The first recorded date of Christmas in England was in the year 597 when Augustine baptised 10,000 Saxons in Kent on ...

The Grand Tour was the utlimate Georgian / Victorian gap year experience. Expensive and glamourous, this was a rite of ...

There have always been fashion ‘tribes’, from fops and beaux, bucks and dandies to Goths and punks, but the ‘macaronis’ of the 1760s and 1770s exceeded them all in their dedication to excess and ...

From the remains of fortified towers to elegant churches and early Christian crosses, we have scoured the land to bring you the finest Anglo-Saxon sites in Britain. Most of these remains are in ...

Isabella Bird: adventurer, explorer, writer, photographer, naturalist. Despite ill health and defying Victorian conventions ...

The Highland Clearances remain a controversial period in Scotland’s history and are still talked of with great bitterness, particularly by those families who were dispossessed of their land and even, ...

“There were opium dens where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.” Oscar Wilde in his novel, ‘The Picture of ...

The chimney sweep, or climbing boys as they were often called, was a harsh profession to be in and most likely one that would severely cut your life short. Those employed were often orphans or from ...

“There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as a good tavern or inn.” So wrote Samuel Johnson and for many, this remains true today. Think of an ...

Britain’s ports and harbours were once menaced by the dreaded press-gangs. Impressment, to give it its proper name, was the scourge of maritime communities across the British Isles and Britain’s North ...

Cotton, a valuable raw material and a mainstay of the textile industry, has been around for centuries and remains one of the most crucial resources to this day. Cotton has been used by humans as far ...

Richard I the Lionheart (r. 1189-1199) is perhaps best known for his exploits in the Third Crusade. His war against Saladin is one of the classic stories of medieval chivalry and crusading. But ...