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, […]
Writing and Researching
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 […]
How I Got to Here
So, with just a week to go until publication of The Day Parliament Burned Down, the story behind the story… When I began work at the Parliamentary Archives in 1999, I often found myself having to tell readers in our public searchroom that nearly all of the historic Commons’ records were lost in the fire of […]
Health & Safety for Historical Researchers
Historical research doesn’t seem, on the face of it, to be a risky activity. Compared with mining, deep-sea pearl fishing, mountain rescue or identifying mysterious biological agents it isn’t – obviously. But there are physical risks, and here are just some of them. 1. Lifting Heavy Boxes and Volumes Manual handling training is compulsory for archivists and librarians who need […]
A Quick Rinse – or – The Story of News Laundering
In The Day Parliament Burned Down, I have attempted to provide as detailed an account of the disaster as possible, using a wide range of official reports, public records, eyewitness correspondence, contemporary diaries, periodicals and newspapers. On their own, each would provide a skewed and confusing picture of what happened, but when set side-by-side, I hope […]
The Timetravelling Beer Drinker
The cost of a pint of beer in 1834 was a ha’penny. That’s right, a ha’penny. Half a penny. In today’s money the cost is even more surprising: a pint cost the equivalent of just 16p. Why is that? Well, there are all sorts of factors to be taken into account apart simply from inflation […]
