New forms

Norwich North

I’ve lived in Norwich for most of my life, moving to Mile Cross in 1967, then growing up in North Norfolk from 1970 to 1984 before heading back home, because that’s what it is. North Norwich is almost certainly the original settlement, the Norð wīc or ‘North Wick’ – You can read a bit more about that stuff here. It is a repeatedly overbuilt landscape – the street lines are old, each one a memory, they contains stories – the entwined wave-forms of life and lives over time.

I’ve fixated over and photographed many aspects of it over the last three and half decades, from blitz damage to the Saxon burial grounds, the ridgeways and tracks, lost rivers, sites of wind and water mills and the vague visible remnants of industry, the divisions that exist in the stretches of city wall, the circulatory roads that ring mark us over time. The churches, markets, shops and homes, and the remains of the historic communities – all so close, and distant, and deep – all at once. Over the last ten years I’ve recorded lots of aspects of the ever-changing nature of things, the marks we make to the middens we still fill, how we live here and how that echoes on and on.

Some of the prints here form part of a collection that will be a book collated from photography captured while walking during the pandemic lockdowns, others are just observation, watching the light and how everything changes even in a landscape you think you know like the veins in your hand. There’s also older series such as the visit to Sovereign House in 2012.