I don’t often do audio tours when I’m travelling, I suppose because I always have a rough plan of what I want to see on any particular day and between that I enjoy wandering around the area following whatever route strikes my interest. On this occasion I had no real plan for the day I arrived in Cambridge and Booking.com was offering me a deal on this particular audio tour so after checking in at my hotel I headed out to explore the Cambridge Backs.
If you follow me on Instagram you’ll know that I recently returned from a week away in Scotland. It’ll be a little while before I start on those posts in depth but in honour of the spooky season I’m bringing forward a couple of them. On one of my evenings in Edinburgh I decided to do a ghost/history tour, and this one was the one that came most highly recommended. I didn’t take a huge amount of photos since much of the tour took place in the dark. The tour was lead by John Napier who was dressed in period costume (I can’t remember who he said he was representing now – a scientist of some sort) and he was a very engaging guide. The group was quite large, around 20 or so of us I think and we met here at the tour’s ticket booth.
Today for the first time since March I ventured into Nottingham City Centre in order to photograph the 10 owls that make up the Wise Owl Walk. It was quite a good work out as the owls are spread out around the city centre and I walked there and back to avoid using public transport. The owls are really well designed and it’s a nice way of getting people back into the city centre, though personally I didn’t stick around other than to take photographs which is probably what I would have done pre-pandemic as well! You can find a map of the trail to download here.
As I was in the Shoreditch area by the time I’d finished my planned Open House London visits I decided to have a wander around and look at some of the street art the area is famous for – with apologies that I didn’t make note of where exactly each photo was taken, here are some of my favourites.
Please note photographs have been removed due to lack of hosting space.
Last Sunday I went on the inaugural Watson Fothergill Walking Tour organised by Lucy Brouwer (@notrock on Twitter). Regular readers will know how much I love Fothergill’s architecture and this was a good opportunity to learn a bit more and also meet other Fothergill enthusiasts. The tour was great, with a good balance of information about the individual buildings and Fothergill himself. I’ve spent a fair bit of time photographing his buildings but not doing any real further research into their original uses so it was good to get an overview of that in the context of Victorian Nottingham. We started off at the site of what was the Black Boy Hotel (now Primark) before moving on to the old Jessops shop and workrooms (always difficult to photograph!).
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