Things to look at and read
New Prints
A new series of both old and new photographs of Anglia Square, from 2009 when the car park was closed, the most recent 2026.
Lost in a Landscape
and other places…
A series of essays
An unstructured collection of written pieces which are basically a long form series of intermittent work – mostly observational, written to accompany photographs shot over the last ten to fifteen years across Norfolk and East Anglia. These essays look both at what is seen as well as what isn’t; acknowledging the depth of the landscapes we briefly inhabit, and the lives lived that are disguised by geographical, environmental and human change.
The history of us is in our soil, mixed with the crag and flint, hidden in our place-names, and lines our fields and boundaries. The past is there, in the lines our rivers, roads, streets and buildings. The narrative we exist as part of is as deep as it is long.
Lost in a Landscape: St Theobald, Hautbois
St Theobald, Hautbois 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...
Lost in a landscape: Salthouse, touching the past
We visited the long dead, stretched our fingers out, 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 around Salthouse is a rolling and...
Lost in a landscape: Ditchingham & Francis Derwent Wood
An eye for an eye Ditchingham sits just North of the Norfolk Suffolk Border. It is to all intents and purposes a suburb of Bungay albeit in a different county and on the other side of a main road. The town and its satellite village sit on the edge of the gentle...
Lost in a Landscape: Weeting pathways
We've been here before. Scrambling about in the past and the past is somehow where this piece of Breckland always feels like it is frozen. We took our children to run around the ridges around the holes in the landscape and down into the belly of the Brecks deep in...
Lost in a Landscape: Walsingham and the wolves
I have amongst my detritus a book on Norfolk abbeys and friaries, it's a junk shop find from years ago. It dates from the 1950s and is extraordinarily complete for a slim tome, just enough background on everything to get you started without too much confusing detail,...
Lost in a Landscape: Heigham Holmes
The weather window suddenly being kind, blue skies and a bit of a breeze over the flat lands of Norfolk. Living here, it’s easy to forget how lucky we are, the cliche of our vast skies gets lost as we all head off to places that have those curious walls of land all...
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: Wretham Circles
East Wretham There's a lightness about Breckland, a dryness and pallor to the landscape, which make it feel somehow different to the rest of Norfolk. It's in the soil, the thin sand with its luggage of chalk and flint, carrying exhausted soldierly lines of Scots pine...
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...
Lost in a Landscape: Oxnead
A pasture for the oxen, that's what Oxnead means so say various sources. Others indicate that the Ox- may come from the word Ouse (Udso), which is an older form from our ginger forefathers possibly of Celt or proto-Celtic origin probably meaning River. It maybe a rare...
The Walled City 3: Pockthorpe gate and Norwich city wall
Barrack Street is pretty dull inmost respects these days, a humdrum piece of grey carriageway winding through crossings and traffic islands as it links the Magdalen Street flyover to the nexus; Mousehold, Plumstead, Kett's Heights or along Riverside. It is the epitome...
Hidden history: Norwich – In War disloyal; in Peace discontented
Norwich – In War disloyal; in Peace discontented I had to go to the dentist yesterday, the one on Barrack Street that I remember being a pub with strange wallpaper in the 1980s, we drank lager and dripped ash on the pool table in there, The Sportsman. I didn't realise...
Vanishing Points
The Great War series
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: Mash Valley and Ovillers
The Somme is exceptionally beautiful. For me a landscape which feels like home. It is chalk downland, when you get up onto the solitary heights of the Redan Ridge or the plateau where Thiepval sits it feels so similar to parts to the southern downlands. Below lies the...
Vanishing Point: Flatiron Copse
There are parts of the Somme where you can and do suddenly feel remarkably isolated in the sun, bits around Serre in the tractor tyre marks and up on the swallowing heights of Redan Ridge with the wind and the larks. For me Mametz is one of the most curious of these,...
Vanishing Points: Tyne Cot
If and when you visit the Western Front, which a huge and growing number of people do partly because of the centenary and partly because you know, corner of a foreign field and all that family stuff, you are entering a piece of ground that is pretty much at the...
Vanishing point: Before endeavours fade
I'd been meaning to go to Holborn and take a photo of this chap for years. This is my grandfathers regimental memorial, he was in the 1st RF (of which I have already posted plenty), I collect these things for some reason I can't fathom. The memorial is a finely...
Vanishing Point: Thiepval
72,191 names. Rising up as it does above the trees on the Thiepval ridge on the Somme, it is by turns a beautiful, vast and horrifying edifice of brick and stone, coloured like blood and bone. A list, a huge frightening and sobering list. The number of names, the...
Vanishing point: Berlin Sap
It looks like a field, because it is a field, one that slopes gently up to a low ridge, 60 metres at its highest point, best appreciated either from a mile or so back in the open areas behind the old line. It looks like nothing much, close up it is just a slope and...
