railways
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My father was a Dorset man—Bridport born and bred—and was always proud of his county. And rightly so. It is indeed breathtakingly beautiful and unspoiled. I remember as a child the excitement of changing trains at Maiden Newton, to take the branch line to Bridport. Leaving the rush and noise of the main tracks and…
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Wythenshawe Hall. (2023, December 3). In Wikipedia By Dave Smethurst, CC BY-SA 2.0, image here The Tatton family had a deer park in Wythenshawe, then Cheshire, as far back as 1297. However, the present Hall dates to about 1540 when Robert Tatton was the head of the family. The Tattons were relatively minor Cheshire gentry.…
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A few years back I wrote about Buckden Towers in Cambridgeshire, the old palace of the Bishops of Lincoln. Finally, with the pandemic receding, I was able to visit the site in its small village (once a thriving place in coaching times and earlier but much diminished with the advent of the railways.) Here Richard…
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The first thing to notice about this is that is an embroidery not a tapestry, although the “Bayeux Tapestry” is also an embroidery ie hand-stitched. It was constructed to mark the millennium of the 991 Battle of Maldon, at which Vikings, possibly under Olaf Tryggvason, defeated and killed the Saxon Earldorman Brythnoth. It is displayed…
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On the BBC news channel recently there was an item about Pete Waterman (of Stock Aitkin and Waterman fame) and his beloved model railway, which is spectacular and will feature in an upcoming showing of Timeshift on BBC 4. The episode in question is in Series 12, episode 7 of 10, entitled “The…
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“Walking Britain’s Lost Railways” is back, for a fourth series, starting in Yorkshire. As well as walking the former York to Hull route, Bell explains why the East Coast Main Line, as it now is, passes through York and not Leeds, although the latter is now more than four times larger. This situation, in which…
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Just as the construction Crossrail exposed human burial grounds, so has HS2. Here, in Wendover, Buckinghamshire we have an Iron Age burial that is likely to have followed a murder, possibly a ritual murder, or an execution. An Iron Age man was discovered, face down, his unusual position indicating that he was most likely bound…
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London: 2000 years of history (channel 5)
Admiralty Arch, Aldwych, Alfred the Great, ampitheatres, Anderson shelters, Anglo-Saxons, Black Death, Blitz, Boudicca, bridges, Brunel, Channel Five, Charles Booth, Charles I, cholera, City of London, Commonwealth immigration, coronations, Covent Garden, Crossrail, Dan Jones, Docklands, Edward VII, Elizabeth I, Ethelred II, Euston, expansion, glass, Golden Hind, Great Fire of London, Great War, Green Belt, Guido Fawkes, GWR, Hampstead, Harold II, Henry III, Henry IV, Henry VIII, hills, industrialisation, Jack the Ripper, Joseph Bazalgette, Kent, Lamb Street Teenager, land reclaimed, Londinium, London, Londonburgh, Londonwich, Metroland, Metropolitan Line, MI5 building, Norman stone, Normans, Northern Line, Old London Bridge, Paddington, pottery, railways, rebellions, Richard II, Richard Whittington, Rob Bell, Roman walls, Romans, Royal Ordnance factories, Samuel Pepys, Savoy, Selfridges, sewage system, shipping containers, Shoreditch, Sir Christopher Wren, Sir Francis Drake, Spanish ‘flu, Spitalfields, St. Paul’s, stone, Suffragettes, Suzannah Lipscomb, Thames, Thomas Wolsey, Tower of London, trials, Underground, Viking raids, War Office, Westminster, Westminster Abbey, Westminster Hall, White Tower, Whitechapel, Whitehall Palace, William I, William Wallace, ZeppelinsWho let Dan Jones out? At least, as in his last outing, he is accompanied both by a historian (Suzannah Lipscomb) and an engineer (Rob Bell), narrating and illustrating almost two millennia of the city’s past. In the first episode, we were taken through the walled city of “Londinium” being built and rebuilt after Boudicca’s…
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Who else might be waiting to be discovered? Which great figures from the past, thought to be lost forever, are just lying there impatiently, wondering when we’ll get around to them? How many tombs, destroyed by Henry VIII’s love life, might yet be retrieved…? Oh, we hardly dare wish! Richard III was found, and just…
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