A Year in the Life: 13 April 2022

13 April 2022

Hampshire

I have an interiors shoot in Ovington, Hampshire.

On the way to my stop-over I pass through village after village. Their vernacular is mixed - brick, rosemary tile, flint or oak clad. They have topiary in their gardens, telephone-box -libraries on the street corners, beech hedges and convex mirrors on their drives. Their roofs are steeply pitched. Their churches have broach-spires and their pubs are sashed.

In Wickham, there is a street that’s full of delight: timber framed houses pull their wizened faces at a brick built upstart across the road: the Queen’s Lodge of 1648. It is battle scarred with bricks of different periods, but the oldest are hand-made and culminate in a ruddy display of the classical orders set out around the main entrance. Somebody has made noble the mundane brick and jammed its magic into artifice. Beyond the styling, the bricks are defined by their texture and hue.

The next day I head home on a single track road through the Downs. It’s just before sunrise, there’s no traffic. I slow the van down and widen my senses, take in the highway and its movement. For the first part of the journey I skirt the edge of a copse. The trees bridge over the road, arcing down to the opposite side. Elongated tendrils of vine tap the top of the van. It’s cold and shady here, but the van is rising, always rising, until it peaks out onto the crest of a hill that offers a glimpse of my journey north.

Present before me isn’t a conventional view. The sun has topped the ridge to the east and the vale is gilded and golden with blankets of mist. There’s no black and white - no polarity, just a softened, quilted landscape - a world full of possibility.