Category: Desk Research

  • Soviet Dengie

  • Defining bioregions in these islands

    In a recent post, I mentioned how ‘I’m still struggling to articulate a suitable spatial scale for bioregional praxis in the Atlantic Archipelago’ and part of this struggle will be identifying particular bioregions within the Archipelago. Today I received a message from Kate Swatridge who had attended Ed Tyler and I’s session on bioregions at the…

  • Landscape Scale Land Management

    At the Oxford Real Farming Conference I attended the session ‘Shaping our future together’ organised by CTRLShift and facilitated by Andy Goldring. Rather than a presentation from the front, this session was designed to create a space for collaboration and planning between organisations, practitioners and networks building on the process started in Wigan, March 2018…

  • A forest of raspberry canes

    As part of the research I’ve been doing into the local history of fruit production, I came across William J. Tate’s 1899 book East Coast Scenery: Rambles Through Towns and Villages; Nutting, Blackberrying, and Mushrooming; Sea Fishing, Wild-fowl Shooting etc. which was apparently illustrated by Arthur Rackham. The book is a collection of articles contributed to…

  • Dengie Hundred

    ‘Has been the scene of some important events in the history of the nation, but in ages so remote that there is no written record to identify them with the locality; and in traversing the district, we find few of those ancient relics by the aid of which their memorials may be traced out. On…

  • The Wild East

    ‘The landward farms produced not only corn, cattle and sheep but great herds of half-wild horses and ponies with a sprinkling of donkeys. They roamed free as the wind over the wide rough grass marshes bordering the sea-wall. When the day came for them to be rounded up and sent to market at Wickford and…

  • Azimuthal Projections, RetroSuburbia & Solarpunk

    Azimuthal Projections is not a progressive rock album but ‘a map projection in which a region of the earth is projected on to a plane tangential to the surface, usually at a pole or the equator.’ I just came across (via Transit Maps) this azimuthal equidistant projection of Columbus, Ohio, USA which is catchily titled:  

  • Desk Research: Dengie Woodland 2

    A rainy Easter Monday, but Burnham & District Museum reopened Good Friday for its 2018 season so I went there to renew my membership and review their library. The good selection of books there allowed me to do some more work researching the history of woodland cover on the Dengie. The Domesday Book period of…

  • Desk Research: Two Horseshoes

    When it comes to catastrophic flooding in Essex 1953 tends to get all the coverage, but the inundation of 1897 was equally noteworthy – after breaches in the sea walls 30-35,000 acres of farmland were underwater. Eventually most of that land was re-claimed, but a stretch of the north bank of the Crouch, near North…

  • Desk Research: Dengie Woodland

    Mixed-bag of weather today that made walking far undesirable, especially after yesterday’s puddlicious Southend trip. Burnham’s little library has a small local history/topography collection with enough in it to hold one’s attention quite a while – including a copy of the book of the great Chapman/André 1777 map of Essex. Another map has captured my…