Robert Smith’s Cabbages

A couple of years ago I went down to Aldwick, near Bognor Regis for the summer to house-sit a relative’s house. I ended up being stran­ded there due to a lengthy train strike. Robert Smith of the Cure is prob­ably the only famous local resid­ent. The owner of one of the local shops told me where he lived, and I went along to see it once out of curi­os­ity. The house was dull and expens­ive look­ing, but the beach it stands next to was much more Robert Smith like, with windswept shingle like Dunge­ness and rare sea cabbages. I never bothered to look at Robert Smith’s house again, but I made many trips to the beach because I liked it so much. I was usually the only person there.

Green concrete

Here’s an illus­tra­tion of a car park in Brack­nell. Like the one I did yester­day, the origin­al artwork was a pen and ink draw­ing, and the colour was added digit­ally. It’s avail­able as a print in three differ­ent sizes, from £6 to £24.

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Cambridge’s Most Haunted

I didn’t have a very thrill­ing pre-Halloween week­end. I was struck down by the bug that’s been going around locally, and stayed in and watched Stranger Things instead. I was temp­ted to get a pump­kin to carve, but build­ing work next door has displaced mice that have tried to come into my flat. At the moment they are deterred by cotton wool and strong-smelling orange and lemon­grass essen­tial oils, but I’d rather not tempt them in with a large ready cut pump­kin to eat.

In the summer I went on a ghost walk in Cambridge via work. The guide told stor­ies of myster­i­ous cloaked figures on roofs, and Black Shuck the giant black ghost dog, and also poin­ted out this spot, at the back of Peter­house College, where it joins onto a grave­yard, as the most haunted place in town.

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Wander­ing along the canal

I often like to get some fresh air in my lunch break by walk­ing along the canal near my work. There’s not a lot there, just some house­boats and a small lock, and a lot of lunch­time joggers and the odd person eating sand­wiches on a sunny day. I’m a big fan of canals, and I think I’ve walked along pretty much the whole length of this one at vari­ous points.

Red Lead & Choler­ic Humours

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In the days when I worked at Hamp­ton Court I got to go to quite a few of their special events. They had a roster of actors who could portray the vari­ous monarchs who had lived at the palace (and two Henry VIIIs) and would do special days with re-enact­ments based on vari­ous time peri­ods or themes. On one of the days they had a day based on science in the time of Charles II. I found some photos when I was tidy­ing up the computer the other day.

Pick­ing Black­ber­ries

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A little while ago I went to visit my pál Erika (sorry, can’t resist the terrible pun) in Surrey for black­berry pick­ing. Her friends Stephanie and Katja came down too, and we went out on a sunny day into the woods and picked some berries and had a picnic and drinks (for N. Amer­ic­an read­ers, Brit­ish woods aren’t very wild). Black­ber­ries grow every­where here at the end of August and most of Septem­ber. They don’t belong to anyone, and it’s safe and legal to pick and eat them. I used to pick huge amounts of them when I was grow­ing up. They’re also good for jam, pies, crumbles, coulis and wine-making. We made jam this time. Foxes also like them as much as humans.

Tate Britain

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I went to the Tate Britain the other day. I went there plan­ning to go to the Folk Art exhib­i­tion, but real­ised I didn’t have the time or money to do it justice that day, and what I was actu­ally in the mood for was post-war modern art. So that’s what I looked at.

Fish­bourne Palace

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A while back I went to Fish­bourne Palace. In the 1960s engin­eers digging a new drain in a village just outside Chichester discovered some Roman mosa­ics. When they were excav­ated, they turned out to belong to the one of the largest Roman palaces outside Italy. My thing I wrote for Story­board this month is based on it (and yes, the build­ing really does look like a swim­ming pool). No one is one hundred percent sure who it belonged to, the most common guess is Tiberi­us Claudi­us Cogidub­nus, the local chief­tain /​ Roman ally /​ client king, but there are no inscrip­tions or histor­ic­al records either back­ing it up or prov­ing other­wise.

Library of Birm­ing­ham

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I also went to the Library of Birm­ing­ham. Initially I went to see the Daniel Mead­ows exhib­i­tion, but the build­ing was so large and impress­ive that I ended up spend­ing a lot of time there, and didn’t end up going to the City Museum. It has nine floors, multiple exhib­i­tion spaces and two roof gardens.

