LOST IN A LANDSCAPE

Lost in a landscape Hardingham – four crosses

There's a sort of axis of travel in everyone's existence, roads that we travel often at various times that become embedded into us a part of our journey through life. Well worn paths that aren't exactly desire lines, they are the things that link us together, part of...

Lost in a landscape: Salthouse, touching the past

We visited the long dead, stretched our fingers out to them, touched fingertips through the flint and bracken. North Norfolk has some lovely landscapes, far removed from the outsider idea of some flatland devoid of features. The North County is a rolling and curved...

Lost in a Landscape: Pudding Norton

There's a lot to be intrigued about in towns like Fakenham. Not unlike North Walsham, it sits on a small winding road that makes it's a much less direct but more interesting journey than somewhere like Attleborough or Wymondham. The drive is less straightforward but...

Lost in a Landscape: Horsford Forest

I like to get out, occasionally with a target in mind, sometimes just to wander. This is one of the various places in Norfolk which involves bronze age barrows; ancient cemeteries lost in the landscape, with a nice ancient heath and a possible medieval postmill/barrow...

Lost in a Landscape – Blickling Arborglyphs

Dogs lead sometimes, our is beige, stinks, is opinionated and prefers woods to beaches, muck and leaf mould to sand and pebbles. There's more to sniff and mark an roll in in woods and fox shit beats dead gull hands down in the scent masking stakes for some...

Lost in a landscape: Bromholm Priory

A bit of a hidden wonder, Bromholm or Broomholm Priory also known as Bacton Abbey sits on a piece of farmland just off the coast road as you enter Bacton from the Mundesley end. The Priory is situated on private land, the main surviving gate at the top of a row of...

Lost in a landscape: Little Snoring

When you drive you travel along the edges of things, where modern life has built a wall along the edge of the land, the tall banks, berms and tree lines of the A roads and motorways where the litter and pieces of spent tyre lie in the dust. The piles of scrapings...

Lost in a landscape: Worstead

I was looking for something else, I didn't actually find what I was after, because of gates and no access signs and the sound of people murdering wildlife in Westwick woods, but as I pootled down another dead end this vista was there, so I hopped along the lane...

Lost in a Landscape: Felbrigg

Plank Bridge. That's what it means, bit of Old Norse from Denmark 'Fjol', and a bit of Old English 'Brycg' itself a Friesian word which is almost the same as the Saxon which in itself shows how close the waves lap the shore when it comes to settlers, or invaders or...

Lost in a landscape: Hainford All Saints

Not everything is as it seems, and as you drive towards Hoveton from Hainford there is one of those odd little places, this is All Saints Church, it's separated from the uncentred village as it stands today, but isn't the site of a deserted village, rather the church...

Lost in a Landscape: St Theobald

In 1982 we were starting sixth form, it's an odd piece of territory that whole mid-teen bit of the timeline. One chunk of life you are used to, the uniformity and structure of school lessons ends, then there's a summer of free fall. Suddenly everything is properly...

Lost in a Landscape: Little Ryburgh

A bit of a late addenda to a trip to Pudding Norton last year that ended up with a chase around the countryside near Fakenham looking at Deserted Medieval Villages, shrunken settlements and ruins. The whole area is haunted by the Flockmasters and full of such sites....

Lost in a landscape: Barton Turf

It rained, my god how it rained. A bank holiday hex hanging over Easter. And typically the patterns of various occupations in one household left me on my own staring at a refracted sodden world as the cars trundling along Aylsham Road under a lead grey sky. I went...

Lost in a Landscape: Scottow

Memory has a strange tonal range, there are sparks of colour in between the washes of grey and flat spots of black or white. I have a very distinct memory of first learning to ride a bike. Oddly for some reason that escapes me it wasn’t at the hands of a parent...

Lost in a Landscape: Stratton Strawless

There is this thing were you travel through a landscape, passing things, that have become lost, part of the blur of the countryside, the unnoticed facets of a landscape which sit just back, away from our arterial routes cut as they are by human traffic. It’ is also...

