Things to look at and read

Waterland: Strumpshaw fen

There is something mysterious and magical about the Broads. I've idled a fair while in the past sitting in a boat, the idiot at the other end of the line from the maggot or more correctly a dead lamprey or smelt when I used to fish. It's basically trying desperately...

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: Hardingham – four crosses

There are axis of travel in our existence, roads that we use 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 our familial...

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,...

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: The Redoubt

There are areas of the Somme where you can really feel the past; where the landscape whilst modified hasn't been essentially changed. This is one of those places. What remains isn't difficult to spot and is easy to get too a walk down a grass clotted, tyre rutted path...

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. Temperatures are rising into those of a late summer day, yet it's...

Magdalen Street 2: St Botolph the traveller

Magdalen Street's hidden history: The lost churches Part 2, St Botolph. St Botolph or St Botulph or even St Botwulf was a church named after a saint  that now only really lives on in an adapted street name. Ignominiously lost in a few street signs in the precincts...

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...

Hidden history: Under Paris

Last year we shared an hour of Halloween with 6 million dead Parisians in  l'Ossuaire Municipal or the Paris Catacombs, we know how to party. Twenty metres below the Place Denfert Rochero there are amazing, intricate piles of dead people dating as far back as late...

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...

The forgotten chapel – William of Norwich

Ring-roads, go round and past. Nature of the beast I suppose, circling. Norwich is blessed with ever-increasing circles; from the old castle ditches and the fee to the city wall and the inner link roads, out to the proper ring-road now forming into another ripple of...

New from The Flatland

Forgotten Norfolk - Brian Wells

Buy stuff

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.

Maps: Norwich City Wall

Maps: Norwich City Wall

Basically Norwich City Wall with all the main elements marked on, This is not 100% accurate for detail, It's stepping off point and that is all at that stage. Building started on 1294, finished in 1350-ish, then we started to pull it down. Privately financed partly by...

read more
Forgotten Outposts: Stella Plage Atlantikwall

Forgotten Outposts: Stella Plage Atlantikwall

A beach in Northern France, in the Pas De Calais actually, Stella Plage sits just south of Le Touquet and Etaples. It's a beautiful beach, so I ignored it and took photos of this bunker. I can't find anything much out about it. Except it's a Vf style reinforced...

read more
Lost Rivers of Norwich

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...

read more
Coasting: Trimingham – On the beach

Coasting: Trimingham – On the beach

I wrote a bit about Trimingham a few weeks ago, it was canvas really, the backdrop, the beach is the deep history. Being what it is and how quiet it can be we went back. There was a bitter driving Northerly, ice bearing, even the hardy fishermen had all packed up and...

read more
Coasting: Happisburgh

Coasting: Happisburgh

I keep trapping myself in series' of work and forgetting that sometimes I take a photo just because I happen to be somewhere and something special happens. I was just poking about in my digital shoe boxes and I came across these. We went along the coast the day after...

read more
Forgotten outposts: Brandiston type 22

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...

read more
Lost in a Landscape: Felbrigg

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...

read more
Coasting: Caister

Coasting: Caister

Caister on Sea, March 2013, a scouring North Easterly for a few weeks changed the profile of of this, and Hopton beaches dramatically, revealing some secrets that haven't been seen for a decade or so, estimates indicate losses of between five and ten feet of sand,...

read more
Lost in a landscape: Booton

Lost in a landscape: Booton

There's things you round a corner and don't really expect to see in the corner of a field, ostriches for instance, rare but not unlikely, elephants, I've seen photos of elephants in Norfolk fields. Booton has a really staggeringly odd, stamp-on-your-brakes sort of...

read more
Dead cities: La Coupole

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...

read more
Lost in a landscape: Hainford All Saints

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...

read more
Lost in a Landscape: Blicking Mausoleum

Lost in a Landscape: Blicking Mausoleum

Blickling is a rather lovely estate near Aylsham, open to the public, with a  few good trackways and walks across it to amble along. It also contains a couple of interesting buildings aside from the more obvious hall itself and the large Carp filled lake, so it's easy...

read more

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: Essex Farm, The Eve brothers

Vanishing Point: Essex Farm, The Eve brothers

I'm fortunate, I get to go to Ypres and the Somme and indeed various other bits of the Western Front fairly often, I do it mostly for my own vicarious pleasure/misery or whatever you find you want to call it. If I face facts it is I suppose a strange thing to want to...

Vanishing Point: Rosebeke

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...

Vanishing Point: The Ridge

Vanishing Point: The Ridge

It's quite an apposite moment, the ridge being what it is, a symbol of so much thrashing about in the earth trying to gain a foothold, somewhere that looms large in Canada's psyche and it's nearly Canada Day, a day that symbolises so much about the gradual joining of...

Vanishing Point: The Redoubt

Vanishing Point: The Redoubt

There are areas of the Somme where you can really feel the past; where the landscape whilst modified hasn't been essentially changed. This is one of those places. What remains isn't difficult to spot and is easy to get too a walk down a grass clotted, tyre rutted path...

Vanishing point: The Leaning Madonna

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...

Vanishing points: Mining the front – Messines 1917

Vanishing points: Mining the front – Messines 1917

The anniversary of the massive mining attack around Messines 1917 passed at 3.10am on Saturday the seventh of June, ninety-seven years since. This year rather overshadowed by the 70th anniversary of D-Day on the sixth of June and justly so. But this is one of those...

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: A Dog’s Life, the Catton Liberator

Ghosts: A Dog’s Life, the Catton Liberator

This was the scene in Catton at the corner of Church Street and Spixworth Road on the 13th February 1945 and the corner of the same Roads on 22nd December 2011. The Liberator 'A Dog's Life' was one of two that crashed in Catton on the outskirts of Norwich, The other...

read more
Baedeker Blitz: The Hubbards

Baedeker Blitz: The Hubbards

Thomas Hubbard, Aged 52, Died 28-4-42 Norwich Garden of remembrance. Memorial cemetery. Farrow Road, Norwich. "The date that sticks in my mind is 28th April 1942 and the time 10.30 At that moment I was in the Anderson shelter in my garden on St. Martins Road, Norwich...

read more
Blitz Ghost: Alexandra Road and Helena Road

Blitz Ghost: Alexandra Road and Helena Road

Alexandra Road, another Norwich Blitz Ghost. A 250kg bomb took out about 4 properties, quite a precise slice, which is still very evident if you look at the row today the missing block was replaced with a more modern variant of the generic terrace, a pattern you can...

read more
Blitz Ghosts: St Benedicts Gate

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...

read more
Blitz Ghost: St Bartholomew

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...

read more
Blitz Ghosts – Rampant Horse Street, Norwich

Blitz Ghosts – Rampant Horse Street, Norwich

Rampant Horse Street, Norwich, 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...

read more

Through glass

Found slides, glass plates, photographs and archive material.

Mystery: Albert and the returning troops 1916

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...

Found photos: The lost boys of Cromer

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,...

Through Glass: Norwich 1900

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...

Persistence of memory

No Results Found

The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.

Black Dog Tales

No Results Found

The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.

Georeferencing

No Results Found

The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.