East of England
The East of England is one of nine official regions of England at the first level of NUTS for statistical purposes. It was created in 1994 and was adopted for statistics from 1999, it includes the ceremonial counties of Bedfordshire, Essex, Hertfordshire and Suffolk. Essex has the highest population in the region, its population at the 2011 census was 5,847,000. Bedford, Basildon, Southend-on-Sea, Ipswich, Colchester and Cambridge are the region's most populous towns; the southern part of the region lies in the London commuter belt. The region has the lowest elevation range in the UK. North Cambridgeshire and the Essex Coast have most of the around 5% of the region, below 10 metres above sea level; the Fens are in North Cambridgeshire, notable for the lowest point in the country in the land of the village of Holme 2.75 metres below mean sea level, once Whittlesey Mere. The highest point is at Clipper Down at 817 ft, in the far south-western corner of the region in the Ivinghoe Hills. Basildon and Harlow, with Stevenage and Hemel Hempstead, were main New Towns in the 1950s and 1960s, with much industry located there.
In the late 1960s, the Roskill Commission considered Thurleigh in Bedfordshire, Nuthampstead in Hertfordshire and Foulness in Essex as a possible third airport for London. The East of England succeeded the standard statistical region East Anglia; the East of England civil defence region was identical to today's region. England between the Wash and just south of the town of Colchester has since post-Roman times been and continues to be known as East Anglia, including the county traversing the west of this line, Cambridgeshire; the inclusion of Essex as part of East Anglia is open to debate, notably because it was a Saxon kingdom, separate from the kingdom of the East Angles. Essex, despite meaning East-Saxons formed part of the South East England, as did Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, a mixture of definite and debatable Home Counties; the earliest use of the term is from 1695. Charles Davenant, in An essay upon ways and means of supplying the war, wrote, "The Eleven Home Counties, which are thought in Land Taxes to pay more than their proportion..." cited a list including these four.
The term does not appear to have been used in taxation since the 18th century. East Anglia is one of the driest parts of the United Kingdom with average rainfall ranging from 450 mm to 750 mm; this is because low pressure systems and weather fronts from the Atlantic have lost a lot of their moisture over land by the time they reach Eastern England. However the Fens in Cambridgeshire are prone to flooding. Winter is cool but non-prevailing cold easterly winds can affect the area from the continent, these can bring heavy snowfall if the winds interact with a low pressure system over the Atlantic or France. Northerly winds can be cold but are not as cold as easterly winds. Westerly winds bring milder and wetter weather. Southerly winds bring mild air but chill if coming from further east than Spain. Spring is a transitional season that can be chilly to start with but is warm by late-April/May; the weather at this time is changeable and showery. Summer is warm and continental air from mainland Europe or the Azores High leads to at least a few weeks of hot, balmy weather with prolonged warm to hot weather.
The number of summer storms from the Atlantic, such as the remnants of a tropical storm coincides with the location of the jet stream. The East tends to receive much less of their rain than the other regions. Autumn is mild with some days being unsettled and rainy and others warm. At least part of September and early October in the East have warm and settled weather but only in rare years is there an Indian summer where fine weather marks the entire traditional harvest season; the most deprived districts, according to the Indices of deprivation 2007 in the region are, in descending order, Great Yarmouth, Luton and Ipswich. At county level, after Luton and Peterborough, which have a similar level of deprivation, in descending order there is Southend-on-Sea Thurrock; the least deprived districts, in descending order, are South Cambridgeshire, Mid Bedfordshire, East Hertfordshire, St Albans, Rochford, Huntingdonshire, Mid Suffolk, North Hertfordshire, Three Rivers, South Norfolk, East Cambridgeshire and Suffolk Coastal.
