Joel's the real Nowhere man

Joel Somerfield tends his little patch of Nowhere.

Finding yourself in the middle of Nowhere is not easily done these days - unless you are young filmmaker Joel Somerfield, that is.

The 24-year-old can go there whenever he wants, after transplanting a one metre square from the centre of that very place, near Acle, to a friend's back garden in London.

He has also made it the star of his final exhibition for his masters degree at the Royal College of Art by using it as part of a humorous film documentary about his discovery of Nowhere in Norfolk.

"I first came across Nowhere inadvertently online while searching for No.w.here which is a film laboratory in London," said Mr Somerfield.

"I saw there was a Wikipedia [an online encyclopaedia written collaboratively by volunteers] article for a place called Nowhere in Norfolk and having never heard about it previously, and it not being too far from where I grew up, I decided to investigate further."

According to the online entry, Nowhere or No-Where is a marshy area by the River Bure where the villagers of Acle had salt pans to produce salt for food preservation.

"Originally an extra-parochial liberty it was formally incorporated into Acle parish in 1862 and the name no longer appears in maps and gazetteers," it states.

Mr Somerfield, who lived in Hevingham until he went away to university, and still visits regularly, spent a year researching and filming the project.

"Nowhere was lost but I managed to locate it through various means including the Norfolk Record Office, the Norfolk Archaeological Unit and Brian Grint, writer of the book The Acle Chronicle," he said.

"Having located Nowhere I decided to find the middle. After a brief hiatus of not knowing where to go next, I decided the best solution would be to extract a precise one metre square at the very centre of the middle of Nowhere and take it back to London as proof that I had found it and to exhibit in the final show alongside my documentary."

Mr Somerfield, whose convocation took place at the Royal Albert Hall recently, is working as a freelance video director/graphic designer in east London.

The Nowhere film is being submitted to festivals and he is looking for another gallery to show the piece and the installation.

"I have also produced a small booklet with drawings by Sion Ap Tomos, a fellow graduate, and a map of the area based on a 1733 map I found at the Norfolk Record Office," he said.

However, in the short-term the middle of Nowhere is coming back to Norfolk to reside at his parents' house.

Mr Somerfield added: "I don't have a garden at my flat in London and the thought of just discarding it doesn't bear thinking about, with the great length we went to retrieve it in the first place."