Eros strikes again in London
Piccadilly Circus is at the throbbing heart of London and for years visitors have crowded under the statue of Eros, which was originally designed as an angel of mercy but […]
Category Archives: England
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 […]
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 […]
theromantictraveller 