Anyway, sometimes I’d go for a drive, sometimes I’d go for a walk, but if the weather wasn’t particularly good then I’d often just head towards Chichester Cross with camera in hand and I’d take photos of the people going about their business in the city. I wouldn’t necessarily call the photography I did street photography, but I suppose it was of a sort.

The following pictures were all taken on various days in February and March of 2011, on rainy days, on days when all the varied umbrellas came out on display. Umbrellas with stars, with swirls, patterned, plain, striped, dotted, and tartan.

A second thing to bring up here as well is that technically this place is called Lee-on-the-Solent but I don’t know anyone around this part of the world we live in who calls it that. We haven’t got time to throw definite articles into the middle of place names like that.

So, the following pictures come from a short stop here over fourteen years ago as I write this now. Why did we visit this coastal part of Hampshire? You’ll have to jump into a time machine and go ask Past Me about that because Present Me doesn’t know for sure. Maybe we’d hit Fareham’s shops and decided to go exploring instead of heading straight back to Portsmouth. I just can’t remember. However, we did go through a phase of parking up along beaches all around England and taking in some sea air so it’s not even out of the question that we headed here on purpose as the only thing to do on that day. It was a Monday, straight after Super Bowl the night before, so we would have had the day off work and likely feeling a little jaded after an early hours of the morning finish.

There was a lot of barbed wire fencing around properties on our walk. Were the people of Lee-on-Solent all untrustworthy criminals? Are they still all untrustworthy criminals? Or was the fencing to stop whatever was inside from getting out?

Some of that fencing was to stop anyone from apparently stealing a hovercraft from the Hovercraft Museum. You’d be surprised how many elaborate heists involve the use of hovercrafts and why it’s important that security is top quality around establishments like this.

Actually, that Hovercraft Museum looks cool. We’ll have to head back to Lee-on-Solent one day when it’s open and have a proper look around.

Very interesting to look back at the photos now and see Tux, the brand identity penguin for Linux on a café sign. Looking through Google Maps snapshots it looks like they finally changed this between 2017 and 2018, possibly after someone questioned them as to whether they had officially followed the licencing rules for use of it.

The pictures in this post were taken in early 2011. A bit cold, a bit damp, but you should get a feel for the place from them as very little will have changed.

The Chesapeake Mill is the main antiques shop in Wickham and it’s very easily spotted on account of its timber frame and abundance of all signs on the exterior, particularly vintage dog food signs. The mill itself has an interesting architectural history in that those wooden beams came from the heavy frigate USS Chesapeake which had fought the British in the War of 1812 then been captured, pressed into service for the British, and ultimately broken up.