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Birm­ing­ham Pen Museum

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While I was in Birm­ing­ham, I visited the Pen Museum. Because I gave a small dona­tion, one of the kind volun­teers essen­tially gave me a person­al guided tour.

Surreal car park

While I was walk­ing around the Jewellery Quarter in Birm­ing­ham, I saw the most amaz­ing car park inside a demol­ished build­ing. The roof and front wall were gone, but the side walls and floor were still there, with fire exit signs hanging off the walls, and cars parked on top of chipped floor tiles.

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Birm­ing­ham

Last week I went to Birm­ing­ham for the day. I got some cheap train tick­ets in the sale, it was only a fiver each way. I had bought them at the same time as my tick­ets for my ill-fated Glas­gow trip the week before (got tick­ets to see my friend Chloe in Glas­gow for £30 return, missed the train by 1 minute due to trans­port holdup, and Virgin wanted £140 for a new single, so I had to forget about it). Every time I’ve been to Euston recently, I’ve thought “hmm, I haven’t been to Birm­ing­ham for over a decade, it’s not far away, I should go there”. So I did.

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Concrete wonder­lands

Flickr have massively changed their website recently, and I took the chance to go through all my old photos and re-organ­ise them a bit, so I’ll be digging up vari­ous things from the archives over the next few weeks. Here’s some of Brack­nell from 2005.

Regent’s Canal

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The other week I went for a walk along the east­ern end of the Regent’s Canal with my dad. I used to live down the other end of it, and I’ve pretty much walked the entire length a lot of times. It’s one of the few short canals around here, most of the others are long inter­city ones.

Petrie Museum

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Earli­er today I met up with my friend Chloe on her way up to Glas­gow, and we went to the Souzou exhib­i­tion with her old flat­mates. When she went to catch the train, I decided to fit in a visit to the Petrie Museum round the corner in UCL too, which I hadn’t been to for a long time. (I tried to say hi to Jeremy too, but his box was closed).

москва в брайтон

I have been busy recently, and the ever-present back­log of photos and so on I mean to post gets ever longer. Here’s some photos I took of Brighton Pier at some point. I have no idea when I took them, prob­ably when I lived in Brighton, but I scanned them the other week.

Mystery film

I found this film at the bottom of a plastic sleeve full of collage stuff. I’d care­fully cut round each picture on the negat­ive, so it was indi­vidu­ally cut out with a neat border, and I have abso­lutely no idea why I did it. The orange mask on c41 film makes it impossible to see the picture unless you hold it up to the light, and cutting the pictures out indi­vidu­ally from 120 film is a stupid idea, and I would have known better since I was about 16. I first star­ted using medi­um format film in 2004, when I was about 20, so I really don’t know.

Through the pinhole

Last night I scanned about 20 rolls of film. Here’s the first one, some pinhole photos I took in Corn­wall a few years ago, using the Diana + (you can remove the lens and use it as a pinhole camera). I think they’re of St Ives and Mouse­hole. They’re pretty soft look­ing, because I just rested the camera on a wall rather than use the tripod. Here are some I took using the tripod and with colour film with the same camera, they’re much sharp­er. I like these mono­chrome ones though, they’re quite eerie look­ing.

The world is not my oyster

Here are the other photos from Whistable. I took more of the boats, seashore etc with my wide-angle lens on film, and I haven’t had it developed yet. I much prefer my film SLR to my digit­al one (70s Pentax camer­as just feel so nice to use), but I’m too broke lately to use much film, and I still have 5 rolls sitting around that need devel­op­ing. I didn’t eat any oysters while I was there, because I’m veget­ari­an, but I did have a really great mascar­pone, truffle and rose­mary pizza.

Smooth down the aven­ue glit­ters the bicycle

I’ve always had a soft spot for 30s subur­bia. These two pictures are a place called Twydall, near where my mum lives. I went along there to buy some wool, and I wasn’t disap­poin­ted, the area is full of old ladies. Also, the fact that the wool shop is called World of Wool­craft and is run by what could be the broth­er of the Comic Book Store Guy made me laugh.