At county level, the least deprived areas in the region, in descending order, are Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire, with all three having a similar level of deprivation Essex. The region has the lowest proportion of jobless households in the UK – 0.5%. In March 2011 the region's unemployment claimant count was 3.0%. Inside the region, the highest rate is Great Yarmouth with 6.2%, followed by Peterborough and Southend-on-Sea on 4.7%. In the 2015 general election, there was an overall swing of 0.25% from the Conservatives to Labour, the Liberal Democrats lost 16% of its vote. All of Hertfordshire and Suffolk is now Conservative; the region's electorate voted 49% Conservative, 22% Labour, 16% UKIP, 8% Liberal Democrat and 4% Green. Like other regions, the division of seats favours th
Weybourne, Norfolk
Weybourne is a village on the coast of North Norfolk, England. The village is surrounded by arable fields and heathland and straddles the A149 coast road, three miles west of Sheringham, within the Norfolk Coast AONB; the area is popular for the local countryside and coast and in particular for walking and bird-watching. The parish church of All Saints is listed Grade II*; the adjacent standing remains of the Augustinian priory are Grade I and the site is a Scheduled Ancient Monument. Weybourne is mentioned in the Domesday Book; the remains of the Augustinian Weybourne Priory, founded around 1200 AD by Sir Ralph de Meyngaren, stand on the site of a simpler Anglo-Saxon church. By 1494 only one prior and three canons lived there: one canon complained that the priory was so poor it was unable to pay him his 20 shillings of annual pocket money. At a visitation in 1514, there was only one prior and one canon and this situation remained until King Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of monasteries and priories.
Weybourne has long been considered a possible site for invasion, one reason being the deep water offshore. "He who would all England win, should at Weybourne Hope begin." During the Second World War defences were constructed around Weybourne as a part of British anti-invasion preparations of the Second World War. The beaches were blocked by extensive scaffolding barriers. During the Second World War, Weybourne Camp was a secret site and was an Anti-Aircraft Artillery range. This, along with a complementary camp at Stiffkey, represented the main live-firing training ranges for Anti-Aircraft Command in the Second World War. Here the Norfolk coastline became a controlled zone by the British forces; this controlled zone extended 10 km deep into the North Sea around Norfolk. Weybourne Camp was a vital part of this zone. Weybourne Camp was visited twice by Winston Churchill in 1941; these visits took place after the Dunkirk evacuation. During his first visit, a demonstration of projectile firing was carried out, but the result was most unsatisfactory.
The Prime Minister gave the commandant just seven days to improve the standard. On the second visit, each demonstration ended in failure until a Queen Bee pilotless target aircraft was shot down and crashed close to the VIP enclosure. History has it. Weybourne Windmill is a fine example of a tower mill, built in 1850, restored but not to working condition. During the Second World War, suspicions arose in the village about the couple who lived at the mill: there were rumours that the residents were spying for the Germans; the man living in the mill was a Mr Dodds and his wife had a strong foreign accent, which locals described as "like German or Austrian". One night two local policemen were walking down the lane from the old coastguard cottages towards the mill when they saw a light flashing from the top of the mill out towards sea. No action was taken – oddly, given the wartime conditions and the closeness to Weybourne Camp – but it bothered one of the policemen and he went back a couple of nights and saw lights again.
Some time Mrs Dodds left her bicycle unattended outside the tennis court. The bicycle fell over and a bag fell out of the basket. A local picked the bicycle up and the bag, he found a radio transmitter. He told the police and a day or two the authorities arrived and took the lady and her husband away. Weybourne had a watermill, located on Beach Road. There is a shop, Weybourne Stores, The Ship public house, which serves ales and hot food most lunchtimes and evenings. A few minutes walk from the village centre is the Maltings Hotel, which provides bar and restaurant meals as well as accommodation. A popular attraction is the Muckleburgh Collection: the largest owned collection of tanks, armoured cars and other military vehicles used in wars across the globe. Another local attraction is the North Norfolk Railway which runs from Sheringham through Weybourne to Holt. Known as the "Poppy Line", this well preserved steam railway cuts through the countryside to the east of Weybourne and passes through the preserved country station, which houses a locomotive shed with a carriage maintenance and restoration centre.
Weybourne railway station is about 1,000 yards from the village centre, signposted from the coast road opposite the church. The main station was built in 1900: other structures, of the appropriate era, such as the signal box, waiting room and footbridge have been imported from other locations.. It was used as the location for the filming of the Dad's Army episode, "The Royal Train", is used by film-makers and artists. On the station there is a small shop and picnic area. At weekends there is a bookshop selling a wide range of old railway books and magazines, railway videos and CDs commemorating times past; the railway offers a 10.5-mile round trip by steam train through an area of North Norfolk designated as being of outstanding natural beauty. At Weybourne the coast has an unusually steep shingle beach, regarded as vulnerable to the threat of the Spanish Armada in 1588; the village was a well-used location for smuggling items such as over-proof gin and pressed bales of tobacco. The coast between Sheringham and Weybourne was popular for landing goods because ships could anchor closer to the
Ordnance Survey National Grid
The Ordnance Survey National Grid reference system is a system of geographic grid references used in Great Britain, distinct from latitude and longitude. It is called British National Grid; the Ordnance Survey devised the national grid reference system, it is used in their survey data, in maps based on those surveys, whether published by the Ordnance Survey or by commercial map producers. Grid references are commonly quoted in other publications and data sources, such as guide books and government planning documents. A number of different systems exist that can provide grid references for locations within the British Isles: this article describes the system created for Great Britain and its outlying islands; the Universal Transverse Mercator coordinate system is used to provide grid references for worldwide locations, this is the system used for the Channel Islands and Ireland. European-wide agencies use UTM when mapping locations, or may use the Military Grid Reference System system, or variants of it.
