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…]
Monday Good morning, my happy readers. It is a momentous day in the Street today. It’s the last day of Legohead’s premiership and the first day of Mascara Man, my seventh PM and probably not [more…]
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…]
For generations, the phrase “grim up north” has lingered in the national imagination — conjuring images of soot-stained skylines, struggling towns, and industries long past their prime. It is a shorthand that flattens the region [more…]
Known for muck and brass, the grim north of England was formerly a hotbed of the Industrial Revolution, rich in sweat, resources, enterprise and plutocrats. Nowadays synonymous with grim decline, my wife and I have [more…]
Before George Stephenson’s name ended up on everything, a colliery manager from Newburn settled the one argument that decided whether railways would ever work. He won it with a hand-cranked cart, two iron engines, and [more…]
Born in the same village as George Stephenson, 5 years earlier. The man who saved the Stockton and Darlington when the engines kept breaking down. The man who built Russia’s first locomotive… and then vanished [more…]
Monday Good morning, my happy readers. The heat wave is over and it is back to normal temperatures here in London, and it is actually forecast to rain this evening. Legohead is back in town [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…]
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