Sam Mellish photography project

An excellent photo project by Sam Mellish.

On my travels up and down the 'A' roads (and quite a lot of the 'B', 'M' and 'C' ones as well...) of Britain, I've often thought about the roadside vans and cafes that spring up in laybys at the side of the road. Often named after some eponymous owner, or girlfriend, and offering "credit crunch breakfasts" or "big baps"...

Sam has been documenting some of these places in East Anglia, in an exhibition, which can be seen HERE. Sadly I just missed seeing the exhibition of actual images just down the road in Ely.

A book of his WIDER wandering is also available, which I notice focuses on the A303 which I've driven along 4 times in the last few months too...

The one I pass most frequently, which is just north of Sam's main area of focus, has a table with a nice view across the Nar Valley towards Castle Acre. I saw the owner packing up in the rain the other day - probably not a good day for custom... Also drove past Wendy's Bus Cafe earlier today.

Thanks to Joe Moran for the tipoff via his blog...

There are some nice geographies to be explored here in terms of:

Territory: who 'owns' a particular pitch or layby - is there conflict over these ?

Customers: what range of social groups use the cafes, are they inclusive/exclusive ?

Location: what views are offered ? what are the interactions between the customers ?

Sourcing of ingredients - local ?

Cultural links... the rules of the road... groups of people using the road for different purposes...

What else can you think of ?

Something I particularly like is Sam's use of a "tube-map" style diagram to summarise his travels. This will go into a collection of similar tube-map remixed images that I'm collecting for an event in London later in the year.

Blogging tag...

Image by Chris Kempson, made available on Flickr under Creative Commons

I was tagged earlier by David Rogers

This is one of those things that goes around from time to time.

I have to name 10 blogs that I read and enjoy and then "tag" one of the people in the list...

Here's some blogs I read on a fairly regular basis....

1. Kenny O' Donnell's flavoursome ODBLOG, which contains the results of his pedagogical adventures

2. Ollie Bray's progress around Scotland - pity that the GEOGRAPHY in the tag cloud is getting smaller over time... ;)

3. Joe Moran's blog: author of excellent "Queuing for Beginners" and "On Roads"...

4. Norf Coast Blog - for things related to the Norfolk coast - an excellent set of links down the right hand column which sets out some of the highlights of the area for residents and visitors alike

5. David Rogers' blog: reflective and creative stuff from a geography teacher

6. My Twitterstream - hundreds of micro-blogs...

7. Bill Boyd's ideas for literacy, which I attempt to put into use in a geography context where appropriate

Might try and add a few more later to get up to 10....

Apologies to the "obvious ones" that I'm bound to have missed...

It takes a lot of effort to stop a weblog turning into a "cobweb"log....

Joe Moran Blog...

Joe Moran has written a few great books that I've read in the last few months, including "On Roads".

Joe's blog is also rather good, and has plenty of interesting material.

A recent visit, prompted by a Twitter comment led me to the following items of geographical relevance.

• Boring map squares: based on Mike Parker's "Map Addict"
• Suburbia: the five best things to come out of suburbia

Also led to another blog which talked about Roy Bayfield visiting an imaginary place: ARGLETON, which is one of the features on Google Maps.

UPDATE
Noel Jenkins has been exploring a new interest in the last few months, and he provided a link to an excellent blog which combined urban exploration and geography in a cool way.
Check out the work of Bradley Garrett.

Queueing for Beginners

A new purchase thanks to the work of Ian Cook, and his cultural explorations. Joe is a cultural historian, and this book tells the tale of everyday life, and the reasons why things are as they are. It's also full of 'living' geography !

Why do we drink beer in pints ? What about our obsession with the weather ?

One of the stories it includes is when Jeremy Paxman presented the weather (as edited from Have I Got News For You, via YouTube

It starts with something that fascinates me: the MASS OBSERVATIONS project, which ran from 1937 to the early 1950s.
I have a copy of a book called 'Austerity Britain' which contains a similar history / geography crossover looking at the years after WWII, and providing a real sense of place, and a lost England...