Writing
Sunday 27 July 2003
Essex signposts and milestones
My mum pointed me at Milestones Online, a site cataloguing signposts and milestones, mostly in my home county of Essex. Not the modern green reflective signposts of course, but those old cast iron posts that you see on country roads between villages with names like Stapleford Tawney and Tolleshunt D’Arcy. Among the good old fashioned homepage styling (centered text, background images, confusing navigation, etc.) there are photos of dozens of signposts (actually, “guideposts”) and photos of milestones on different routes such as the road between London and Harwich. I love it when the web makes you take more notice of things in the real world.
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'the web makes you take more notice of things in the real world.'
Watch Peter Sellers in 'A Two Way Stretch" and you are stunned at how the infrastructure of this country has changed in 50 years.
Read one of the Saint books by Leslie Charteris and much the same thing occurs to you.
Walk down the street my Grandma lived in and you can see where the metal railings were taken to help with armaments production, they have never been replaced. You notice the newer houses in the street, replaced when the old ones were hit by German bombs.
It is often said of the modern era, we look but we don't see. Or we see but we don't notice. Someone once said (Was it Ruskin?), that we should try and draw or sketch things around us, not to become artists but just to help us notice things.
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