Armstrong’s Cragside – almost parallel lives
William Armstrong is my favourite eminent Victorian inventor, maybe because he was a Geordie like myself, born in Newcastle in 1810. His house at Cragside – the house where modern […]
Category Archives: England
Fleeting time
I spent some of the best Friday evenings of my life walking home from London Bridge where I worked back to my flat in Pimlico in the 1980s. The route […]
Plague pits and theatrical ghosts in the West End
Most of the familiar but somewhat opaque names for different parts of London have real significance if you scratch the surface a bit. The Strand, for instance, is a name […]
Did Queen Boadicea catch the Hogwarts Express?
Some English monarchs have had a rotten deal in terms of their interment. Not all of them ended up in Westminster Abbey. The remains of Richard III were recently found […]
Tower of Lies
As I’m plodding through ‘Wolf Hall’ at the moment I thought I’d have a wander round the Tower of London again to absorb some Tudor atmosphere. It’s not difficult to […]
I Want to Marry a Lighthouse Keeper
I’ve long fantasised about living in St Mary’s Lighthouse off the Northumberland coast, like Montaigne in his tower, surrounded by books and in splendid isolation. Incidentally, I hated the change […]
Wooden Dollies and pirates in North Shields
North Shields, where I as a true salt-of-the-earth Geordie and proud of it come from, was founded back in 1225 by some Abbott, as is usual with most of the […]
Bridges and Bigots in London
I went for a meal at a Bengali restaurant on Butler’s Wharf alongside the Thames on Saturday night, for a friend’s wedding. His mum is Turkish, dad Bengali and wife […]
Blizzards of blood at Towton
I’ve been obsessed with the Battle of Towton for as long as I can remember. On Palm Sunday 1461, outside the Yorkshire village of that name, Lancastrian and Yorkist forces […]
No sanctuary in Durham Cathedral
“Dear Sir – I came to visit our (not just your) beautiful cathedral last week. As I was taking a couple of photos without flash a bossy little woman in […]
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