It’s William Cobbett’s 250th birthday today. In honour of the occasion here are the great radical’s views on sitting in the very uncomfortable House of Commons chamber in the years leading up to the calamitous fire of 1834: Why are we squeezed into so small a space that it is absolutely impossible that there should […]
The 1834 Fire
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 […]
On Watling Street
Just before Christmas I found myself attending a week-long course in the City of London and, as chance would have it, the training centre was on the corner of Queen Street and Watling Street EC4. Watling Street was the Roman road which ran from Dover to Wroxeter and beyond. This London fragment of it still bears its ancient name, […]
A Tale of Two Birthdays
It’s not just Dickens’ 200th birthday, this is Pugin’s year too. One of the most pleasing aspects of the bicentenary celebrations of Charles Dickens’ birth is the way in which his early life before he became a novelist has been rediscovered. It turns out that in the early 1830s he was a Parliamentary reporter and […]
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 […]