OSGB uses Orthorectified images of many temporal resolution for one area. The grid is based on the OSGB36 datum, was introduced after the retriangulation of 1936–1962, it replaced the used Cassini Grid which, up to the end of World War II, had been issued only to the military. The Airy ellipsoid is a regional best fit for Britain; the British maps adopt a transverse Mercator projection with an origin at 49° N, 2° W. Over the Airy ellipsoid a straight line grid, the National Grid, is placed with a new false origin to eliminate negative numbers, creating a 700 km by 1300 km grid; this false origin is located south-west of the Isles of Scilly. In order to minimize the overall scale error, a factor of 2499/2500 is applied; this creates two lines of longitude about 180 km east and west of the central meridian along which the local scale factor equals 1, i.e. map scale is correct. Inside these lines the local scale factor is less than 1, with a minimum of 0.04% too small at the central meridian. Outside these lines the local scale factor is greater than 1, is about 0.04% too large near the east and west coasts.
Grid north and true north are only aligned on the central meridian of the grid, 2° W and approx. 2° 0′ 5″ W. OSGB 36 was used by Admiralty nautical charts until 2000 after which WGS 84 has been used. A geodetic transformation between OSGB 36 and other terrestrial reference systems can become quite tedious if attempted manually; the most common transformation is called the Helmert datum transformation, which results in a typical 7 m error from true. The definitive transformation from ETRS89, published by the OSGB is called the National Grid Transformation OSTN15; this models the detailed distortions in the 1936–1962 retriangulation, achieves backwards compatibility in grid coordinates to sub-metre accuracy. The difference between the coordinates on different datums varies from place to place; the longitude and latitude positions on OSGB 36 are the same as for WGS 84 at a point in the Atlantic Ocean well to the west of Great Britain. In Cornwall, the WGS 84 longitude lines are about 70 metres east of their OSGB 36 equivalents, this value rising to about 120 m east on the east coast of East Anglia.
The WGS 84 latitude lines are about 70 m south of the OSGB 36 lines in South Cornwall, the difference diminishing to zero in the Scottish Borders, increasing to about 50 m north on the north coast of Scotland. The smallest datum shift is on the greatest in Kent; these two datums are not both in general use in any one place, but for a point in the English Channel halfway between Dover and Calais, the ED50 longitude lines are about 20 m east of the OSGB36 equivalents, the ED50 latitude lines are about 150 m south of the OSGB36 ones. For the first letter, the grid is divided into squares of size 500 km by 500 km, outlined in dark grey on the map to the right. There are four of these which contain significant land area within Great Britain: S, T, N and H; the O square contains a tiny area of North Yorkshire all of which lies below mean high tide. For the second letter, each 500 km square is subdivided into 25 squares of size 100 km by 100 km, each with a letter code from A to Z starting with A in the north-west corner to Z in the south-east corner.
These squares are outlined in light grey with those containing land lettered. The central meridian is shown in red. Within each square and northings from the south west corner of the square are given numerically. For example, NH0325 means a 1 km square whose south-west corner is 3 km east and 25 km north from the south-west corner of square NH. A location can be indicated to varying resolutions numerically from two digits in each coordinate through to five.
Humphry Repton
Humphry Repton was the last great English landscape designer of the eighteenth century regarded as the successor to Capability Brown. His first name is incorrectly rendered "Humphrey". In 2018, the bicentenary of Repton's death, several groups held events throughout the United Kingdom to celebrate his work. Repton was born in Bury St Edmunds, the son of a collector of excise, John Repton, Martha. In 1762 his father set up a transport business in Norwich, where Humphry attended Norwich Grammar School. At age twelve he was sent to the Netherlands to prepare for a career as a merchant. However, Repton was befriended by a wealthy Dutch family and the trip may have done more to stimulate his interest in'polite' pursuits such as sketching and gardening. Returning to Norwich, Repton was apprenticed to a textile merchant after marriage to Mary Clarke in 1773, set up in the business himself, he was not successful, when his parents died in 1778 used his modest legacy to move to a small country estate at Sustead, near Aylsham in Norfolk.
