Things to look at and read

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

Vanishing Point: Carnoy to Montauban

I'm not far from here. Sitting in a hotel room on a laptop, near a roundabout and Le McDonalds, watching a dubbed film which was bad enough in English in the first place. So I thought I'd start doing something apart from lazy hotel drinking. Carnoy is just to the...

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...

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.

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 from...

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Dead cities: RAF Swannington

Dead cities: RAF Swannington

RAF Swannington Known locally as RAF Haveringland, either way it's a little Gem, I spent the best part of a blisteringly hot afternoon messing around on the edges of an all but invisible Second World War airfield. It's just there, lost in the landscape, the fields...

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Lost in a landscape: Bacton Wood

Lost in a landscape: Bacton Wood

Feet facing the sun – Bacton Wood When I was a child we had a dog called Sally. She was what the local vet referred to as a Daisy Dog, a mixture of this and that, pretty well mannered and a bit tatty, a cross breed of indeterminable heritage with a long black coat...

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Coasting: Eccles beach – far away in time

Coasting: Eccles beach – far away in time

Eccles beach. Not Echo Beach, but I like a nice inexpensive joke derived from a slightly odd eighties lyric now and again, you just watch me. There are a fair few Eccles in Britain the famous one is in Salford, where those crumbly buttery cakes with raisins in that...

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Lost in a Landscape: Bawsey – the Church on the hill

Lost in a Landscape: Bawsey – the Church on the hill

It seemed rude not to, I've been driving past Bawsey for far too long, so on a trip to Derbyshire to drink and take in a band (Phantogram) with my Nephew Rich, I made an attempt to stop. In fact I had two attempts at it, Sundays' mission was stopped by the heavens...

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Coasting: Happisburgh – Where the wild thing were…

Coasting: Happisburgh – Where the wild thing were…

Happisburgh, a curious place to find yourself, a favourite place of mine – the quality of the light on an eastern coast is strange, the ever-changing riven landscape, the beating sea. It sits 20 miles to the East of Norwich, below the stretch of coast where the cliffs...

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Coasting: Lost lands – West Runton

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...

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Bixley – the lost village

Bixley – the lost village

Bixley barely exists as a place, not far from the A146, it is now largely a track to a church which until relatively recently served the rural surroundings and a diminishing population. The last human connections are the graveyard and the landscape itself which still...

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Lost in a landscape: Horsford Castle

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;...

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Lost in a Landscape: Horsford Woods

Lost in a Landscape: Horsford Woods

Horsford Woods I like to get out, occasionally with a target in mind, sometimes just to wander. This is one of the various places in Norfolk which involves bronze age barrows; ancient cemeteries lost in the landscape, with a nice ancient heath and a possible medieval...

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Lost in a Landscape: Warham Camp

Lost in a Landscape: Warham Camp

Warham camp is the best known and best preserved iron age hill forts in Norfolk. Hills aren't that popular here, we like our sky to go right up to the edges of everything whenever possible, but that doesn't mean they don't exist, it's not the fens, those are flat....

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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

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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.

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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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