Moving Centres

This project set out to find what lies at the actual geographical centre, the point from where the landscape of the United Kingdom radiates from. Where is it? What does it look like? On learning that there are more than one omphalos claimed for England alone the project is now on going to find all omphalos in the United Kingdom, Great Britain and the countries contained within.

Do these centres on the landscape shed any light through history and geography to clarify the rhetoric in today’s continuously changing cultural, economic, geographical and political debates of the standing of the United Kingdom within Brexit, Europe and the rest of the World?

The centre of a land mass holds no romantic or ethereal connotations as every cartographer and surveyor knows there is no such absolute. The location of for example Great Britain's true centre may never be entirely clear because of debates over what method should be used to calculate and the fact that islands shape changes with tides and erosion. The basic problem is one of determining the centre of an irregular three-dimensional object on the surface of a sphere. Not only that, but the irregular landscape of the United Kingdom is surrounded by water which keeps moving about and is responsible for changing the shape of this geographical object on a daily basis.