Lost in a Landscape: Wayland Wood

There is a darkness in woodland, hiding in the shade of the green canopy, something that retracts in the sunlight in the corner of your vision, beyond the growing and shrinking of the shadows with each revolution of the earth on its tipping axis. Beyond the sterility...

Lost in a Landscape: Trunch

There’s a lot in a name, Trunch has one that doesn't fit in in Norfolk, or in fact in England. Locally it sits uneasily with the profusion of ~hams and ~tons, and ~bys and ~thorps. East Anglia’s toponymy is that of the invaded, repeatedly settled. People who move into...

Lost in a Landscape: Rich pickings – Swafield

‘Fruit picking’ and ‘Pick your own’, still seen on cardboard hand painted signs still wedged in hedges and gateways, were and are a summer long routine in Norfolk. The memory flickers up from somewhere as I drive, I'm here and not, between sunlight and...

Lost in a landscape: Little Witchingham

There's a sea of barley, the horizon a shadowed thin night cloud line of trees. In the late afternoon heat this far from the coast there's no wind, no air sucked in by the heated land to move the thorned tops. Everything is calm. The summer hasn't advanced enough to...

Lost in a Landscape – Lyng Easthaugh

The lands to the west of Norwich have only a passing familiarity for me. I grew up in north-east Norfolk where I recognise the landscape facets and how they fit together pretty well, the marl pits and churches and the little winding roads that dip in and to of the...

Lost in a landscape: Edingthorpe – Rising toward the surface

Lost in a landscape: Edingthorpe - Rising toward the surface The cloud has almost boiled back, the sun chasing a lowering and disintegrating weak ridge of low pressure, there's a space for early summer between it and the next low dragging in from the south west....

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Vanishing Points

Vanishing Points is a long-form photographic series with accompanying interpretation consisting of stories relating to the landscapes of the Western Front, memorials and some of the figures that peopled them.

A selection of 36 final images was made from over 120 photographs which formed the core of the 2018 exhibition and collection at St Peter Hungate in Norwich, The exhibition was timed to coincide with the centenary of the Armistice and ran for two weeks.

The response was truly staggering.

The original articles can be found on the links below and images can be purchased from the collection in the shop.

Articles

Vanishing Point: Dartmoor – father and son

There's a focus, out there. You'll see it in most cemeteries on the old front. The famous dead, the men, and boys who achieve some infamy by dint of their bravery, age or circumstances. Sometimes it's a footballer who scored big in 1912 before signing away four years,...

Vanishing Point: Bernafay Wood

After Carnoy the cloud started to drop, a shield of it obliterated the sun. Within twenty minutes the light had almost completely failed, the air filled with prickles of moisture. It took a good hour to lift as the edge of a small front slid in from the South West. It...

Vanishing point: Courcelette

I've been fortunate at times out on the front, walking the levelled trenches, across the flattened shell holes and in the regrown woods. You meet people, some you know via the curious world of social media, shared interests in a shared space eventually made flesh out...

Vanishing point: Guillemont, Trones and Jünger’s Lane.

It suddenly struck me yesterday, what I'm trying to finish the unfinishable. The Great War may have ended in 1918, but it didn't, and so it goes, new layers of images, understanding and history being laid down with every word typed and shutter click. I'd set various...

Vanishing Point: Carnoy to Montauban

I'm not far from here. Sitting in a hotel room on a laptop, near a roundabout and Le McDonalds, watching a dubbed film which was bad enough in English in the first place. So I thought I'd start doing something apart from lazy hotel drinking. Carnoy is just to the...

Lost boys: Sid Northrop

I recently rediscovered this. It was something I'd put on Flickr. It is the tale of another family member and his last few days and hours in the Great War. We visited the panel he is remembered on at Tyne Cot a couple of years ago. He was my grandmother Jesse Parr's...

Vanishing points: The Bull Ring, Etaples

Etaples was one of the main base camps along the coast of Northern France, being a port, a lot of men, thousands of them would have disembarked here. Many more would have embarked. It was known as "The Bullring", as were most of the base camps, but this one was the...

