The ‘Grim up north’ trope reminds of Northern England’s story of endless decline. In reality, the region produced immense wealth through the likes of textiles, steel, coal and shipbuilding. Influential industrialists’ fortunes rivalled those in [more…]
Everyone knows George Stephenson. The self-taught genius who invented railways. Except he didn’t, really. George was the visionary, the man who saw what steam could do. But the man who actually designed the engines, surveyed [more…]
In a record of one of our previous cases, to which I gave the somewhat lurid title ‘The Sussex Vampire’, my friend described the episode of the so-called Giant Rat of Sumatra as something ‘for [more…]
It was a sunny spring morning, and even amid the noise from busy Baker Street the open window admitted the song of a blackbird. Holmes laid down the News Chronicle to address himself to a [more…]
He couldn’t read his own name until he was 18. Then he built the technology that shrank the planet. George Stephenson was born in a two-room cottage in Wylam, Northumberland, on 9 June 1781. There [more…]
Following Holmes’s instructions, the next afternoon I visited the Fulham Road. At its east end, where it forms the boundary between Kensington and Chelsea, it is lined with the white stuccoed houses of the moderately [more…]
Holmes had often lightly mocked me for my belief in the supernatural. ‘I cannot but suppose,’ he said, ‘that any apparent manifestation of mystical forces will, if subjected to rigorous scrutiny, yield a perfectly rational [more…]
A Sunderland chemist beat Edison by a year, accidentally invented synthetic fabric, lit up the world’s first electrically-powered street, and still got written out of history. It’s time to set the record straight. If you [more…]
The following morning, as we were digesting a formidable breakfast of kidneys and bacon sent up by the admirable Mrs Hudson, Holmes was again amusing himself with his violin. After his usual discordant improvisation he [more…]
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