A blog on London history – and other stuff
Along the Albert Embankment wall of St Thomas’ Hospital, directly over the Thames to the Houses of Parliament is an incredible piece of public guerrilla art.
Hand painted on the wall are thousands upon thousands of red and pink hearts, each one representing a victim of the Covid pandemic. Some have the names of individuals written in, there are other hearts drawn by family members, messages have been appended.
Continue reading “National Covid Memorial Wall”
Another free online talk for you. Me and the rest of the gang at UKToursOnline did one of our ‘chats’ yesterday evening where we talked ghosts, witches, the supernatural and other bits of London lore and legends.
You can see me discussing the Battersea Poltergeist, Tim Barron talks about haunted theatres, Rachel Pearson looks at witches, Emma Matthews visits haunted pubs and Leo Heaton introduces us to the Black Dog of Newgate.
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Continue reading “Ghost stories! Spooky London tales for Hallowe’en”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”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”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”
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”
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”
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”
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”
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”