Posts under ‘summer fun’

Welcome to Walton-on-the-Naze

(it's quicker by rail).
If you come by car

please park tidily.
Enjoy the award-winning beaches

(but not from this spot)
Eat some delicious ice-cream desserts

(or not)
Venture into the wilderness

climb the tower

and enjoy the view (and a nice cream tea).
Pretend for a moment that you're in the south of France

and then come back to England

(just [...]

Sometimes it does a soul good to get away from the built-up spaces of a city — even a city with a wide and sweeping, ever-changing tidal river like the Thames — and head out to the coast and walk on a beach for a few hours. Such was the reasoning behind last week's visit [...]

When we last left Painshill Park, we were standing in the Gothick Temple, taking in the view across the lake.
In the middle of the lake is a funny little grotto. It's rather remarkable, although a very difficult structure to photograph. It sits on a tiny island in the middle of the lake — or [...]

For those of you (if there are any of you) waiting for the next instalment of my Painshill Park posts, I'm afraid you'll have to wait a bit longer. What with spending last weekend at Caption, where I took a lot of photos that needed going through, having other things I needed to get done [...]

As I mentioned in my previous post on the subject, Painshill Park is quite a large estate, and there is a lot to see in it — our visit was about five hours long. Our first stop was the walled garden, which is full of pretty colours from the wonderful flowers. Charles Hamilton was a [...]

One of my favourite books is Headley & Meulenkamp's Directory of UK Follies, Grottoes and Garden Buildings1. It's a delightful book that has provided me with many hours of fun, reading about funny and obscure buildings in all sorts of unlikely corners of the country, built by all sorts of wonderfully eccentric people. I could [...]

Whilst in Oxford, I also took quite a lot of photos of various grotesques that lurk on the buildings (no gargoyles, though, 'cos I didn't see any I liked the look of as much — it seems as though the artistic endeavour was most often ploughed into the grotesques rather than the gargoyles). Of course, [...]

Last week, I managed not only to forget to mention any of Alternative Press Fair events that were on, I also managed to entirely miss all of them due to feeling a bit under the weather and really not wanting to end up ill and having to miss Jeremy and Tim's wedding on Sunday. Did [...]

Those people following me on Twitter will probably have noticed how lacklustre I've been feeling this past week. I'd put it partly down to the weather, even though the fact that summer seems to be over actually didn't come as a surprise to me. The make-up induced allergy that caused my face to painfully erupt [...]

On Saturday I made another trip to NotLondon, in Kent this time, where I discovered many things, to wit:
On the train, I discovered that "Britain's best architecture was inspired by beer"1, and also that there is a random and unexpected obelisk sitting next to the railway near Swanley station. (Later googling turns up the information [...]