City Hills & Sea started off as a little place online for me to tell stories about Japan, where I lived for most of the first two decades of this century. I also used the site for both my 2020 and 2021 daily photo projects, but I have since moved that elsewhere. Since 2024, I have mostly moved my posting over to substack, mainly so I could showcase more of my poetry. I’ve kept this site up and running for the time being because there’s still quite a lot of cool stuff here.

I mostly post pictures connected to the city, hills or sea – and the places in between – because that’s what fires up my imagination engine. However, I now live almost equidistant from the coast either side of England, so the ‘sea’ portion of the site has kind of dropped off somewhat; instead, there are a lot more posts about doors.

I’m a firm believer in there being stories hidden in plain sight, mysteries lurking in the mundane and life, in general, being a lot more interesting than we typically give it credit for. You just need to go digging a bit.

Hopefully, without too much digging, you can find something interesting to you somewhere around here. If not, that’s cool. The world would be boring if we were all the same.

Chas MacKinnon

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Before I left, I visited the 12 castles with their original keep, a whole bunch of stations with ‘Fuji’ in their name, and posted about every station in Japan with ‘Musashi’ in the name.

As 2022 draws to a close, I’m finishing up what little remains of my Japanese content with a few final posts about some steam trains that live in parks around Japan.

Nowadays, I live almost equidistant from the coast either side of England, so the ‘sea’ portion of the site has kind of dropped off somewhat; instead, there are a lot more posts about doors.

And yes, this whole thing is very much a vanity project.

It’s just not a “hey you, look at me” kind of a deal. It’s a “hey me, look at you!” kind of a deal. I like making beautiful things and I like sharing them, but ultimately, I’m my target audience.

Plans for 2021

As you may have gathered from the name of the blog, I’m all about the shapes of cityscapes, the thrill of being up in the hills and the multiple personalities of the ocean waves.

While I originally intended to be posting about mountains a lot more than I have, bad weather & somebody else’s poor diet put the kibosh on that – typhoons Faxai & Hagibis back in late 2019 wrecked a lot of the trails close to me and then the pandemic happened along making it inadvisable to be travelling too far afield, so I didn’t get to go into the hills as much as I used to.

That’ll probably change as 2021 goes on, all being well, although it will be a whole new set of trails to get used to.

Since I’ve relocated from a place where one train station sees more people going through its premises in a single day than actually live in the country I now find myself in, the things I’m used to posting about in the city might feature less – but I’m sure I’ll find some architectural treats while I’m out and about.

I’m currently not far from the sea, so that’ll be making plenty of appearances in the coming months. After August, I’ll be moving again, to destinations unknown. Fingers crossed it’ll be close enough to the coast to allow for regular visits. I do like the stories the waves try and tell us, particularly when it’s stormy.

There’s a whole heap of photo galleries from my time in Japan here – there will be other new galleries being added throughout 2021, so keep an eye out.

Daily Photo Challenge

I completed my 2020 photo-a-day challenge posting here every day but I decided I was only going to continue that in 2021 and beyond at 365project.org. I’m only going to post my absolute favourites here.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE, January 2021: Electric Pandemic-boogaloo, part le deux. Still here, in the land of the rising ~~COVID cases~~ sun. I’m on track for a May departure but it doesn’t seem like the rest of the universe is currently following the same rules as me, so eh. Just spending a lot of mental energy on being fine with going with the flow, at the mo. ‘We’ll see what happens’ is all I ever seem to say these days, but it’s all we can really do.

(Well, we can also wash our hands, wear masks & stay the heck away from one another.)

Working on that, you should too. Stay safe & be well in the meantime.

UPDATE, May 2020: Well, the pandemic changed things substantially, and I will be in Japan for a bit longer, probably until December 2020, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned recently it’s not to take anything for granted.