Places, people or events associated with Queen Victoria, or the Victorian period in Britain,
“ ‘Not here,” said Nancy hurriedly, “I am afraid to speak to you here. Come away – out of the public road – down the steps yonder!’ The steps to which the girl had pointed were those which, on the Surrey bank, and on the same side of the bridge as Saint Saviour’s Church, form […]
Herb Garret sounds like it should be a band leader (perhaps of a similar vintage to the chap pictured below). In fact, the Herb Garret acts as a kind of anteroom to the Old Operating Theatre, perched in the roof of the baroque St Thomas’ church in London’s Southwark. The Operating Theatre is probably the
This is a Victorian operating theatre, where proceedings were watched by an audience of gawping students and operations were conducted without anaesthetic or antiseptic. I mean, you really can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like, can you? The Old Operating Theatre is reputedly Britain’s – some say Europe’s – oldest operating theatre.
The old operating theatre Read More »
Head west out of London Bridge Station. If you’re very careful, you will discover London’s third Anglican cathedral, Southwark; it’s easily missed. Hemmed in between the colourful and vibrant Borough Market and the occasionally vulgar Montagu Close, and often hidden by dark Victorian railway arches over which trains ceaselessly rattle and clunk in and out
London’s forgotten cathedral Read More »
The Tower of London has been sitting on the north bank of the Thames, watching the tides of a great city ebb and flow, for around a thousand years. The city has grown up around it and it is part of it; it is impossible to imagine London without the Tower. Think of all that
Visit the Tower of London Read More »
You’ll find the small village of Dent, sometimes known locally as Dent Town, on the western edge of the Yorkshire Dales. This was once part of Yorkshire’s West Riding but is now inside the county of Cumbria. The narrow roads through achingly beautiful Dentdale seem never-ending; it’s almost a relief to arrive amongst Dent’s old
The Vampire of Dent (and other stories) Read More »
I’m always a little wary of claims to be “the oldest” this or that. There are probably at least a dozen pubs that are the oldest in Britain and, clearly, only one of them is. But the good folk at St Andrews, Greensted, Essex, claim theirs is the oldest wooden church in the world, as
Greensted Log Church Read More »
Every now and again, you come across a reference to ‘The London Stone’. Not ‘a London stone’; The London Stone. Use of the definite article tells you right away that this is Something Quite Important. Never heard of it? Tut-tut. To be honest, I worked in and around London for years and was completely unaware
Britain, the global superpower On 22 June 1897, Queen Victoria returned from her Diamond Jubilee parade in London having had a wonderful day. Loyal crowds lined the streets to see their monarch, a tiny plump old lady clad in black, pass from Buckingham Palace, through Trafalgar Square, The Strand, Fleet Street and up Ludgate Hill to
The Empire on which the sun never set Read More »
The squalor of industrial society Britain experienced the massive socio-economic upheaval that comes with industrialisation before anywhere else in the world. A wealthier Britain was emerging, with expanding middle and urban working classes: it was the birth of the consumer society; but there was also widespread and, in places, abject, poverty. It is in fact
And its legacies are all around us At 6am on 20 June 1837 in Kensington Palace, eighteen-year-old Princess Alexandrina Victoria was woken by her mother, Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, to be told that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chamberlain wished to see her. Pulling on a dressing-gown, the young princess saw the two
Wasn’t Victorian Britain great? Read More »
How we got to exercise our franchise People can be hopelessly optimistic, but are perhaps increasingly fairly cynical, about Parliament and politicians. However, things could be a lot worse – and of course there’s nothing new about incompetent, or even dodgy, politicians. In 18th and early 19th century Britain, Parliament was particularly corrupt and unrepresentative.
How Britain got the vote Read More »
I wonder how many pints of ale have been supped here? Let me see: if just twenty people drank a modest 4 pints every night, that would be, er, 29,200 pints a year – 2,920,000 for every century. But the revenue generated by that amount of beer would not be enough to make the place
The George Inn at Borough Read More »
We travelled to Bateman’s, Rudyard Kipling’s Sussex home for 34 years, through the impossibly pretty village of Burwash, all whitewash and weatherboard. You reach the house down what Kipling described as “an enlarged rabbit-hole of a lane” to arrive in what is now a car park. I wondered how it had all looked when the
