Posts Tagged ‘notlondon’

The first seaside visit of the year was down to the Kent coast for a rainy day in Deal a couple of Saturdays ago. First stop was the undeniably Brutalist pier. To quote Charles Holland, "It doesn't look like a good night out, more like a bad morning after. [...] It looks like a piece [...]

One good thing about the Shabby Seaside Appreciation Society us that it gives me a good excuse to finally get around to visiting loads of places I've been meaning to see for ages. A couple of weekends ago, I jumped on a train to Southend on a gloriously sunny day and had a lovely time. [...]

Any time you hear mention of Arundel, people always mention the castle, but it's possible to have a lovely day there without once stepping foot inside the castle grounds. If you walk up the hill, follow the wall around, past the strange little ornamented wooden building… …and past the cathedral, which is surprisingly huge for [...]

Last week on Tuesday, I went to Bekonscot model village, which was good fun. We got to play at being giants, and admire the marvellous attention to detail in landscaped grounds full of miniature trees, model trains clattering around a railway track, and even animatronic action going on in unexpected corners.

Last Saturday the Shabby Seaside Appreciation Society went to Canvey. This man-made island at the end of the Thames estuary in Essex was the subject of a recent documentary (which I've not seen yet, but which you can read about in a recent post on Fantastic Journal). It was quite a grim day to visit [...]

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 [...]