A postcard book of places called Paradise in England, featuring collection of 28 A6 postcards, glued into a block for easy removal with an essay by Caroline Eden.

Edition of 300.

Photos by Oli Kellett and Design by Clare Noon.

Between 2005 and 2016 I travelled all over the country photographing mostly urban areas call Paradise.

In 2005 Google Maps was still in its infancy, there was no Street View (2009) and no smart phones. The iphone was still 2 years away from being released. It’s hard to remember what it was like to use old paper maps to travel places. I remember printing out pages and pages of directions to use to navigate my way from Northampton to London. Always keeping a trusty A to Z handy (as no one really trusted Google maps then).

Playing around on Google Map seemed strange and incredible back then. It still does now. It’s just different. One thing that has changed was back then you could type in a word and it would direct you to a street with that word in it. In 2025, if you type in a word like ‘Paradise’ into Google maps you’ll get directions to ‘Paradise Spa’ or ‘Paradise kebab’ and not the ‘Paradise’ the street is named after. This was because it was a time before business paid Google to be placed into the map.

Anyway… I Idly typed in all sorts of utopian sounding words to see if they existed, like.. Utopia.. but also Eden, Nirvana… and ‘Paradise’. Paradise sounded interesting as we all understand what Paradise represents. I really had no idea what anywhere actually looked like. But I would type in ‘Paradise’, print off a map and drive there and take a photo, originally with a 5x4” view camera and later with a digital Tilt and Shift camera. 

I only photographed in winter and had 2 children over the 12 ish years. I photographed most of the places in England. When I’ve looked more recently online there appears to be more places than I remember. Not sure the reason for this. Maybe more improved searches as tech had developed. Who knows. 

But this postcard book records some of those destinations I was directed to.