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Pageant of Transport #50places2026

The Easter weekend saw a range of cars drop into Weston-super-Mare for the annual Pageant of Transport.

I did wonder if I should have shown off the Funky Cat. They did have some quite new cars there, and it did appear that you only needed to pay for a ticket and then you could display your car. I am guessing that if I was in an Ora Funky Car club of some kind, we could have planned to showcase a range of Funky Cats. One reason I was hesitant, well there was a few reasons, but one key reason was that the Funky Cat is an electric vehicle and virtually all the other cars at the Pageant had internal combustion engines. There is still some weird unfounded negativity towards electric cars, which I don’t quite understand. Another reason was that I would have had to park up all day at the Pageant and wasn’t sure I wanted to do that on my own.

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Then and Now Take Two Once More – Sand Bay Bunker

This is a regular series of blogs about photographs of the same place taken years apart. I have started to notice is that I have been doing Then and Now photographs unintentionally over the years and have been taking photographs of the same thing or place from the same view or perspective years apart. Now this has come to my attention I have started to intentionally take photographs of the same place.

On the beach at Sand Bay is an old second world war pillbox. It looks like it has sunk into the sand, I am not sure if it has just sunk, or of it had slipped down the beach over the years.

I have taken many photographs of the bunker. This was taken in April 2026 using an iPhone 17 Max Pro.

Here are the photographs from over the years taken of the same view. This was taken in September 2024 using an iPhone 13.

This is the bunker in October 2023, which I took with an iPhone 13.

This was taken in April 2021 with an iPhone 8.

Here is the (same) view in June 2020 taken with an iPhone 8.

This was the view in April 2017 taken with an iPhone 6S Plus.

There appears to be an extra telegraph pole in the 2020 photo, that was installed in the intervening  three years.

I do think it interesting that there are quite a few pillboxes and beach defences at Sand Bay. You wouldn’t have thought that this coastline was under threat of German invasion back in the 1940s. It’s quite a way from the continent and you would need to go around both Devon and Cornwall (going past Plymouth, a major Royal Navy port), as well as South Wales before hitting the beaches at Weston and Sandy Bay. However doing some research about the pillboxes, I came to realise that the British in 1940 did believe that invasion may come from the South West. The Taunton Stop Line was a defensive line in south west England. It was designed “to stop an enemy’s advance from the west and in particular a rapid advance supported by tanks which may have broken through the forward defences.