Vanishing Point: Out of sight

Genealogy is an inconsistent science and growing a family tree quickly becomes an obsessive work of semi-fictional detective work. The urge to push further and further backward heading into our peasant laden past, hankering after the occasional sight of a king or...

Vanishing Point – Langemark

Langemark is I feel one of the most desolate corners of the Western front. As I mentioned in another piece on Vladslo there is something so desperately bleak and sad about German cemeteries. They don't lack in any of the respectfulness of the loss or the death or the...

Vanishing Point: Devil’s Wood

Oak is a feature of the English psyche, a fabled national wood if there is such a thing. It proliferates throughout our history from warships and traders building an Empire to the familiar furniture and ancient twisting house frames. The royal Oak subverted to shelter...

Vanishing Point: High Wood

The way to start these things is difficult sometimes so here is a Piece of Mackintosh, not perhaps his best poem, but he can sum up the general situation in the area of High Wood better than I can. He knows what it was like because he was there in 1915 and wounded...

Vanishing Point: Fricourt New

The best and the worst of it all are hidden over a brow. You won't find the chattering crowds of the nexus points where death draws itself to a peak, this is not Thiepval or the Menin Gate. Nobody talks, no one sniggers, there is no rustle of frite wrapper when a hush...

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PRINT SHOP

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THROUGH GLASS

Through Glass: Norwich Skyline 1890s

I love a bit of glass, particularly when it shows the city spread out like this. Believed to have been taken in 1890 this is a magic lantern slide. It appear to have been taken from St James Hill. You'd probably struggle to replicate the shot now due to the amount of...

Through Glass – Philip’s Glass: Trams

A few sample images from a batch of glass of Trams in Norwich I've got access to via a friend Phil. There are only three of these and they are in a bit of a state, looks like they weren't fixed terribly well and are quite badly smoked so I've had to pull them back a...

Through Glass: Lowestoft early 1960s

I recently went to visit Phil to take some stuff back. I'm terrible for not getting round to things and I'd had a pile of glass sitting on my desk at work for about three months, it's heavy, he's shut when I'm open and open when I'm shut and I just never got round to...

Through Glass: Norwich 1900

A few years ago I was fortunate enough to have a box of glass slides come into my possession, here are a few of them, one day I'll get the whole lot scanned in and shared. But for now here are a selection of Norwich through the glass from about 1890 to 1920. I suspect...

Through glass: Norwich 1960s – part 2, Pubs.

There are a fair selection of pubs in Norwich in this batch, some still exist, some don't, all are interesting in one way or another. These are in no particular order and are pretty much straight out of the box. Norwich 1960s Part 2 The Plough Inn, Farmer's Avenue....

Through Glass: The lost villages of Stanta

There's been a few reports and exhibitions of work undertaken by photographers who have delved into the lost landscapes of the Stanford Training Area. There are tours, carefully marshalled around the activities that the army undertake in there as they have done since...

Through glass: North Norfolk, Herbert Thomas Cave

A second set of Philip's glass. These are 6 x 6 inch glass plates, mostly in rather nice condition, a few are de-laminating slightly and they're a bit dotty in places but basically all sound. These are believed to be by a photographer called Herbert Thomas Cave. The...

Mystery: Albert and the returning troops 1916

A mystery photo. Last week Bethan Holdridge who works for the Museums service in Norwich invited me to have a look through her Great Grandfather Oliver Isaac Brown's collection of photos. He was a Suffolk man but lived in Great Yarmouth, a sapper in the Royal...

Through glass: North Norfolk holiday 1960s

Another small collection of found slides. These ones came via Martin Snelling (@LeftofNever on twitter), ex-Norwich lad, who runs View From This Side; a project which collects found transparencies and slides. I swapped them for a few slides of Albania, because... I...

Through glass: Great Yarmouth

I'm always on the lookout for old photographs, negatives, slides and plates. In particular, the old, forgotten and unseen. The vague visual detective work involved in trying to work out when the shutter fell as much as where, it is that act of identifying with a fixed...

Through glass: 1960s norwich – part 4, streets

Difficult to subdivide these really, so the obvious one was to produce a post of 1960s Norwich street scenes or buildings which were shot. Some things are instantly recognisable, others less so. some things just haven't changed much beyond a coat of paint, others are...

