At the time of writing, I’m 40 years of age and live in Derbyshire after a long stint in the West Midlands and Surrey for a couple of decades before returning to my birth town. I returned home to undertake teacher training (PGCE) and enjoyed a few years in education. I’ve had a broad career from sales, marketing and technical roles – mainly working in ICT. I have a professional and personal interest in technology and information systems but I do have a wide range of hobbies and interests. I’ve always had an insatiable desire for learning and exploring the world around us.
By all accounts I am English but my ethnicity is a mix of English, Irish and Guyanese (South America).
Chesterfield
I live in my birth town of Chesterfield in Derbyshire – a town famous for the crooked spire on its parish church. As the largest church in the diocese, it’s truly spectacular inside and forms a key part of residents’ identity (the football is nicknamed the Spireites).
Chesterfield is often described as the gateway to the Peak District, a beautiful national park with some fantastic places to visit for hiking and cycling, stone circles, craft workshops and small villages (with great charity shops). There’s also plenty of public art to be found around Chesterfield including a sculpture by Barbara Hepworth.
Chesterfield is one of the few towns with a busy open air market ever since being granted a market charter in 1204. Like most town centres, there are the many familiar high street chains but smaller independent shops can be found in addition to themed market days such as the 1940s or Artisan markets.
I was surprised to see that Chesterfield is one of the worst areas in the UK for social mobility and many ex-mining towns throughout the Midlands still show deprivation. However, Chesterfield was voted the happiest place to live in the East Midlands and one of the happiest places in the UK (according to a Rightmove survey, 2021).
About This Site
This blog (part of jameshatton.co.uk) is a place where I maintain a journal online. Some of the projects I engage with are documented here. You can navigate through the various sections via the menus or use the tag cloud on the front page to find items of interest.
I have maintained a personal website since 1997 – a few years after we got a family desktop PC that we kept in the dining room. The site has had several domains and ‘brand names’ – the very first (as shown) was called Mindenhancing and I would write HTML and upload it via FTP. The site went through several ‘brand names’ such as cheesypeas, later it became worldofjames.co.uk and I finally settled on this domain, jameshatton.co.uk, around 2005. Again it’s had various guises and backends since such as Joomla and now the site uses the wordpress CMS.
Incidentally, the main banner image on the website is a photo I took of the Devil’s Punch Bowl in Surrey.
The site is forever a work-in-progress so I welcome any feedback on content or presentation either by dropping a comment on a post or using the contact me form.