There’s an accumulation of notes and images that I’ve made over some time (and are continually added to) that are loosely about ‘place’, and had thought would become a single post on this blog. They’ve been drifting around for while now – certainly since writing an earlier post on ‘particularity‘; but I’ve been waiting to unearth some keystone of information to bring the strands together in a coherent story-arc. No such thing has yet emerged and some de-cluttering of the desk and head are needed.
Although some might become focused and considered pieces of writing with illustrations, I’m going to put most of the notes and images in a series of occasional posts largely as they are, a hotch-potch of thoughts, memories and images about places; places I’ve been to, or that I’ve seen or heard of through other people via paintings, prints, photographs, writing, music…often those places are landscapes but they’re also town streets, marginal land, gardens, places in transition such as demolition sites or scrub clearance in fields; or ‘temporary places’ where something stays only a while but transforms a space, like a temporary public artwork, or a street market. They’ll be under the category of Placescapes.
For decades now I’ve been having continuous conversations, usually with myself, about what makes a place and why Continue reading →
The village of Pill, my home in North Somerset, clusters (once attractively I hear) around a deep, muddy, tidal creek formed by the Martcombe Brook rising just a couple of miles south of the village. A ‘pill’ is the West Country and Welsh name for a tidal creek – there are several pills along this stretch of the river, each identified with its own prefix, our old, ‘proper’ name is Crockerne Pill, see below for explanation. The Martcombe Brook spills into the River Avon, two miles or so south-west from where it joins the Severn. Shirehampton is only the river’s width across from us (but a different world Continue reading 