Through Glass: Dartmoor

Another set of odd negatives and plates I received a while ago via a very old friend Dave Guttridge. Dave is a photographer, musician and DJ by trade and also has an interest in the past, in particular shellac and the art of the gramophone. He found these while...

Through glass: Norwich 1963 – The Phoenix slides part 1.

This is the first of a series of posts. These will be based around a collection of found photographs which were pointed out to me by a friend in possession of someone else I know who didn't really know what to do with them. These were picked up at a jumble sale; a...

Through glass: Norwich 1960s – part 3, churches.

There aren't many of churches in the Phoenix collection, but what there are are fairly interesting. A selection and also some of the archaeological dig in near the Garth at Blackfriars and the Art College, Norwich. Norwich in the 1960s Part 3 St Helen's Church,...

Found photos: The lost boys of Cromer

I go through people's leftovers, their old clothes, the maps of lines on their faces, sit in their seats and eat from their plates; strangers' stuff. They are people I can't know nor ever will in the vast majority of cases, nearly all of them are unreachable; dead,...

Rephotography: M&GN Ghosts

I decided to try out the 'Ghost' style of photo-merging after my friend Nick Stone started to share his wonderful 'Blitz ghost' images, inspired by the wonderful work of Sergey Larenkov. I didn't want to copy these projects, so I turned my attention to something that...

Cinema Ghosts: Great Yarmouth

A recent addition to the series undertaken as part of project I've worked on with Cinema Plus at Cinema City, called Norfolk at the Pictures. This second set contains a series of images of cinemas in Great Yarmouth from the turn of the twentieth century up to 1960....

Ghosts of D-Day

I rather missed the landing craft with these, I mucked about setting up the post last week in anticipation of the 70th Anniversary and then ran out of time to do it. But here they are in the second wave, lost behind the Tsunami of other Ghosts of D-Day that suddenly...

Lost city ghosts: Pitt Street

Pitt Street, now a scattering of industry and a quite a few nice trees. The entrance to Gildencroft, an alleged old jousting field now opened up to the corner of St Augustines and the churchyard, breathing some green into the traffic. Pitt Street once...

Blitz Ghosts: Church of St Julian Norwich

One of the best known Blitz victims in Norwich, because of it's famous St Julian thing. Hit head on by a 250kg, it was all but obliterated as you can see. Beautifully rebuilt, and a fabulous little church, even if you don't do the whole religion thing it's a very calm...

Rephotography: Ghosts of Reims

Re-Photography of Reims. Vincent Zénon Rigaud Auteur and photographer, born in Reims in 1981. I have practiced photography since childhood progressing on to digital photography. My first passion was studying history while at art school photography has became an...

Trench Ghosts part 4

Langemark A few trench ghosts I did last week then got distracted and forgot about. One of Langemark and one of the Sugarloaf salient at Fromelles. The Langemark rephoto leaps out straight away. It's also familiar to anyone that's ever visited the German cemetery...

Plunkett Ghost: Flood Levels 1961

Flood level gauges New Mills Yard. 27th August 1961 > 2012 Recording Norwich Flood levels 1570-1912. Boy's height 4 feet. The photographer's younger son, Jonathan, aged 6; he who has uploaded an enormous number of his father's photos to the triple-dub and...

Cinema Ghosts: The Empire Great Yarmouth

The Empire, a rather grand building standing above anything else at the more southern End of Marine Parade. It is a rather splendid Pigeon home, and although bits of fascia have been removed is still a rather attractive old building, the inside is supposed to be...

Rephotography: Ghosting history

I should of course have done a piece on the Ghosts stuff properly ages ago, but time passes and what one minute seems to be the important and interesting bit of whatever you're doing suddenly isn't as much as it was three or four years ago. The recent conservation of...

Here are the young men

I've been rescuing these boys from Junk shops for years, those 50p unknowns, the Great Uncles who maybe died and had no children, they become orphaned from their families, so I've ended up with an old biscuit tin full of these lads. Mostly Brits, but a few Aussies and...

