We bought this postcard of the Museum Gardens, Beacon Park in a shop in Brighton. I say ‘bought’ – the woman in the shop was so harrassed that when we asked how much it was, she said “It’s free! Go on, you can have it”. A bargain then – particularly as a close inspection reveals this to be quite an old photograph (albeit a...

The Friary Outer car park in Lichfield is attracting more than usual attention at the moment. In the midst of a major redevelopment project, the site is currently under the beady eye of archeologists who are investigating the plot before works start in earnest on a hotel, 60 homes, a restaurant and new public toilets. Kate Gomez over on Lichfield Lore had the same...

All of last year was spent sourcing old photographs and taking new ones for the book I’m working on and now – with about a month and a half to go before handing everything over to the publisher – I’m frantically trying to complete the text. This has involved a heavy schedule of writing evenings and weekends – often with a fractious cat...

A Storify scrapbook of photographs, video and audio that I created in 2011.

  Ever since my teenage years, photography has held a big fascination for me. This has largely been down to the influence of my father, who was a keen photographer, and who freely passed on photographic tips to me, especially while on family holidays in picturesque places. I remember dad’s patient attempts to get me to understand the relationship between...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what benefits overseas social networks might be to universities, especially those parts of the university dedicated to alumni communications. So I got reading to find out what was out there, and came across Chinese micro-blogging platform Weibo.com, which is often referred to as China’s equivalent to Twitter. The...

Just lately we’ve been enjoying BBC4′s documentary series Time to Remember, looking at the development of British Pathé. This reminded me that my father had made a lot of cine films in the 1960s, and thanks to the kindness of a family friend, I was able to get a DVD copy of five or six of his films. Because my father worked in TV, he’d wanted to...