Placescape #1 Southern England

SE montage header-2Now that I’ve invented an excuse for posting inconsequential items about place within this new ‘placescapes‘ theme here’s a throwback to September 2012 and a holiday spent largely in the Kent and Sussex area known as The Weald. I hadn’t set out to document this ‘touring holiday’ and I can’t remember why we chose to go there (apart from a middle-aged yearning to visit the gardens of Sissinghurst and Great Dixter), but it turned out to be a bit of a revelation.

Some places may have felt a bit over-preserved, others were just what you might expect in 21st century south-eastern England, with miles of bungalows and sprawling factory estates, but the remarkable variety of landscapes, architecture Continue reading

Introducing – placescapes

IMG_7061There’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