Follow the brown signs

TED is an innovative and inspiring website that showcases thousands of talks given by a diverse range of interesting and brilliant people across the world about a whole variety of different topics. These people tell their audiences about their passions, their ideas, their research, their experiences and about the fundamental things that make them tick. The talks cover everything from space travel to marketing, but what I love most is not just the variety of the presentations but that every single one invites the viewer to think, question and evaluate the world around...

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I had a tweet this morning on this fine bank holiday Monday from a very nice chap who first featured my pursuits in the Ordnance Survey journal Mapping News last year. He tweeted me to let me know that my map mashups (the technical term for the complex code behind how my brown signs maps work using Google Maps) has been featured on a Google blog. I was of course very excited and so I must share.... http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2011/08/putting-culture-on-map.html?spref=tw Cool huh?! I think so :)...

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This week I had the honour of writing a piece about my new website (www.followthebrownsigns.com) for The British and Irish Association for Zoos and Aquariums (BIAZA) newsletter. I hope the piece will get more attractions signing up to the site (for free) and help get as many zoos and aquariums on the brown sign map as possible. It motivated me to do a little research into the subject and when I read that Brighton Sealife Centre is in fact the oldest operating aquarium in the world I decided it needed...

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... when my sister got sent the link to this video I thought I must share it. What I love most, apart from loving the song and being reminded of my teenage years when The Mose would play R.E.M. on a loop, mooning around the house adoring Michael Stipe a little more than is healthy, I also love what lies behind the story of the song. Mikey Stipey, as he has become affectionately known in our house (even my 86 year old Dad knows who we're talking about when we mention...

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Today, after about 3 weeks working solid 14 hour shifts at my restaurant, I am back in the game (the very best game I know: The Brown Sign Game) and in honour of my return I thought I'd feature a big fat impressive attraction on random brown sign of the day and it doesn't get much bigger than space does it? So today children we're going to be talking about The National Space Centre.

This pretty amazing attraction is in Leicester and I cannot tell you how many times...

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The Mose and I went down to Dorset for a few days over the Easter break, mainly because I was wetting myself at the prospect of having a little go on the Swanage Steam Railway after they signed themselves up to my Brown Sign Way website.

This railway line wasn't actually one of the many hundreds across the country that were pulled up and abandoned after Dr Richard Beeching overhauled the railway network in the infamous Becching Report of 1963. This report saw the closure of around a third...

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I have a permanent Twitter search set for "brown sign" on my TweetDeck that pulls up any tweet with the words "brown" and "sign" in it. So whenever anyone tweets about brown signs I always tweet them back, tell them what I'm doing and point them to my website. The relevant ones are usually people going down the motorway tweeting "OMG I'm so excited! We've just gone past the first brown sign for Alton Towers!" Others have been rants about the council not replacing stolen or defaced brown signs and...

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This is the view from above the White Horse Hill in Uffington, Oxfordshire. Apart from deserving the Random Brown Sign of the Day accolade for it's gorgeous views over the beautiful Oxfordshire countryside, having an excellent quirky name and being over 3000 years old, this horsey hill also holds a special place in my heart.

In a former life as a travelling marketing consultant I spent many hours in my car driving all over the south of England listening to radio 4 and audio books which, needless to...

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The joys of The Brown Sign Way not only come in the sheer quantity of brown-signed attractions across Britain but also in their variety. There are 93 different types of attraction and facility that get their own symbol on brown signs, for example: Birds of Prey Motor Museum Theatre Historic Dockyard/Naval Attraction   Of course there are attractions that don't fit into any of the 93 categories and these either get their own unique symbol (like Jodrell Bank Observatory and the Millennium Dome) or don't have a symbol and simply have text on their sign. There...

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This was the view from Chris’ balcony window at 7.30am on Wednesday morning. After the blindingly gorgeous weather we’d had the day before this sight was mildly disappointing. Sometimes though having your options limited ends you up discovering random places you probably wouldn’t have gone to before and today turned out to be just one of those days.

Chris told me about a brown sign he used to pass on his way to work that he’d always been intrigued by which points to (and this is no joke)...

