Every night of the year a horn is blown at the four corners of the obelisk in Ripon’s Market Place to set the ‘watch’. This ceremony has taken place for the last 1,100 years, without fail.
-
-
Early in the 8th century the then bishop of York, John, founded a monastery. When he died in 721 his body was buried in a chapel of the monastery’s Saxon church. In 1037 he was canonised and his monastery, and the town that had grown up around it, became a place of pilgrimage.
-
Every first-time visitor to London, I suspect, has Westminster Abbey high on their must-see list. Fewer however make a point of visiting nearby Westminster Cathedral, the city’s central Roman Catholic place of worship. And that’s a shame, as the Metropolitan Cathedral of the Most Precious Blood, to give it its full name, is striking in appearance and has an interesting history of its own.
-
If you look at a map of England you will see that Hull, or Kingston upon Hull to give it its proper name, is rather out on a limb. Lying on the Humber Estuary its location so close to the sea has resulted in a history shaped by sea-going trade and shipping.
-
Travelling teaches us that people around the world have more in common than we sometimes realise. People everywhere laugh, cry, worry, and hope for the same basic things. And when good things happen, we celebrate. There are small family celebrations: a new baby, a wedding, a birthday. And then there are the celebrations that bring people together on a much bigger scale. A national holiday, a religious festival, a sporting success …
-
! London hasn’t seen any rain now for 37 days (although a light sprinkling is forecast for this morning before a return to heatwave conditions. The temperature has swung between the high 20s centigrade (reasonably comfortable) to the low and even mid 30s (not so comfortable!)
-
In 1888 William Hesketh Lever, owner of the Sunlight Soap factory on England’s Wirral Peninsula, founded a village to house his workers. He based it on some innovative principles for his time (and perhaps they also seem quite radical still today?) His vision was to provide his workers with decent, sanitary housing in a considered architectural and picturesque form.
-
It has been hard to find ‘perfect’ days this past June. It started too cool and too dull, then in the space of a few days transformed itself to an extreme heatwave. Temperatures hit 35 Celsius and the high humidity made life in London pretty tough. Such is a our changing climate, unfortunately, and England wasn’t built for heat.
-
As photographers we are trying to convey three-dimensional scenes and objects on a flat two-dimensional surface, whether paper or screen, and we can use similar tricks to those of the Renaissance artists. Lines that converge on a point close to the horizon (‘leading lines’) create a sense of distance, as do receding objects.
-
Whitstable is renowned for its sunsets, said to have inspired JMW Turner. Last night’s coincided with low tide, the wet shingle reflecting the colours in the sky.
