We tend to see modern towns and villages as permanent things. They may change, but it’s hard to imagine the landscape without them and easy to take it for granted that they will last forever. Yet the world is littered…
The church that makes a cockney
Not to be confused with the sound that a cockney makes… There has been a church on the site of St Mary le Bow, on London’s Cheapside, since Saxon times. And this is where Cockneys come from. Or, rather, a…
National Wallace Monument
Beyond Scotland, ex-pat Scots and a few informed corners of Britain as a whole, not many people would have heard of William Wallace before the 1995 film, Braveheart. The American, Mel Gibson, directed and starred in the movie, playing the…
Wallace memorial, Smithfield
London’s Smithfield seemed a little ragged round the edges to me. Home to the capital’s huge meat and poultry market, some of the buildings have seen better days and the well-intentioned Victorian garden at West Smithfield appeared a little sad;…
Formidable Edinburgh Castle
You can’t imagine Edinburgh without Edinburgh Castle – it is one of the City’s landmarks, dominating the skyline, perched on a seemingly impregnable, daunting, volcanic rock at the end of The Royal Mile. On a bright day, perhaps at festival…
From a house in the clouds to a fort
We are in the east of England, on the Suffolk coast. The town of Aldeburgh was once a thriving Tudor port; that’s where we’ll find the fort. And Thorpeness, well – Thorpeness was purpose-built in the 20th century – and…
Two thousand years at Brougham Castle
I’m gazing up through the empty keep, where long-dead feet once paced across floors that have themselves long-since vanished, rotted away. Here’s Brougham Castle, scenically sitting on the south bank of the River Eamont a couple of miles outside Penrith,…
London’s Church of the Templars
Almost hidden, tucked away from the jarring bustle of London just off the Strand, you may stumble upon a church that was built by the Knights Templar. Like all Templar churches, it is round – modelled on the Church of…
The end of the line for Eleanor
Network Rail, the people that own and operate Britain’s rail infrastructure (after someone sold it by mistake) say that 37 million people pass through London’s Charing Cross Station every year. That’s equivalent to the population of Uganda. It’s probably not…
St Patrick’s Chapel, Heysham
This is one of our friend Jeni’s favourite places and she said we should go; so of course we did. Heysham (I’m told it is pronounced ‘hee-shum’, not ‘hay-sham’) sits on Lancashire’s coast at the southern end of Morecambe Bay. …