photographer, writer, sustainability campaigner
Articles from before August 2020 are available on Martin’s archive site…
Defending Oxfordshire: The military landscape from prehistory to the present. Mike Osborne. Mike Osborne is an experienced writer of county military histories. This is his twelfth volume since he began the series in 2010. He obviously enjoys writing them because the subject could be quite dry, but is in fact peppered with little asides, jokes, …
I have been a keen gardener since childhood and living in the countryside was brought up ‘in nature’, learning everything from how to build a dry-stone wall to the lives and habits of water voles and crayfish. I even appeared on an edition of the BBC’s ‘Animal Magic’ with Johnny Morris on that subject in …
I first came across Colin Ward, as so many people did through his writings, as a teenage school student. I was sixteen when his Penguin Education topic book Violence was published in 1970. In the context of everything from the Vietnam War to violence on the football terraces, the connections made were inspiring, and terrifying. …
Nearly forty years ago Jeff Bishop and Paul Hoggett published a fascinating book entitled Organizing around enthusiasms: mutual aid in leisure (Comedia 1986) a study of the up till then, unexplored worlds of the hobby and the small club and the people that made them tick. This utterly charming centenary publication, Oxfordshire County Council Staff …
The programme for this musical which has transferred from Sheffield Crucible Theatre to the National Theatre (NT) in London, has a powerful and informative introductory essay by Sheffield urban planner Gordon Dabinett. Not an everyday occurance in NT programmes. But Standing at the sky’s edge is no everyday performance. The setting for the musical is …
‘The Archeology of East Oxford’ records the results of a programme of archeological work carried out in East Oxford,defined as ‘Oxford-east-of-the-Cherwell’, between 2010-2015. The area is full of interesting historical and archeological sites but as the introduction puts it:‘External perceptions are, however, often of a mundane and unexciting nature; that Oxford’s sprawling eastern districts are …
The land has always been a contested space. The 2000 ‘right to roam’ legislation, despite its inviting title, only covers about 8% of land in England. Getting outside and enjoying the fresh air and countryside were high priorities during the pandemic, and focused people’s minds on what was and was not possible. Land ownership and …
Back in the 1990s when I first became a member of the Royal Town Planning Institute I opened my first copy of its The Planner magazine with great interest. One thing I still remember from that edition was a letter lamenting the fact that architects got all the glory in Hollywood movies and that planners …
This is the story* of a young man Ernest Thomas, at war. Thomas was born on Christmas day 1895 and brought up on Kingston Road in north Oxford, his father a ‘brewer’s traveller’ for Halls Oxford Brewery, with his mother Florence bringing him up along with three younger sisters Peggy, Kathleen (Kathy) and Marjorie. Ernest …
The theme of PhotoOxford2020 is ‘Women and photography: ways of seeing and being seen’. The theme enables contemporary artists, photographers and curators to rediscover and celebrate women photographers whose work has been overlooked or marginalised over the years. Helen Muspratt, (1907-2001) a photographer I had never heard of until this year, is a case in …