Leaving York, I took the train north to Newcastle, where I took another train heading west to Hexham, a small town in Northumberland. As nice as Hexham was, I’m sorry to say that I wasn’t there during business hours and so didn’t see much of it. Which is a shame, because there’s a fine 12th […]
While in York Castle Museum, I was surprised to come across Black-Out, a ‘skilful card game — full of interest’. It’s one of the British war games I mentioned in a previous post. At that time I only had a low-res photo from the BBC website to go on, so I was glad of the
My second (and last) day in York. Luckily, since I’d seen the two major attractions (for me) on my first day there, I was free to wander around with only a vague plan in mind. And there was a lot to see. One of the great things about York, I found, was the way in
Did you know that 87% of the UK’s population, and 99% of its land area, lies outside Greater London? Well you’d barely know it from reading this blog. After finishing my research in that fair city (and after dispensing with the foolish notion of detouring to Cambridge or Aberystwyth to do yet more research), it
Is it possible to love a city? Surely. Is it premature to declare such a love after only having lived in that city for only two months? I don’t think so: after all, you can fall in love with a person practically on first sight. Love doesn’t depend upon your knowing its object deeply, only
I’ve nearly finished with my long series of London posts, but I’ve got a couple more before I recount my travels in the provinces. This one is about Bloomsbury, my home for two months in the (northern) summer of 2007; I really took to it. I’ve written about some of Bloomsbury’s sights before (Charles Fort’s
Right. My very last day off in London, the first Sunday in September. No longer could I put off the choice between the Tower of London (including Tower Bridge) and Greenwich (the National Maritime Museum, above, and the Royal Greenwich Observatory). As an ex-astrophysics type, I really couldn’t not go and see the observatory at
At the end of August, I spent a day and a half at the offices of the Air League, which very graciously had allowed me access to their archives. Their address on Tothill Street is not far from Buckingham Palace, which I hadn’t yet seen. And I hadn’t done Whitehall properly yet. So it was
After Newark and Cranwell, I returned to London, for the last couple of weeks of my stay there. No longer did the summer stretch out before me. This meant that I had to start making hard choices about how to spend my time, both in terms of my research and my sight-seeing. In my gawking
Cranwell is a RAF base in Lincolnshire (not far from Newark or Grantham, or Lincoln for that matter). It was first established as a RNAS training station in 1915, and sortied the odd anti-zepp patrol in the next few years. In the 1930s, Frank Whittle did much of his work on jet engines here; indeed,