Ghosting Hillfields

This Gallery form a collection that was part of a recent commission for Imagine Hillfields part of a larger project called Imagine. The project was and is about how we relate to our environment and how we imagine our present and future, connecting communities through...

Lost City Ghosts: St Augustines, The Rose Tavern

The Rose Tavern (previously also known as The Rose Inn), popular little pub on st Augustines, one of about six. It died in the 1980s after the Big Red Barrel war that spelled the end of so many pubs and ushered in an era of quite unpleasant fizzy rubbish beer that is...

Ghosts: R101 & Norwich Castle

There's a thing on the telly tonight about Zeppelins*, this isn't one, but it's the best of got it's the R101 over Norwich in 1929. the sound you can here is me jumping on a bandwagon and promptly falling off and hurting myself. The photo is from Norfolk Record...

Great War: Zeppelin raids 2

A couple more ghost composites to commemorate the Zeppelin Raids on Great Yarmouth and King's Lynn on the 19th/20th of January 1915 both in Great Yarmouth in 1915, created exactly 100 years to the day. The soldiers are stood in the doorway of the Drill Hall near St...

Blitz in Colour: Dereham Road Baptist Church 1942

Opened in 1904. Closed temporarily in 1942 during the Baedeker Raids. Sources point at this being a result of the first raid on the Monday night; the 27th of April; this would fit the pattern of most of the bombing being of the north and north-western sectors of the...

Ghosts: Sainte-Mère-Église 2

A few more of Sainte Mère Église including the Rue Division Leclerc junction with Rue Général de Gaulleand the church; two Paratroopers deal with German snipers, both 1944 and not at the same time.

Colourisation: Alois Gilgenbach

An interesting little job/favour for Rob Schäfer of gottmituns.net/, this is his Great Uncle Alois Gilgenbach, retouched and colourised. I've not attempted a Wehrmacht soldier before, but at the end of the day the only real difference was feld grau instead of khaki,...

Blitz Ghosts: St Benedicts Gate

On the 28th April 1942 this was the result of a 1000kg Hermann that burst on what is now the traffic lights at the bottom of Grapes Hill. The men aren't short, they standing in the edge of a hole that was rather wide and very deep caused by the blast a Herman was...

Blitz Ghosts: Danger UXB

I'm not sure where this is, I can't find any info out, but think it's possibly at Harford dump, which is where most of the defused stuff ended up, or it might be the depot in Ipswich. I'm on my way to getting some names for these chaps. Interesting to note that so far...

Blitz Ghosts – Rampant Horse Street

Seventy years on, plus a bit. The result of the second night of the main two raids 29th/30th April 1942, The fires are out, must be the modern rain. This is the scene that did for the Caleys factory the previous night, less so than Nestlé did years later admittedly....

Ghosting: Norwich 1943

In Norwich in 1943 White stuff was an International, GAP was a Barclays bank, Buntings is Habitat, or was and Bullen's remains unchanged. The originals of these photos were taken by Lew Funk: his Son John is digitising his fabulous and fascinating collection which...

Blitz Ghosts: Aylsham Road

Aylsham Road, Norwich, April 1942 and nearly now. There are two pictures of the area. Both I believe taken by George Swain. The top Blitz Ghost is the first one I ever did, and the bottom one is the last. A 500kg landed here, it blew the front out of all the houses in...

Ghosts: Sheringham

Originally Part of the touring exhibition – Tradition and Innovation: The Story of Market Towns. From the press release: The exhibition will be touring to museums in Sheringham, Diss, Swaffham and Wymondham from November 2013 to July 2015, before making its way to...

Blitz Ghost: St Bartholomew

One of the few real reminders of the blitz on Norwich that is easy to visit is the church of St Bartholomew, Heigham, Norwich, it's quite easy to find sitting just of Heigham Street and Waterworks Road. On the night of the 27th of April 1942 when the first of the big...

Lost City Ghosts: Oak Street & St Martins

106 to 114 Oak Street, when George Plunkett pounded the streets in 1936 snapping away at the other end of the time tunnel, these rather lovely Tudor houses were still there, then a period of massive vandalism occurred during which Norwich reshaped itself, partly with...