Geffrye Museum

Here are some pictures from the Geffrye Museum in Hoxton. It used to be an alms­house, and is now a museum of furniture and interi­ors. They have rooms set up show­ing typic­al London living rooms in vari­ous time peri­ods from the 1600s onwards for famil­ies with a medi­um income, with inform­a­tion about all the objects in the room. They also have a histor­ic­al garden and restored 18th century alms­house interi­or, but I didn’t get a chance to see them this time. In the run up to Christ­mas, they’d arranged each room to show how differ­ent winter fest­ivals were celeb­rated in each era (until the 1800s New Year and Twelfth Night were much bigger than Christ­mas).

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Aban­doned school science lab

I was doing some resid­en­tial teach­ing for the last 2 weeks. A group of year 9s from Chile came on a school trip, and I gave them lessons about English and Brit­ish History/​Culture and took them to vari­ous histor­ic­al places like Cambridge and Canter­bury. I was work­ing in the middle of nowhere, in this old manor house in the middle of a nation­al park. The house had been a board­ing school from the 1920s to 2005, and the company I worked for was only using part of the build­ing.  We were the last school tour to be there before it was going to be handed over to the new owners, who no-one knew much about, but didn’t seem to be using it as a school. There were lots of locked up rooms that had been used by the board­ing school, but weren’t used for the language holi­days, like the science lab, and they had piles of school stuff lying every­where. The atti­tude was pretty much feel free to explore, just make sure the kids don’t get into anywhere that could be danger­ous.

Anything and everything a chap can unload

I took these couple of pictures on a visit to Porto­bello Market a couple of weeks ago. The film was expired slide film anyway, and it went through the airport xray machine twice on my way to and back from Bulgaria, and it ended up with a large red section. Not an attract­ive red tinge, a muddy red effect that blew out high­lights and blurred details. I took more pictures at the market, but they ended up unus­able. That’s expired film for you.

Little Venice in orange

These are some photos I took in Little Venice with my old Pentax film SLR a few weeks ago. They call it Little Venice, but it’s really just a canal basin out the back of Padding­ton Station with lots of house­boats, some nice pubs and a cafe and a puppet theatre on boats. I guess “Little Holland” or “Little East Anglia” don’t sound as excit­ing. The slide film was much more out of date than I real­ised, but I like the orange and purple impres­sion­ist look I ended up with, some of the photos look more like paint­ings than photos.

Hast­ings Summer of 2006

I got some films developed a little while ago, and it turned out some of them are from quite a while ago, and had been lurk­ing around in draw­ers for a long time. This one is from 2006. I’m not sure what camera I took these with, some kind of box camera or Diana or some­thing.

Enfold­ing sunny spots of green­ery

I haven’t posted here for a while because life has over­taken me a little, and I’ve been dash­ing from place to place. I’m in Palma de Mallorca right now visit­ing Marcos’ family, with a perman­ent move to London on the cards for the end of the month (it can’t come too soon). I’ve got a back­log of photos to work through.

Mystery film- Friends and Places

This is anoth­er ancient film scanned. It’s defin­itely from 2008, but it skips about all over the place, there’s shots of Medway and ATP and Brighton, but I didn’t move to Brighton until the August of that year, and ATP was in May, and I have no idea when the Medway pics were taken, so it seems to have been hanging about in my camera for quite a while. I don’t even know what camera I used. I think it might be a Lomo LCA, the one I got in an Esto­ni­an junk shop for £20. It’s since half fallen apart, so I’m glad I didn’t pay those Austri­an rip-off merchants much money for it. Whatever camera I used, it’s some really grainy 400asa cheapo Ferra­nia marked film, prob from pound­land

St Ives 2008

Here’s some photos of St Ives from 2008. They were on the same roll of x-pro’d Sensia as the Lille photos. I think it was the last of my freezer­full of expired slide film I got when I worked at Jessops as a student.

Bath Mono­chromes

Here’s some b&w pictures I took in Bath a few winters ago. I finally got the film developed after find­ing it in a draw­er. Pentax ME Super + 28mm lens + Ilford HP5. I’ve been to Bath a lot, both as a Clas­sics student to look at stuff in the Baths, as a tour guide, and visit­ing my ex’s family, who were from a village not too far away. It’s stopped look­ing exot­ic to me.

Bird has flown

Here’s the rest of the pictures from where I took the panos at the River­side Coun­try Park. There’s a promon­tory which goes out to an island in the river, almost at the mouth where the Thames and Medway meet, with narrow beaches with reed­beds and aban­doned boats along the edge and woods and pools in the interi­or. I used to come here a lot. I partic­u­larly love it in the winter when there’s prac­tic­ally no-one there except me and some water birds.

