Time to bring this puppy (of a series of blog posts) home! Duriong the last couple of weeks I spent in London researching, I also managed to tick something which had been on my bucket list since my first UK trip in 2007: the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. Portsmouth is a little over 2 hours from London by train, which somehow seemed to always mean just a little too much advance planning for me to actually make this happen. Not this time!

The Dockyard is part of an active Royal Navy base, HMNB Portsmouth, which is home port for two-thirds of the British fleet. The first naval dockyard on this site was begun in 1194 – that's during the reign of Richard Lionheart – so this area has been at the heart of British seapower for a very long time. Of course, all of the built heritage that remains is far more recent than that, 18th-19th century or so, precisely because it was a working dockyard for so long.

After Glasgow, York. This was a place we had both previously visited and loved, but not for well over a decade and not together. So we were curious to see if we would enjoy it as much now. Folly? Yes, but that's not important right now.

The first instalment of some much-belated travel photo blogging from our UK trip in May-June 2024. Above, the Sérilly Cabinet, a private room built for the lady of a Parisian town house around 1778, and now relocated in its entirety to the V&A.