Ghosts: Swaffham history part 1

Plowright's Ironmongery Shop 1962. Part of the touring exhibition – Tradition and Innovation: The Story of Market Towns. From the press release: The exhibition will be touring to museums in Sheringham, Diss, Swaffham and Wymondham from November 2013 to July 2015,...

Lost City Ghosts: The Forum and St Peter’s Street.

Peter Mancroft & Forum - White Swan Yard Ghost 1960 > 2013, Part of a series I start and stop doing as the desire takes me as you do. I might do some more soon just for the hell of it. The site has seen a fair bit of turmult over the last 60 years, what with...

City Station – Norwich

A Blitz Ghost of the Portico of City Station, just at the bottom of Barn Road in Norwich being dismantled by one man and a hammer. The Station was bombed on the first night of the raids, Not built on entirely solid ground, it's basically marsh land round there and I...

A Dornier in a car park.

Not something you see every day. This is the Norwich Dornier, a Do 17z Number U5 EA. The same one featured in various photos of Eaton Park in Norwich, Sitting there like a giant Airfix kit being winched onto a flat back. A German Dornier Do17z in bits in the car park...

Dead cities: RAF Attlebridge

RAF Attlebridge ...the end of the South Eastern runway, Honingham Road, Western Longville. The most accessible publicly visible bit of the airfield left. The first station built in Norfolk for WW2 use. Originally RAF flying Blenheims and Bostons, it passed to USAAF as...

Lost in a Landscape: RAF Happisburgh

Everyone I mean *everyone* in North Norfolk, and the Eastern bit of North Norfolk, or East Norfolk as I like to call it when I'm a bit y'know, not from London or the home counties, knows Happisburgh. It's the most interesting bit of Norfolk Coast by a long way. This...

Coasting: Winterton’s war

Yet more lumps of concrete, I doubt a the vast majority of people even give them a thought apart from trying not to scratch the car. Bit strange though, 13 ton blocks of concrete in a car park, and on the beach in one of those lovely little Norfolk corners. Winterton,...

Lost in a landscape: Wretham Circles

There's a lightness about Breckland, A dryness and pallor to the soils that make it feel somehow different from the rest of Norfolk. It's in the earth, the thin sand with it's luggage of chalk and flint, the exhausted soldierly lines of Scots pine twisting away as you...

Forgotten outposts: The Bure line at Oxnead

You will, as you drive around north and east Norfolk, pass these all over the place. In fact you'll find them all over the county as you will tank blocks and mortar spigots, even the odd trench line still exists all still protecting us from a long dead, now...

Dead cities: RAF Swannington

RAF Swannington, known locally as RAF Haveringland, either way it's a little Gem, I spent the best part of a blisteringly hot afternoon messing around on the edges of an all but invisible Second World War airfield. It's just there, lost in the landscape, the fields...

Forgotten outposts: Brandiston type 22

There are hundreds of these scattered across Norfolk, it's not a modern phenomenon either. Defence starts at the gate to your house, there's ramparts and forts, dating from the late Neolithic to fairly recent lumps of Cold War concrete dotted about on awkward corners...

Dead Cities: Deopham Green

RAF Deopham Green, latterly home to 452nd Bombardment Group (Heavy), becoming USAAF designation Station 142*. The group flew B-17 Flying Fortresses as part of the Eighth Air Force's strategic bombing campaign. This is a remnant of the North Runway and a runaway summer...

Dead cities: La Coupole

This is the Ida railway supply tunnel, Bauvorhaben 21 (Building Project 21), Schotterwerk Nordwest (Northwest Gravel Works) at Wizernes, St Omer. Built by Organisation Todt using "compulsory labour" (about 60% French, 40% non combatant German) the tunnel was built for...

Coasting: Guns of Mundesley

An odd little place is Munsley, somewhere inbetween Victoria and now you can sense a fading into much more of a backwater than was probably intended by the holiday destination builders. A pretty Victorian resort perched on high soft glacial sand cliffs, protected...

General Prints

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