I only discovered this sublime place a couple of weeks ago. Yet another thing I love about England- you never know what's around the next corner. A bit like Northern Ireland, when I drove round a bend and found an old man worse for drink lying in the middle of the road in the pouring rain. Passing motorists negotiated me trying to pick him up so that I could lay him over a fence like an old carpet waiting to be beaten, both of us clutching each other in a ghastly dance. Anyway, how about this? Impossibly English, it must have been used as a period film location.
Right then. Sorry for all this mucking about. All will become clear, because I'm bringing a book to its conclusion and my brain is therefore degenerating. More of that later, but in the meantime I give you a London corner turret. Quite spectacular, there are variants all around it. Not the usual quiz monochrome, but I stared and stared at this yesterday, an ample reward for the UE Eleventh Commandment: Thou Shalt Always Look Up.
Having been away I have returned to my computer to find someone's messed about with my photo settings and it's going to take me all day (well, when I'm back from Darkest Essex) to find out what's happened. So. Very sorry. Normal service will probably be in the morning now. Curses.
I used to pass through here fairly regularly, which is no use at all. I went through it three weeks ago or so and it hasn't changed that much from the picture, just more traffic. What more useful clue can I give? I know. Think Mary and Eliza.
This is my very recent shot of the Cley-next-the-Sea windmill featured in last Tuesday's quiz. I managed to get down into someone's tiny boat moored on the water, almost exactly where the boat is in the original picture. You can immediately see how much silting and general narrowing has gone on in the last 60-odd years. My trouble was that I had great difficulty in getting out of the boat, and ended up going in the River Glaven. In obvious distress that naturally involved a lot of very loud cursing, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, who shall be nameless, couldn't do anything for laughing, and when I finally got back up onto dry land by squelching up a wooden ladder, I found people patting her on the back because she was crying and choking at the same time.
Deceptively simple. Probably. All I'll say is that although this view today still has the mill, a river and boats (and very little else), it looks very different. Think silting up, as you do on a Tuesday morning.
I am a designer, writer and photographer who spends all his time looking at England, particularly buildings and the countryside. But I have a leaning towards the slightly odd and neglected, the unsung elements that make England such an interesting place to live in. I am the author and photographer of over 25 books, in particular Unmitigated England (Adelphi 2006), More from Unmitigated England (Adelphi 2007), Cross Country (Wiley 2011), The Cigarette Papers (Frances Lincoln 2012), Preposterous Erections (Frances Lincoln 2012) and English Allsorts (Adelphi 2015)
"Open this book with reverence. It is a hymn to England". Clive Aslet
Preposterous Erections
"Enchanting...delightful". The Bookseller "Cheekily named" We Love This Book
The Cigarette Papers
"Unexpectedly pleasing and engrossing...beautifully illustrated". The Bookseller
Cross Country
"Until the happy advent of Peter Ashley's Cross Country it has, ironically, been foreigners who have been best at celebrating Englishness". Christina Hardyment / The Independent
More from Unmitigated England
"Give this book to someone you know- if not everyone you know." Simon Heffer, Country Life. "When it comes to spotting the small but telling details of Englishness, Peter Ashley has no equal." Michael Prodger, Sunday Telegraph