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This is the sign at the bottom of the Minack Theatre hill. I'd never heard of the Telegraph Museum so I was intrigued, and when I'm intrigued I must discover. We'd passed a big white building on the way to the Minack with MUSEUM printed in massive letters on it so I guessed that was it.

After parking up you walk through a garden full of "sci-art" sculptures which were born out of an interesting collaborative project that aims to bridge the age old divide between the art world...

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At 1am on Monday morning I was in my old pal Chris' sitting room in Plymouth after a non-stop 4.5 hour belt down the motorway straight from work. We'd spontaneously decided I'd visit and go brown-signing around the South-West after The Minack Theatre signed up to www.thebrownsignway.com. I was hell-bent on paying them a visit after reading what they had to say about themselves: "The Minack is the UK's only cliffside open-air theatre, created by Rowena Cade in the 1930s, we're now hosting an 18 week summer season of...

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Exactly what it says on the tin: a massive train made from bricks just on the outskirts of Darlington, or more precisely "situated next to Morrisons on Morton Park Industrial Estate" it's location is rather depressingly described on thisisdarlington.com tourist information website.

Interesting when you learn a little more about it though so here's a little about what they have to say:

The sculpture was built in 1997, designed by David Mach, to celebrate the rich railway heritage of Darlington.  The adventurous can climb to the platform...

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Today's brown sign of the day is The World of Model Railways in Mevagissey, Cornwall. I knew I'd love it even before I'd had a butcher's at their website but all the pictures and descriptions of this little attractions only compounded my love for them even more. When answering the question "Why is your attraction important and why would Britain be worse of without you?" on the form on my website they said this:

"We are almost unique in Britain, one of very...

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I'm getting so many unique and amazing attractions signing up to The Brown Sign Way through the "I'm a brown-signed attraction, get me involved!" page on my website that I think it's time they were shared, so in their honour I'll pick one randomly every day and feature it in my new daily post called "Random Brown Sign of the Day". It won't be a normal blog about me doing a brown sign visit, it'll be more about how surprising and interesting these places are when...

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Matt and I decided that another brown sign trip was in order after the mildly disappointing day we'd spent wasting petrol driving around South West London/Surrey, being turned away from Hampton Court Palace and getting stuck in traffic jams that made us go a bit mental. As an ode to our "Henry VIII says no" day we took this picture of us eating our packed lunch in the car, kindly bought by Matt from the petrol station consisting of Ribena, donuts, Revels and Wine Gums (both big bags) which we...

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Me: *Sounding very serious and worky* I would like to hire an intern/work experience person to help with a project I'm currently undertaking and wondered if you might be able to assist me?
Man: OK, I'll just get some details, can you describe the project for me?
Me: Yes of course... *blah blah usual stuff about brown signs etc*
Man: Can I just stop you there, do you have a twin?
Me: Err yes I do, do you know her?
Man: Well not really, but I did...

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Luckily for me my best friend Beaker's brother Matt, who works abroad, has been back in the country for the last week. This is great for me because it means I get some variety in the person sitting next to me on my brown signing trips. People who don't have proper 9-5 jobs or children suit my needs brilliantly. Score. Matt's known me for a long time and was therefore totally unphased by my suggestion that we should get in the car and drive in a random direction to discover...

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This weekend I went away with my uni gang to the Cotswolds. My friend Kat (far left) moves to Singapore for an indefinite period soon and we all needed a weekend away slopping around in our pyjamas 'til noon, pootling in picturesque villages buying things we didn't really need, breaking casserole dishes we found in the cottage and eating massive pies in country pubs (accompanied by lots of wine) to make us all feel like we'd spent some quality time together before she left.

Now that the Brown Sign...

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I was very excited to be tweeted at the other day by a cool bunch of geographers (they exist, I promise you) called The Geography Collective who launched a great website last year called Mission: Explore. They have an affiliated iPhone app and now 2 books that are packed full of missions for kids to do. They aim to get children noticing the world around them and engaging with their surroundings by completing lots of fun and diverse exercises. They're designed to get kids actually doing and thinking for themselves,...

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