Join me for a video tour of Parliament Square courtesy of UKToursOnline. We’ll look into Westminster Hall, catch up with the statues in the Square, discover some of the stories of Parliament and even pay a short visit to the Abbey.
Continue reading “Video: a tour of Parliament Square”Video: Square Stories – favourite squares in London, Oxford and Bath
Another video chat with the gang from UKToursOnline. This time we get competitive looking at “squares” – there are the London garden squares including Russell Square and the gardens of Notting Hill, and the elegant and exclusive St James’s; Georgian splendour of Queen’s Square in Bath and Oxford’s wonderful Radcliffe Square. We’ll also take you on a trip around Trafalgar and Parliament Squares.
Continue reading “Video: Square Stories – favourite squares in London, Oxford and Bath”Video: Favourite Museums and Galleries
Another free talk from me and my four friends at UKToursOnline. Here we look forward to the reopening of the UK’s galleries and museums by picking some of our favourites, and sharing our favourite objects in the British Museum and the V+A.
Continue reading “Video: Favourite Museums and Galleries”FREE VIRTUAL TOUR: London’s WW1 Memorials
A virtual tour from www.uktoursonline.com where I look at some of the capital’s most significant and most poignant war memorials from the First World War, including the Cenotaph, the memorials to the Machine Gun Corps and the Fusiliers, the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner and the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey.
Continue reading “FREE VIRTUAL TOUR: London’s WW1 Memorials”Lindow Man – the body in the bog
In the British Museum is a remarkable Iron Age corpse, a wonderfully preserved ‘bog body’ from the 1st century CE discovered in a place called Lindow Moss near Wilmslow in Chesire in 1984.
Lindow Moss is a peat bog and while workmen were harvesting this peat they discovered a leg. The previous year the head of a woman (dated to the 2nd or 3rd century CE) had been found, so the archeologists were called in.
Continue reading “Lindow Man – the body in the bog”The Royal Gold Cup
Walk into Room 40 in the British Museum via the staircase in the entrance lobby and the first thing that hits you is this wonderful piece of medieval metalwork – The Royal Gold Cup, created around 1380 in France by John, Duc de Berry for his brother Charles V (or, some sources say, for his nephew Charles VI).
It’s a lidded cup that weighs just under 2kg (so just over 4lb) is around 23cm (9 inches) tall and is made from gold with ‘basse-taille’ (low relief) enamelling that tells the story of the martyrdom of St Agnes (Charles V birthday was St Agnes’ Day – 21 January).
[Here’s me doing an online talk about the Cup and explaining more about the story of St Agnes]
Continue reading “The Royal Gold Cup”A Medieval Citole in the British Museum
Up in Room 40 of the British Museum you will find one of the most stunning bits of medieval carving to survive – a citole (an early type of guitar) that dates from around 1300.
It’s carved from box (a slow-growing shrub that produces dense, hard wood). When it was nearly 300 years old, someone decided that citoles were so last year and converted it into a violin, but the neck and main structure were retained (the finger board and top of the sound box are ‘new’).
Continue reading “A Medieval Citole in the British Museum”The Cabinet Room at the Churchill War Rooms
My Instagram Live talk from today about the Cabinet Room in the Central War Rooms and how it was used in WW2.
“This is the room from which I shall direct the war” said Winston Churchill in May 1940. Click on ‘play’ to hear about the set up, the atmosphere, the tense meetings and arguments that took place beneath the streets of Westminster, and to see some of the incredible artefacts that have been preserved in the space.
Continue reading “The Cabinet Room at the Churchill War Rooms”Churchill War Rooms
With us all locked down it’s impossible to do tours at present, so I’ll be experimenting with some online tours. This is the first effort (at the risk of underselling it, I’m hoping they’ll improve with practice) – an introduction to the Churchill War Rooms.
I’ll do a couple more on the Cabinet Room and the Map Room in the next couple of weeks, but this one attempts to set the context for their creation and introduce a couple of characters that you may not have heard of.
Continue reading “Churchill War Rooms”Lewis Chessmen
One of the most famous of the early medieval exhibits from the museum is the Lewis chessmen. 93 separate pieces, in a variety of sizes, were discovered in 1831 on the Isle of Lewis, hidden, presumably, by someone who was trading the sets. These 93 are now split between the British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
They’re exquisitely carved, with some wonderful details and are made mainly of walrus ivory – from the tusks of the walrus – with a few that are carved whales’ teeth.
[Here’s an online talk I did recently about the chess pieces\