The seas will reach and always seep

Today it was sunny and I had the day off, so I went to the River­side Coun­try Park. It’s where the Medway meets the Thames Estu­ary. It’s one of my places. I exper­i­mented with making some stitched panor­amic pictures. I also took some normal pictures. I’ll post them later. I’d love to have one of those turny Russi­an panor­amic film camer­as, but I’m too poor.

Get Out of the Office and Into the Spring­time

At last, some sunshine. Today me & Tukru went out for some coffee and draw­ing. It’s the London Zine Symposi­um on Sunday, and we have stuff to do. We didn’t actu­ally get much cafe time, because we forgot how early stuff closes round here. I’ve got some new stuff up my sleeve, but I don’t want to show it until it’s done.

Wander­ings

The other day I was round my dad’s. It was a sunny day, and I didn’t fancy spend­ing the whole day cooped up indoors. I got my dad to give me a lift up to Kit’s Coty, a strange isol­ated place nearby, which has the remains of a Neolith­ic barrow there. The barrow isn’t very evid­ent these days, but the gate into the tomb is still there. There are more houses round there than I’d thought, all detached with big gates and long drives and beware of the dog signs, and on unpaved roads. It was totally quiet and a bit David Lynchish round there.

Mystery film- pleas­ant but bland

I’ve got a whole load of unscanned negat­ives here which I’m slowly work­ing my way through. There was a whole film of pictures of this place with a lake, but I have abso­lutely no idea where it is, or when I took the photos. I also have no idea what camera I used for these, but the film is Kodak Ekta­chrome 160 Tung­sten, cross-processed. The pictures are pleas­ant but bland, and I’ve got a real feel­ing this was a test roll to see if some­thing worked right/​was any good (char­ity shop camera? lens found in someone’s loft and given to me? who knows). Whatever it was seems to work fine.

Tint­a­gel- Mosk­va 5

My ex-boyfriend’s family used to go to Corn­wall every summer, and we used to join them, me usually lugging a whole load of photo stuff on the train down. These were taken at Tint­a­gel.

Museum of Child­hood

On Saturday morn­ing I did a zine work­shop for the Brighton Popu­lar Educa­tion Collect­ive who run a day of free classes and lectures on things like bike mech­an­ics, sewing and local history one day a month. It was the same work­shop I’ve done loads of times, and it always seems to go down well. This time I had both a lady in her 50s and a very enthu­si­ast­ic boy of about 7 there.

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Broad­stairs

Here’s some pictures I took in Broad­stairs last summer, they were languish­ing on my hard-drive until this week­end.

Tea & Sympathy

Earli­er today me & Vicky planned to go to an Alice Tea Party that was advert­ised in a vintage clothes shop. We dressed up Alice style, her in a grey dress with a bow and white tights with black ballet shoes, and me with a chequred skirt, silver and black stripy jump­er, and silver ballet shoes. We got there and the “tea party” turned out to be a shop assist­ant on a small table with some styro­foam cups of tea. Very disap­point­ing

Fisheyes

Fisheye photos from vari­ous occa­sions on the beach. With help from Madame T.

Pier Kaleido­scope

A couple of weeks ago I took my cheesy 70s kaleido­scope filter to the pier. I didn’t really get the shots I wanted, and I dropped my lens cap between the slats, but I managed to get a few ok shots.

Brighton Aquar­i­um

When Chris was down the other week we went to the aquar­i­um because I had a half price vouch­er. I love aquar­i­ums, and I’m going again on Monday even­ing for a work thing.

Hazy Sea

I went for a walk along the beach whilst wait­ing to meet up with my cous­in, who’s just moved to Brighton. There was a haze on the sea that day, and the pier looked like it was float­ing on noth­ing. I never get tired of photo­graph­ing the seafront.

A wander along the beach

One of my New Year’s Resol­u­tions was to trawl back through forgot­ten photos on my hard drive/​negatives folder and post-process them. This was one of the first untouched folders I found. Back in Septem­ber, I went for a walk along the beach along Hove Lawns, right up to Portslade. It was a beau­ti­ful day, and there was hardly anyone about, because it was the middle of the week, and the tour­ist season had pretty much finished.

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