Follow the brown signs
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inspire me
find brown signs around me
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get involved
put your brown sign on the map
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blog
my brown signing adventures
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brown signs
what they are & why they're important
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the girl behind the signs
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history
where it began & where we are now
Follow the Brown Signs Blog - October, 2010
Have I got Mapping News for you…
October 23, 2010
http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/education/pdf/mn38pdf.pdfMapping News is the brilliant quarterly journal published by the dedicated map chaps at The Ordnance Survey. As if it wasn't exciting enough already this Autumn's edition also features an article about me and my brown signing adventures, they've even included some of my badly composed photographs (usually taken while hanging out of my car while driving slowly around roundabouts). With such coverage I decided that visitors to my blog might suddenly sky rocket so I undertook the not insignificant task of removing all the rude words from...
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Along The Brown Sign Way all signs are created equal, and thankfully none are created more equal than others.
September 27, 2010
This morning I was sitting on the train reading The Corporation by Joel Bakan, a book essentially about the power and influence that corporations and businesses have over us, the lay people of this world, and it began to make me feel a little bit sick. I find it so sad that advertising and marketing techniques actually work on people in the first place. I've never liked people telling me what to do or being subjected to opinion I'm just not that interested in, it's one of the reasons...
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The most appropriately spent Roald Dahl Day ever
September 13, 2010
After my huge excitement at finding out this morning that it is in fact Roald Dahl Day today it seemed only right that I should visit The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre at my soonest convenience. Happily I was already heading Buckinghamshire way to work on the exciting design of my new website with a man who knows his Photoshop. So when we should have been sitting down to some serious work, instead, after my not-too-strong persuasion, we were getting into the car and heading off to Great Missenden....Read more >>
Top secret Brown Sign Mission: Codes, 1984 computers and reusable condoms
September 5, 2010
I've wanted to visit Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire for some time. I like all things history, war and intrigue and Bletchley Park, where ingenious code breakers spent sleepless days and nights in make shift huts cracking the infamous German Enigma code, has to be the place to go to get all that. A good friend of mine (who also happens to be my ex-boyfriend) volunteered to come with me, good thing too, how else would I have completed the "know your planes - friend or foe?" game with almost 100%...Read more >>
A "I walk past that sign every day and I’ve never visited" day
August 11, 2010
In one of my more random and terribly unsuitable jobs I worked for a few months at the fine chocolatier Mr Paul A Young's (I don't like chocolate, really, not even at all) in Islington, North London. Every day on my way to work from King's Cross I walked past this brown sign for The London Canal Museum and I'm ashamed to say, in all the time I worked there, and despite my obsession with brown tourist signs, I never visited. Shame on me, and what an error that was,...Read more >>
A little history of ice skating
August 7, 2010
It was the long cold North European winters that inspired the invention of the ice skate. The earliest known example is over 5000 years old and was found at the bottom of a Swiss lake (I assume the chap wearing them rather overestimated their capabilities) and were fashioned from animal bone and leather straps which attached to the skaters shoe. Early records indicate that ice skaters using poles to propel themselves across frozen lakes and rivers “as swiftly as birds” was a common sight in the colder climes across the...Read more >>
My day at the office
August 2, 2010
I thought I might share some non-brown-sign related thoughts with you today in the absence of any brown signed attractions filling my waking hours. It has been a funny day, well, an enlightening one at least. I knew things wouldn't be normal when I burst out crying after reading The Man, Richard Branson's morning blog post entitled "in it for the fun, not just the money". The Man describes the drive and motivation behind starting out on your own, and this was the sentence that started those little tears a-comin':
"I...Read more >>
Gooone fishin’…
July 30, 2010
The nights sleep, despite significant tiredness when we hit the sack, was not such a good one, in fact, let's be honest, it can probably be ranked as one of the worst ever. Predictably I hadn't checked the weather forecast before we left and assumed that being in mid July meant likelihood of good weather. Unfortunately I was proved wrong (as always) at around 1 am when the heavens opened and we were rained on hard for the next 6 solid hours. I had nightmares of the tent, and ourselves,...Read more >>
More More Moor (that’s how I like it, that’s how I like it)
July 23, 2010
The next brown sign trip started with a pretty much uninterrupted drive up to Robin Hood's Bay, just south of Whitby in the North York Moors. By "pretty much" uninterrupted I mean it did include a quick stop at an OK Diner on the A1. OK Diners are the most amazing motorway services ever and leave me dumbfounded as to why they haven't made their way down south to replace the horrendous Little Chefs I am so used to avoiding. These restaurants have totally pulled off the 1950s-themed diner experience,...Read more >>
On another bear hunt…
July 18, 2010
Time to do another brown sign trip! Heading for Robin Hood's bay today, just north of Scarborough. Because of the long drive up there the estimated time of leaving was approx 9.30 (get up and go for a 2 hour run at 7 am come back get in the car and go) but here I am still buying fishing rod licences online and digging very spider infested camping chairs out of the shed. Perhaps a more accurate time will be 11.30. Ho hum.
I have fishing booked for Tuesday and...
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I have fishing booked for Tuesday and...
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