This week is Parliament Week, and 2013’s theme is ‘Women in Democracy’. I thought it would be fun therefore to provide you with a description of what it was like for women to visit a debate in the House of Commons before the 1834 fire. This well-known account comes from the Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth, […]
Old Palace of Westminster
My Hot Date with Mr Turner
I’m currently on a lecture tour for the Royal Oak Foundation (Americans in Alliance with the National Trust), and a few days ago I had the opportunity to visit one of the great Turner oils of the 1834 fire – which now hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. During the writing of The Day […]
More Relics of the Old Palace of Westminster
News of some other mementoes carved from the ruins of the old Palace of Westminster following the 1834 fire has reached me. This time they’ve been created from salvaged stonework, and depict a mysterious man and woman. They’ve been drawn to my attention by landscape architect and historian Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, author of The London Square, (Yale, […]
An Eyewitness on an Omnibus Comes Forward
Breaking news! The Nichols family who edited and printed The Gentleman’s Magazine were also parliamentary printers and their office was at 25 Parliament Street. John Gough Nichols (1806-1873) sent a letter to his father – who was on holiday in Hastings with the rest of the family – the day after the fire, and this has now come to light […]
Relics of the Old Palace of Westminster
One of my hopes on publishing The Day Parliament Burned Down was that new information which I had been unable to track down in my research would come to light when readers and audiences got to hear about the fire. The most obvious one was to find out what ultimately happened to Chance the dog, but I also […]
Publication Day
It’s finally here! More…
