Things to look at and read

Vanishing point: The Leaning Madonna

She's not leaning anymore obviously, originally designed by sculptor Albert Roze and dubbed the 'Golden Virgin' - she stands holding aloft a golden baby Jesus on the very top of the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Brebières in the middle of Albert. In fact she's very shiny...

Coasting – Bacton

Bacton; a place name to conjure with if you know North East Norfolk's emptier fringe. A confusing piece of coast where as you move north of Happisburgh; the cliff drops and as it swings further round and there is a vale where Walcott sits. A series of tiny villages...

RAF Coltishall gate guardians

This post is a short one, more of a response to this post and the photo which was found in a jumble sale in 2016 by Julie Chettleburgh. It contains a fabulous photo of a Spitfire on Farmer's Avenue (above) which caused a flurry of excitement as everyone either...

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...

Lost in a landscape: Horsford Castle

Horsford Castle When you look at the area surrounding Norwich quite how much there is in quite dense groups, we're ringed with hidden areas that aren't well signposted, or exist only in documentation and on old maps, or in some cases are even acknowledged;...

Lost in a Landscape: Buckenham Carrs

Heading west of the city two days before Christmas, and it's all a bit of a bind. A glue of cars sticks the inner ring-road fast, the whole route backed up with shoppers, escapees, people leaving work early, the driving dead. The light is at a tangent – the winter...

Vanishing points: The Sad Angel of Kemmel

The French Memorial at Kemmel. She sits next to a steep road in a cup in the trees, standing a fair way up the slopes of the mount on a clutch burning incline. Known as Mont Kemmel, Mount Kemmel or Kemmelburg depending on your nationality, all of them held it a one...

Coasting: Lost lands – West Runton

Another one of my favourite bits of Norfolk coast, lots of reasons; my childhood, our children played here, I spent a lot of my teens mooching about between the slipway with Vodka and the Village Inn with beer, staggering up to Roman Camp to doss on mate's floors and...

Lost Rivers of Norwich

I'm nothing if not unoriginal, this has come about for two reasons; me watching the excellent Thames Discovery project at work on Twitter, And more recently an idea of Jon Welch's based on seeing this rather remarkable work of Art by Stephen Water; his is hours of...

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...

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,...

Lost in a landscape: Barton Turf

Barton Turf – White light and angels. 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...

New from The Flatland

Forgotten Norfolk - Brian Wells

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New Forms – City

Photographs of Norwich North taken from forever to 2023

Vanishing Points

Western Front prints from 2012 to 2018, from the 2018 exhibition.

Colour

Landscapes, prints from various series and some one-offs by request.

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.

Coasting

Photography from along the coast of East Anglia

Posters

A selection of posters based on various buildings, objects and projects.

Limited Editions

Special edition numbered/signed Giclée prints – studio printed

Flatland

Small publishing co-operative, slowly growing our book list.

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

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...

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Lost in a landscape: Salthouse, touching the past

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...

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Lost in a landscape: Ditchingham & Francis Derwent Wood

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...

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Lost in a Landscape: Weeting pathways

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...

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Lost in a Landscape: Walsingham and the wolves

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,...

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Lost in a Landscape: Heigham Holmes

Lost in a Landscape: Heigham Holmes

We went out on Sunday, for a saunter. The weather window suddenly being kind, blue skies and a bit of a breeze and the flat lands of Norfolk. It's easy really when you live here to forget how lucky we are, the cliche of our vast skies gets lost as we all head off to...

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Lost in a Landscape: Pudding Norton

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...

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Lost in a landscape: Wretham Circles

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...

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Forgotten outposts: The Bure line at Oxnead

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...

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Lost in a Landscape: Oxnead

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...

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The Walled City 3: Pockthorpe gate and Norwich city wall

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...

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you would like to buy a Limited or Open Edition Print from the Vanishing Points series some are still available in the shop

Like what I do?

If you like what I do you can support the site running costs here by sending me a few quid using Kofi. Always much appreciated.

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

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...

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Blitz Ghosts: Oak Street & Sussex Street, Norwich, 1942

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...

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Blitz Ghosts Norwich: Danger UXB

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...

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Blitz Ghosts – St Augustines School, Norwich

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...

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Blitz Ghosts Norwich 1943

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...

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The Blitz: The Firefighter’s Memorial

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...

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Through glass

Found slides, glass plates, photographs and archive material.

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

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: Norwich 1960s – The Phoenix slides part 1.

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

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

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

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...

It’s beginning to and back again

It’s beginning to and back again

We went to London. We do this journey quite often, from the East it is a fairly routine trip, a day out; one of those the ever shortening distances that only just hold us all apart. We have offspring who have set up shop there in the expense and dull glitter, the piss...

Persistence of memory

Approaching Nirvana

Heroes are strange beasts, as is memory. Nirvana never were particularly the former for me, but are very much part of the latter. Retrospectively – 25 years on almost to the day, it's still quite nice to know you were present at the stuttering birth of a new squalling...

Vanishing Point: Rosebeke

A strange day. I've been working very loosely on an ongoing project called 'Vanishing Points' for a while. I'm a bit of a fan of VPs, lots of artists are as a way of leading the eye into compositions, focussing the viewers mind. Kubrick for instance is a master of the...

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...