England

This was when we got to Grantham, a nice town but like Peterborough blighted by ugly car-oriented buildings. On the plus side, you can see the steeple of St. Wulfram's Church in the background.

Here's another mostly-ugly photo of Grantham, with yet another ugly shopping centre in the foreground, with the nicer, older buildings in the distance.

I was unable to get a lot of information about this hotel online, other than how to reserve a room, but my understanding is that it's a former railway hotel. Any further info would be welcome.

This is the Bradford City Hall notable for its clock tower and the fact that it features a statue of Oliver Cromwell, unusual since he wasn't popular and is often considered illegitimate. As with the Great Victoria Hotel photo, this shot regrettably suffers from glare, whiting out part of the clock tower. Also notable in this photo are the double-decker buses. Don't believe the media when they tell you that they're gone. :-) Transport For London pulled their fleet of 50-year-old AEC Routemaster double-deckers out of service a year or two ago, and then the media ran with it and claimed that all the double-deckers were gone. In actual fact, double-deckers survive in various forms all over Britain, even in London. It's just that London doesn't have Routemasters anymore. These don't look like Routemasters, though. Does anybody know what they are?

This is Tyrell Street in Bradford (thanks to Lordrich for the name). The ornate building on the end is the former wool exchange, now a bookshop.

This ornate building, one of the best known and regarded in Bradford, was once the Wool Exchange, but is now a bookstore.

We were told that photography isn't allowed in the bookstore in the old wool exchange...unless you're there to take pictures of the ceiling, which is also the roof. :-)

The Midland Hotel gets its name from the Midland Railway, as it was a railway hotel.

I was walking up a hill with my friends, and I saw this photo opportunity, and took it. I really liked how the setting sun was illuminating the city skyline, such as it is.

No, I'm not a student at Bradford, and never have been, but I do have friends there. I took this shot more or less randomly, and amazingly it came out nicely, even though I was using my built-in flash at close range. Okay, so Old Speckled Hen is a recent development, not an old authentic English ale at all, but it is a NEW authentic English ale!! :-) It's also very good.

"Guy Fawkes was a very naughty man!!" :-) This pub is allegedly where he planned his naughty actions, but I haven't been able to verify whether this is true, or just a local legend.

York Minster is the largest gothic cathedral in northern Europe, although so much of it is under scaffolding so much of the time it's often hard to get a good photo of it. This shot is an exception, since it doesn't show the whole Minster. Come to think of it, taking a photo of the whole Minster is quite a challenge if you don't have a helicopter, due to its massive size and the close proximity of other buildings. York Minster was built during the years 1220-1472, but there are believed to have been churches on the site since 627.

Whether Ken Livingstone (mayor of London, not York, I'm not that stupid) thinks, cathedrals normally have pigeons flying around them. :-) This gave me the opportunity to get this shot.

Charles Babbage is ultimately responsible for Flickr, at least if you trace it back far enough. He didn't invent photography or the internet, but many historians of technology consider him to have invented the computer, at least in theory. He built several calculation devices, most notably this one, the Difference Engine, to be used in conjunction with one another to form the "Analytical Engine," considered by many historians to be the first computer in the modern sense, albeit entirely mechanical in nature. Among other innovations, it was not only the first modern computer, but the first one to use punch cards to store software, a storage technology that was only phased out in the 1980s. This version of the Difference Engine (he designed and built several variants) was the largest, and it is not believed to have ever been assembled until the Science Museum in London assembled some old parts and drawings, built everything missing with period tools, and finished the job, putting the finished product on display as seen here. Upon testing it, they found that it worked perfectly, and supposedly it's still operable. Several other, earlier difference engines are displayed nearby, although all of the machines date to the 1830s.

Although I could have taken this in 1999, when I was actually taking a photography course at the University of East Anglia, I'm fairly certain this was actually taken by me independently, and then developed in the darkrooms of the UEA Photo Society. I'm not sure, though. The year on the poster, of course, is referring to the 2001 UK election, as this poster is ridiculing Cherie Blair's obsession with mysticism and superstition. In the end, of course, Britain was doomed by a weak opposition and voter apathy to 4 more years of Blairite incompetence and corruption, which included the Iraq War, and yet another unsuccessful attempt to get rid of him, so one has to consider this poster as being unsuccessful, if indeed The Times dared to take a political position against Blair. It is a bit of an ethical grey area for many journalists, to be sure, when a serious newspaper like The Times does something this blatantly partisan. I've always thought that this photo was very interesting, though, in that it perfectly captured the mood of the times (no pun intended), and even included a reference to the British Rail Crisis, all in a major railway station! :-)

Everybody who's been to London recently has their obligatory Tower, Tower Bridge, Buckingham Palace (except for me), Westminster Abbey, and Houses of Parliament shots, but the coolest one to have, maybe, is one of Battersea Park. Here's mine. :-) The streaks in the sky to the upper left are reflections from the train lighting, as I was on a Gatwick Express unit when I took this, if I'm not mistaken.

I took this, like my Networkers At London Waterloo shot, on my first trip to London. It was obligatory, of course, to take a bunch of photos of Tower Bridge, and indeed I have many of them from almost every year I was in Britain, but in actuality most of them are too common. This one is at least a little bit more artistic, giving me an excuse to scan it and upload it. :-)

This is from a highly unusual photo shoot that I went on with the University of East Anglia Photo Society, when we got on old-style wooden motor boats and ventured out into the shallow parts of the North Sea off the Norfolk Coast, as this is where it's possible to see a lot of seals relaxing on the sandbars. The weather was less than ideal, but considering how nasty ocean weather can be, especially if you're in small boats, it wasn't too bad. I've posted this to the Fog & Rain group for this reason, so if anybody has a problem with it I'll remove it. :-) I'll probably have more photos of this trip shortly, but I have some other stuff that I'm working on at the moment.