Repton tried his hand as a journalist, artist, political agent, as confidential secretary to his neighbour William Windham of Felbrigg Hall during Windham's brief stint as Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Repton joined John Palmer in a venture to reform the mail-coach system, but while the scheme made Palmer's fortune, Repton again lost money. Repton's childhood friend was James Edward Smith, who encouraged him to study gardening, he was given access to the library of Windham to read its works on botany. His capital dwindling, Repton moved to a modest cottage at Hare Street near Romford in Essex. In 1788, aged 36 and with four children and no secure income, he hit on the idea of combining his sketching skills with his limited experience of laying out grounds at Sustead to become a'landscape gardener'. Since the death of Capability Brown in 1783, no one figure dominated English garden design, he was at first an avid defender of Brown's views, contrasted with those of Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price, but adopted a moderate position.
His first paid commission was Catton Park, to the north of Norwich, in 1788. That Repton, with no real experience of practical horticulture, became an overnight success, is a tribute to his undeniable talent, but to the unique way he presented his work. To help clients visualise his designs, Repton produced'Red Books' with explanatory text and watercolours with a system of overlays to show'before' and'after' views. In this he differed from Capability Brown, who worked exclusively with plans and illustrated or wrote about his work. Repton's overlays were soon copied by the Philadelphian Bernard M'Mahon in his 1806 American Gardener's Calendar. To understand what was unique about Repton it is useful to examine how he differed from Brown in more detail. Brown worked for many of the wealthiest aristocrats in Britain, carving huge landscape parks out of old formal gardens and agricultural land. While Repton worked for important clients, such as the Dukes of Bedford and Portland, he was fine-tuning earlier work that of Brown himself.
Where Repton got the chance to lay out grounds from scratch it was on a much more modest scale. On these smaller estates, where Brown would have surrounded the park with a continuous perimeter belt, Repton cut vistas through to'borrowed' items such as church towers, making them seem part of the designed landscape, he contrived approach drives and lodges to enhance impressions of size and importance, introduced monogrammed milestones on the roads around some estates, for which he was satirised by Thomas Love Peacock as'Marmaduke Milestone, esquire, a Picturesque Landscape Gardener' in Headlong Hall. Around 1787, Richard Page, landowner of Sudbury, to the west of Wembley decided to convert the Page family home'Wellers' into a country seat and turn the fields around it into a private estate. In 1792 Page employed Humphry Repton, by famous as a landscape architect, to convert the previous farmland into wooded parkland and to make improvements to the house. Repton called the areas he landscaped'parks', so it is to Repton that Wembley Park owes its name.
The original site that Repton so transformed was built on in the construction of the short-lived Watkin's Tower. The area landscaped by Repton was larger than the current Wembley Park, it included the southern slopes of Barn Hill to the north, where Repton planted trees and started building a'prospect house' – a gothic tower offering a view over the parkland. Repton may have designed the thatched lodge that survives on Wembley Hill Road, to the west of Wembley Park, it is in the cottage orné style used by Repton. Regrettably, Repton's Red Book for Wembley Park, which would give a definitive answer, has not survived. Capability Brown was a large-scale contractor, who not only designed, but arranged the realisation of his work. By contrast, Repton acted as a consultant, charging for his Red Books and sometimes staking out the ground, but leaving his client to arrange the actual execution, thus many of Repton's 400 or so designs remained wholly or unexecuted and, while Brown became wealthy, Repton's income was never more than comfortable.
Early in his career, Repton defended Brown's reputation during the'picturesque controversy'. In 1794 R
Davidia involucrata
Davidia involucrata, the dove-tree, handkerchief tree, pocket handkerchief tree, or ghost tree, is a medium-sized deciduous tree in the family Nyssaceae. It was included with tupelos in the dogwood family, Cornaceae, it is native to South Central and Southwest China from Hubei to southern Gansu, south to Guizhou and Yunnan, but is cultivated elsewhere. Davidia involucrata is the only member of its genus, but there are two varieties differing in their leaves, D. involucrata var. involucrata, which has the leaves thinly pubescent on the underside, D. involucrata var. vilmoriniana, with glabrous leaves. Some botanists treat them as distinct species, with good reason, as the two taxa have differing chromosome numbers so are unable to produce fertile hybrid offspring, it is a moderately fast-growing tree, growing to 20–25 m in height, with alternate cordate leaves resembling those of a linden in appearance, except that they are symmetrical, lacking the lop-sided base typical of linden leaves. Davidia involucrata is best known for its flowers.