Vanishing Points series prints
Like what I do?
Blitz ghosts, bomb maps and more…
Ten years ago I did a thing, the echo is still rattling about in my head, occasionally it slides noisily back into my consciousness so I add to it, it’s mostly here.
Ghosts: London blitz aerial maps
These are blitz ghosts: London blitz aerial maps using images from various collection overlain on Google map aerials. An iconic image from one German Heinkel III bomber showing another over Rotherhithe, the Surrey Commercial and West India Docks and Isle of Dogs to...
Blitz Ghosts: Oak Street & Sussex Street, Norwich, 1942
Oak Street & Sussex Street, Norwich, 1942. More scenes from the Norwich Blitz. Probably the morning of 28th April. Tough ones. I spent far longer trying to work out where it was than normal, and there's story behind this scene that you will find below that brings...
Blitz Ghosts Norwich: Danger UXB
More in the Blitz Ghosts Norwich series. I'm not sure where the above picture is exactly, Originally I thought it was possibly at Harford dump, which is where most of the defused stuff ended up, or it might be the depot in Ipswich, turns out it's in Anchor Quay to the...
Blitz Ghosts – St Augustines School, Norwich
St Augustines School 1940, a posed shot for George Swain as the children enact an air raid drill, there are a few others in this series, showing twisted lines of children waiting to enter, one of the other ones lines up with the wall and some door and windows behind...
Blitz Ghosts Norwich 1943
Some Blitz Ghosts images of Norwich from 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...
The Blitz: The Firefighter’s Memorial
The Firefighter's Memorial. Entitled 'blitz' by artist John Mills. 997 firemen lost their lives in WW2, all listed on the plinth. It didn't occur to me to check out the Norwich ones. Idiot that I am. If you care to look up photographs of St Paul's Cathedral during the...
Through glass
Found slides, glass plates, photographs and archive material.
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. Please note: If you are going to take this content...
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. Please note: If you are going to take this content and...
Through glass: Norwich 1960s – 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: The lost villages of Stanta
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 or Stanta as it's usually known. There are tours, carefully marshalled around the...
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: Victorian Great Yarmouth
Victorian Great Yarmouth I'm always on the look out 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...
Persistence of memory
What’s THIS for…! Killing Joke in Norwich
You might recognise this scene for two reasons; Firstly you live in Norwich and have walked down either Duke Street or Oak Street or have sauntered down this chopped off continuation of Colegate beside St Miles Church with it's lovely flushwork and tracery. Secondly,...
Trench Fever
I thought it was about time I did a bit of quantifying, I've done a something in a previous piece here, which scratches at the back of a story but only tells the penultimate episode of it not the rest, there's other bits clanging and banging about on the internet that...
Supporting Pulp
We once supported Pulp. All local bands get to support someone half-decent if they keep at it and harass people for long enough, which is basically what we did. As experiences went it wasn't that special, but beat the hell out of playing in an empty bar on a...
Norwich Baedeker blitz: The Lockwoods
The Lockwood family lived at number 65 Rosebery Road in Norwich, a very ordinary little house in a row of terraces nestling in the sea of shoe factory workers houses between St Clements Hill and Angel Road, not far from Angel Road School. In the Picture above we have...
Before the NHS…
I've blogged before about this on Flickr years ago, using some family photos which belonged to my mum. The Health Service is quite important in our family, there are many nurses and healthcare workers in the ranks. This was particularly true for her – she was involved...
Black Dog Tales
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Georeferencing
Ghost Airfields of WW2: Part 1
I did these a few years ago, basically sticking aerial photos onto Google maps, I'd pretty much forgotten them until earlier. They seem worthy of a few posts. There are hundreds of these sites in East Anglia, and all, where accessible are worth a visit. If you want to...
Magdalen Street: Part 1 – Introduction
Norwich-over-the-water is a strange place. Magdalen Street or Fybriggate as it was originally called and its immediate environs sometimes seem divorced from the city and historically were separated from the rest of the Central norwich by a relatively thin stretch of...
Buy stuff
New Prints
A new series of both old and new photographs of Anglia Square, from 2009 when the car park was closed, the most recent 2026.
Lost in a landscape
Various prints from the East, Lost in Landscape and Coasting series.
New Forms – edge
Photos of Great Yarmouth between 2000 and 2021.
Colour
Landscapes, prints from various series and some one-offs by request.
Coasting
Photography from along the coast of East Anglia
Vanishing Points
Western Front prints from 2012 to 2018, from the 2018 exhibition.
Posters
A selection of posters based on various buildings, objects and projects.
Flatland
Small publishing co-operative, slowly growing our book list.
New Forms – City
Photographs of Norwich North taken from forever to 2023