Follow the brown signs

Follow the Brown Signs Blog - August, 2011

A brilliant talk on “living the dream man!” and feeling vulnerable

August 30, 2011

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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Google Maps blog about Follow The Brown Signs

August 29, 2011

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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Bad bikes and the oldest operating aquarium in the world

July 25, 2011

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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It seems I can’t stop banging on about men on the moon…

July 24, 2011

... 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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Random Brown Sign of the Day – The National Space Centre

June 3, 2011

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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All aboard for some Swanage steam train action

May 5, 2011

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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Me talking on BBC Lincolnshire about The Brown Sign Way

May 3, 2011

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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Random Brown Sign of the Day – Uffington White Horse

April 20, 2011

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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How to win at greyhound racing – go for a Swift Gin

April 19, 2011

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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Stormy times in a whole world of barometers….

April 14, 2011

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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