The Latin specific epithet involucrata means "with a ring of bracts surrounding several flowers". These form a tight cluster about 1–2 cm across, reddish in colour, each flower head with a pair of large, pure white bracts at the base performing the function of petals; these hang in long rows beneath the level branches. The flowers are at their best in late May. On a breezy day, the bracts flutter in the wind like white doves or pinched handkerchiefs, hence the English names for this tree; the fruit is a hard nut about 3 cm long surrounded by a green husk about 4 cm long by 3 cm wide, hanging on a 10 cm stalk. The nut contains 3–6 seeds; the genus Davidia is named for Father Armand David, a French Vincentian missionary and keen naturalist who lived in China. David first described the tree in 1869 as a single tree found at over 2,000 m altitude, sent dried specimens to Paris. Scottish plant hunter Augustine Henry again found a single tree, this time in the Yangtse Ichang gorges and sent the first specimen to Kew Gardens.
Plant collector Ernest Henry Wilson was employed by Sir Harry Veitch to find Henry's tree but arrived to find that it had been felled for building purposes. Returning to England, Wilson had his boat managed to save his Davidia specimens; the oldest probable fossils of Davidia are permineralized fruits from the Upper Cretaceous Horseshoe Canyon Formation of Dinosaur Provincial Park near Drumheller, Canada. Those fruits are smaller than those of D. involucrata and have fewer locules, but are otherwise similar in morphology to the extant genus. In 2009, B. I. Pavlyutkin described Miocene fossils in Primorsky Krai and assigned them to a new species in the genus Davidia; the species was introduced from China to Europe and North America in 1904, is a popular ornamental tree in parks and larger gardens. Most trees in cultivation are var. vilmoriniana, which has proved much better able to adapt to the climatic conditions in the west. This tree and the cultivated variety D. involucrata var. vilmoriniana have gained the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit.
Media related to Davidia involucrata at Wikimedia Commons
Windward and leeward
Windward is the direction upwind from the point of reference, alternatively the direction from which the wind is coming. Leeward is the direction downwind from the point of reference; the leeward region of mountains remains dry as compared to the windward. The side of a ship, towards the leeward is its lee side. If the vessel is heeling under the pressure of the wind, this will be the "lower side". During the age of sail, the term weather was used as a synonym for windward in some contexts, as in the weather gage. Windward and leeward directions are important factors to consider. Other terms with broadly the same meaning are used upwind and downwind; the windward vessel is the more maneuverable vessel. For this reason, rule 12 of the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea stipulates that the windward vessel gives way to the leeward vessel. In warfare, a square rigged warship would try to enter battle from the windward direction, thus gaining an important tactical advantage over the opposing warship – the warship to windward could choose when to engage and when to withdraw.
The opposing warship to leeward could do little but comply without exposing itself unduly. This was important once artillery was introduced to naval warfare; the ships heeled away from the wind so that the leeward vessel was exposing part of her bottom to shot. Leeward and windward refer to what a game stalker would call downwind and upwind; the terms are used by seamen in relation to their ships but in reference to islands in an archipelago and to the different sides of a single island. In the latter case, the windward side is that side of an island subject to the prevailing wind, is thus the wetter side; the leeward side is the side protected by the elevation of the island from the prevailing wind, is the drier side of an island. Thus, leeward or windward siting is an important climate factor on oceanic islands. In the case of an archipelago, windward islands are upwind and leeward islands are the downwind ones. In these contexts the terms windward and layward are not used. Hunting: In hunting, the animal, downwind has an advantage.
S/he can smell the upwind animal. The downwind animal has the advantage of surprise. Architecture and urban planning: Part of a house, or a community, is located upwind of something downwind, malodorous — an outhouse, a garbage dump, a feedlot, a factory or meatpacker, it is sometimes the case that part of a house or a community, or sometimes the entire house or community, will be downwind of some pleasant odor. These odors are either plant-based — flowers, fruit or flowering trees, forests —, or moving water — rivers, rain. Barlavento and Sotavento in Cape Verde Islands Downstream and upstream Foehn wind Lee shore Northwestern Hawaiian Islands known as Leeward Islands Windward Islands, Leeward Islands and Leeward Antilles Windward Islands and Leeward Islands
