Things to look at and read

Pleasure Beach – Great Yarmouth 2009

I've had a few minor-league unpleasant 'Oh FFS' things happen lately. The most recent was a hard-drive suddenly making a horrible keening noise and then refusing to mount. Two days of trying different software to get it working again and bingo I had a drive that...

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...

Coasting: Eccles on sea

There are a fair few Eccles in Britain the famous one is in Salford, where those crumbly buttery cakes with raisins in that mess up everything in the vicinity when you eat them, there's also one in Kent, another one near Snetterton, and a couple in Scotland. And...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

On Utah Beach

We'd just been away. It didn't take me very long to remember that I'm not very good at holidays. The vacancy of it all gets to me very quickly, I find it difficult to relax and conjure 'fun' up out of being somewhere just because it's somewhere else. We tended to end...

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...

Hidden history: A winged victory for the sullen

'Peace' or an Angel Sheathing a Sword, not actually a winged victory at all, despite the smile. A rather attractive woman, but you wouldn't especially want to piss her off. If you lived at the top of Prince of Wales Road you might fancy having a sword at hand, dealing...

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: 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,...

Lost in a Landscape: Stratton Strawless

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...

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...

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...

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,...

Dear Dad…

I've resisted an urge to paint this incomplete picture for a while. I started writing months ago, it would have been my dad's birthday, that got me thinking about him and about how I'm heading towards the age he was when my mum had me. And I've written about my...

9/11 – the years on

Guest post from Louisa Griffith-Jones. Sometimes you just stumble across a remarkable piece of writing. Louisa posted this earlier today. I read this about 9/11 standing at a bus-stop, a lump in my throat. She is a friend, someone I remember from gigs in the early...

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...

Vanishing Point: Out of sight

Genealogy is an inconsistent practice, growing a family tree can quickly become an obsessive piece of semi-fictional detective work. The urge to push further and further backward heading into our peasant-laden past,  the occasional sight of a king or queen, some lord...

Norwich: “Brightest shining of the city”

Viking and Anglo-Saxon Norwich We live here. It is easy to forget where Norwich comes from, we take our surroundings for granted; a city that has grown from virtually nothing over the last 1200 years. A scattering of people living on gravel terraces above a bend in a...

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...

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: East Somerton

Lost in a landscape: East Somerton

Norfolk is full of holes, little dells and corners, drives and pathways that sort of amble off in all directions vanishing over a rise or fading into a dark arch of trees. East Somerton is just one of those many little nooks that almost don't exist, the past clinging...

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Lost in a Landscape: Shipden

Lost in a Landscape: Shipden

We are spoilt for lost villages in Norfolk and due to the nature of the coast have a huge number that weren't down to the usual suspects, so not things like plague, pestilence or bad land for farming or landlords enclosing land or commons; moving sheep in to replace...

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Dead cities: RAF Attlebridge

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...

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Coasting: Walcott

Coasting: Walcott

We used to go to Walcott and Bacton quite a lot when I was a kid, it's was and is all concrete, groynes and flat inland space, with the rising glacial moraines starting just to the North towards Trimingham. You can see the past up on the cliffs to the North the rise...

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Coasting: Horsey

Coasting: Horsey

Horsey is a curious area, it's always felt like slightly dead ground to me, for the uninitiated it is just to the North of Winterton and South of Waxham, it has it's own Broad a large flat expanse of water edged by windpumps, dunes and intermittent seals. One of my...

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Lost in a landscape: Bowthorpe DMV

Lost in a landscape: Bowthorpe DMV

  We live in Bowthorpe for about three months, it wasn't my cup of tea, I've never quite got my head around modern houses, preferring to live in a series of brick built Victorian freezers with leaky roofs and nowhere to park, I'm clever like that. One of the...

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Lost in a Landscape: Little Hautbois

Lost in a Landscape: Little Hautbois

Another desertion. The photograph below was taken looking very roughly South at the present day situation of Little Hautbois; Little more than a row of houses just off the B1150, set in Pretty Farmland, it still just about clings on to its existence. As you follow the...

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Dead cities: Langham Dome

Dead cities: Langham Dome

Langham Dome A sort of anti-axis forces death star type thing. It looks a bit like one of those chocolate bombs or a steamed pudding, but about 18 feet high, made of reinforced concrete and painted black. Nestling on the edge of an abandoned airfield about 4 miles...

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Dead cities: RAF Thorpe Abbotts

Dead cities: RAF Thorpe Abbotts

RAF Thorpe Abbotts In February (2014) I was fortunate enough to get invited by Waveney Valley Community Archaeology Group with the permission of Lord Mann on a reconnaissance mission for a project they are doing on studying standing buildings on the site of Thorpe...

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Lost in a Landscape: North Walsham – The revolt 1381

Lost in a Landscape: North Walsham – The revolt 1381

I found myself with a few free moments on Sunday afternoon and after some deliberating with tea and fags decided the best option was to tick something off my lists of things I wanted to go and see and do. So, I ended up in North Walsham, a market town I'd lived in for...

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Lost in a Landscape: Arminghall henge

Lost in a Landscape: Arminghall henge

Imagine for a moment flying over a landscape. There is a city below you receding to one side, fields coming into view on the other, lots of features to look at as well as flying a plane. You look down and spot a mark in a field, and this is the sort of thing you are...

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Coasting: Guns of Mundesley

Coasting: Guns of Mundesley

An odd little place is Mundesley, somewhere between 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...

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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: Stumbling through Ploegsteert

Vanishing Point: Stumbling through Ploegsteert

I'm a virtual veteran of two world wars, one in particular; The Great War, the one to end all thingummys... as an anomalous title for a war as there could possibly be. That aside I do a lot of, or as much as I can afford and fit into life without annoying my very...

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.

Norwich Baedeker blitz: The Lockwoods

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...

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Rephotography: Ghosting history

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...

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City Station Norwich

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 was already cracked, the weight of brick on...

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A Dornier in a car park.

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...

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Through glass

Found slides, glass plates, photographs and archive material.

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Persistence of memory

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Black Dog Tales

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Georeferencing

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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