20th Century
A History of Pop Music – Albums 1968
Featured Album: Dianna Ross & The Supremes – Greatest Hits This is a series of articles looking at albums from 1960 to whatever year we end up in. I will select a featured album for [more…]
History
20th Century
Walking in Memphis
I guess you know this is a song. The Cher version is crap but Marc Cohn’s one in the early 90s was great Anyone who has heard of, let alone been, to Memphis will associate [more…]
21st Century
Postcard from Mumbai
After a long, hot site visit in Panoli, a small industrial town in Gujarat, the traffic on the main Ahmedabad to Mumbai highway was even more hideous than usual. It was the last day of [more…]
18th Century
Nicholas Wood: The man who wrote the book on railways
He taught Robert Stephenson his trade, judged the Rainhill Trials, and wrote the first proper book on railways, the one that engineers across the world actually used. Not all of us can be gallivanting around [more…]
20th Century
The Westland Whirlwind
The Whirlwind was a twin-engine, heavy fighter developed by Westland Aircraft, not to be confused by the Westland Whirlwind helicopter of many years later. It was developed in the 1930s as a heavy fighter and [more…]
19th Century
Beamish: the Museum that said yes to everything
You may be surprised to learn that a working time machine has already been invented in County Durham. It exists because one man refused to let the region throw its own history into the skip. [more…]
Business
Somewhere to Hang Your Towel
The phrase “grim up north” lingers in the national imagination and conjures images of soot-stained skylines, struggling towns, and industries long past their prime. Yet this caricature of tired decline obscures another, less frequently told [more…]
20th Century
A History of Pop Music – Albums 1967
Featured Album: The Monkees This is a series of articles looking at albums from 1960 to whatever year we end up in. I will select a featured album for each year and the link for [more…]
18th Century
Edward Pease: the Grandfather of the railways
George Stephenson gets the statues. But a plain-dressing Quaker wool merchant from Darlington put up the money, drove the Act through Parliament, and hired Stephenson in the first place. He helped found the world’s first [more…]