Does this image look familiar to you? If you’re in the UK you have probably seen it, or images like it, hundreds of times before, particularly last year. And it’s likely that this simple silhouette instantly leads your mind to…
Tag: history
I must have walked down Whitehall a hundred times, past one stone façade after another, and not realised that such an important building lay just beside me. I knew about the old Palace of Whitehall, which was a key royal…
There have been some great documentaries on TV recently, including the wonderful Archaeology: A Secret History, which at first sight I thought might be more along the lines of Time Team, but turned out to be really innovative and fascinating….
I visited the National Maritime Museum yesterday, which has some fantastic examples of ship figureheads and ship badges from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the outset of the age of seafaring, images were used to mark out the identity…
The Supersizers… This is one of my favourite documentary series of all time and I have been quite happy to watch episodes over and over again! Each episode sees restaurant critic Giles Coren and comedian Sue Perkins spend a week…
Robert May was born in Wing in Buckinghamshire around 1588. He worked with his father who served as cook for the Dormer family of Ascott Park and was eventually sent to France to learn the secrets of cookery. He served…
On this day in 1885 a new magazine was founded by Clark W. Bryan in Holyoke, Massachusetts. It was designed for women, with articles about family life, household products, health, recipes and literature. The first edition was titled For the Homes of the…
Methods of curing meat have been developing all over the world for many hundreds of years, in order to preserve food for longer. Many delicious products were created through traditions of smoking, drying, salting, pickling. Efforts to preserve meat accelerated…
Mary Seacole was a nurse who worked on the front line during the Crimean War. She is often overlooked while the more famous Florence Nightingale is celebrated by history. However she arguably did more good, was loved more by the…
Somebody drew my attention towards the term lukewarm yesterday, wondering why we add the word luke to warm to mean tepid. The term derives from Middle English, first used in the 14th century, when the word ‘luke’ was a adjective…