Odd Country

Oddments

A highly irregular record.

A wooden 1960s television set on a stand in an empty room, showing BBC Test Card F — a girl at a blackboard beside a clown toy — against a wall painted in pastel colour bars.
Show's OverThe strange afterlife of Test Card F · Lost Signals · Aug 2026
“A building under assembly is a ruin in reverse.”
Robin Hood Gardens mid-demolition in black and white: two concrete slab blocks with their flank walls torn open, seen from across a road behind a line of hoarding, a bus shelter at one side and a single figure walking past.
Eight Tons of Poplar: The V&A bought a council flat · Strange Ground · Aug 2026
A cellophane-wrapped bouquet tied to the base of a lamppost on a city pavement at dusk, an empty road and red-brick buildings behind it.
CellophaneEngland invented a mourning ritual in about 1989 and nobody announced it · Folk Ways · Jul 2026
Schoolchildren in a park in the mid-1980s, several walking away across mown grass towards trees, with a town and tower blocks on the skyline behind.
Nine Hundred Years, Then FifteenThe BBC Domesday Project, 1986 · Lost Signals · Jul 2026
Cecil Beaton's 1941 photograph of the Keep Calm and Carry On poster hung on a pub wall, flanked by wartime notices about careless talk and ration books, with men in flat caps seated at tables beneath it.The Poster Nobody Saw
Keep Calm and Carry On, 1939 and 2000 · Under Glass · Jun 2026
Three ring-necked parakeets perched along a cherry blossom branch against a pale blue sky, bright green with red beaks and long tapering tails.
Nobody Let Them OutLondon's parakeets, and four stories that are not true · Field Notes · Jun 2026
Four panels comparing the lowercase letter h: a photograph of the original metal sort, the digital revival drawn as an outline, a printed impression from the Doves type, and the revived digital letter, with red guide lines across x-height and baseline.
Caught by the RiverA man spent nine months throwing a typeface off Hammersmith Bridge · Under Glass · May 2026
A worn leather boot, laced and split at the toe, standing on a dust-covered mantelpiece in a derelict room against crumbling plaster and exposed brick.One Shoe, Up the Chimney
The commonest English magical practice, and nobody wrote down why · Folk Ways · May 2026
An illustration of a hooded, skeletal figure of Death holding a scythe, standing on a yellow hillside at dusk and looking down at a small hedgehog that faces it.
A Brief History of Dead HedgehogsFour hundred years of killing them, and what the empty verges mean now · Field Notes · Apr 2026
A Glanville fritillary specimen against a vivid yellow ground, wings spread to show the chequered orange, cream and black pattern and the fine dark veining.
In Pursuit of ButterfliesThe Englishwoman whose will was broken on the evidence of her hobby · Field Notes · Mar 2026
The concrete slab roof of one of the Orford Ness pagodas, raised on stubby columns above a shingle bank, derelict brick outbuildings alongside it under a heavy grey sky.
Curated DecayOrford Ness, where the National Trust decided not to preserve something · Strange Ground · Mar 2026