By the time you read this, February fill dyke will be over for another year and March will (perhaps) have come in like a lion. Sherds is always glad when winter is over, but in the depths of the cold, dark, and grey weeks of January and February there is one sure way to find warmth and consolation – by reaching for a book called Next to Nature, an anthology of the ‘Word from Wormingford’ diary columns that Ronald Blythe wrote for many years for the Church Times.
Recent discharges of raw sewage into the UK’s rivers and streams are a reminder of the sanitary crisis of the 1840s to 1860s, when water pollution was identified as the major cause of rising mortality rates from ‘fever’. The response – albeit slow – involved a huge investment in waterworks that transformed public health. As revealed in a book by James Douet on water and sewage architecture, it also resulted in distinctive new building types, as Chris Catling reports.
The invention in 1900 by Eastman Kodak of the Brownie camera, selling for the equivalent in today’s money of £28, brought the watercolour age to an end. This too had begun, in the mid-18th century, with technical innovations, such as…
REVIEW BY SOPHIE AMBLER Battlefield commemoration has hitherto been the territory of historians of the modern age, leaning too heavily on the First World War and US Civil War, and linking battlefield memorialisation to the rise of nationalism. Atherton instead…
Lee P Ruddin explores the life and work of an artist whose beautiful paintings of Egyptian life are now sadly overlooked.
In CA 419, Chris Catling reported on the history and development of kilns and oast houses used for drying the hops that help to preserve and give flavour to beer. This month, he reports on the buildings associated with the production of the malted grain used primarily in making beer and whisky, but also as an ingredient in a range of foods, from bagels to biscuits, and from vinegar to Ovaltine.
Bury St Edmunds’ neoclassical Market Cross recently celebrated its 250th anniversary – but the structure has a much longer tale to tell. Former County Archaeologist Adrian Tindall explores the Suffolk landmark’s colourful past, including its role as a playhouse and its place in the story of the National Anthem.
Dictionary publishers like to end the year by announcing the new words that that they have added to the lexicon based on the frequency with which they have appeared in print during the preceding 12 months. Not all of these words are new, and this year’s crop consists mainly of familiar words that have undergone shifts in meaning.
REVIEW BY RP To those who regularly stroll the streets of London, the churches of Nicholas Hawksmoor might be a familiar sight, even if the architect’s name is not. Perhaps overshadowed by contemporaries such as Sir Christopher Wren and Sir…
For this month’s ‘Odd Socs’, we cross the Atlantic to look at the work of Partners for Sacred Places (PSP), an organisation dedicated to finding creative ways to maintain America’s historic places of worship as civic spaces. These buildings face…
A major project at the Tower of London has revealed hundreds of graffiti written by prisoners, as well as other historical visitors to the site, thanks to cutting-edge technology. The initiative, conducted by Dr Jamie Ingram as part of his…
Visitors to Nothe Fort in Weymouth will be able to share the olfactory experiences of the soldiers who once manned the Victorian coastal defences, during a special event featuring historically inspired smells in early March. Interactive demonstrations of evocative odours…
Military History Matters has curated a list of 2024’s best military history titles: the nominees for this year’s MHM Book Awards. Our selection includes some of the best-researched, most-insightful, and most-readable titles reviewed and featured in the magazine over the…
The websites of upmarket estate agents will typically feature a dozen or more properties for sale in Sussex or Kent converted from 19th-century oast houses. These desirable residences once served a humbler purpose, drying the resinous hop flowers that are an essential ingredient in the nation’s beer. Patrick Grattan recorded the last of these buildings in use for that purpose in the 1960s, and his knowledge has fermented into a detailed history of the oast, as Chris Catling now reports.
In 1350, the Black Death had begun to ravage Scotland after spreading north from London. Over the next three centuries, the plague would return to Scotland multiple times, with the last major outbreak occurring in 1644-1649, thought to have been…
Excavations at Achnacon, an abandoned township in the Scottish Highlands, have uncovered evidence relating to the Glencoe Massacre of 1692. This infamous episode targeted the MacDonald clan on the grounds that they had failed to pledge allegiance to the new…
Glassmaking was introduced to Smethwick by Thomas Shutt, who started making crown window-glass on a site alongside the Birmingham Canal in 1814. When he died in 1822, his company was sold to Robert Lucas Chance, the business later changing its…
REVIEW BY CATHIE BRYAN Tourism in Egypt currently supports a profitable industry that was consolidated in the 19th century, when package tours were first introduced. The author’s objective is to trace the history of tourism from pharaonic times, arguing that…
The sounds that one associates with places of worship are those of an angelic choir or the intricate patterns of a Bach fugue. Some churches have, however, been enjoying success with the rather more unexpected pairing of doom metal bands and church organs.
Many studies have been carried out into the impact of smoking on the human body, and one need only to glance at a pack of cigarettes to be confronted with imagery detailing some of the consequences in gory detail. In…
Previously undiscovered markings identified as apotropaic symbols (protective carvings sometimes referred to as ‘witch marks’), as well as a rare ‘curse’ inscription, have been revealed during volunteer research at English Heritage’s Gainsborough Old Hall in Lincolnshire. The hall was originally…
REVIEW BY SOPHIA CHAPPLE In Where Men No More May Reap or Sow, Richard Oram analyses five centuries of Scottish environmental history across 13 chapters. This project initially sought to cover the early medieval period up until COP26, recently held…
REVIEW BY BRIAN HOGGARD The title of this book suggests it will look at the occurrence of the daisy-wheel symbol in gravestone art, which it partly does. The geographical area surveyed for the book is principally the north-east of America…
REVIEW BY JOANIE WILLETT Growing up in Cornwall has been indelibly etched throughout my social learning, which makes reading (and viewing) material about Cornwall tricky. The overwhelming most books, TV, and films are written about middle-class escape or escapism which,…
In a deep valley below Bomarzo’s Orsini palace lies the so-called ‘Monster Park’ – the Sacro Bosco, a Mannerist gem from the later 16th century. It is surely one of the most remarkable Renaissance gardens in Italy, if not Europe.…
New research into the burial sites of 17th- and 18th-century whalers on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard is providing rare insight into the lives of these individuals and the impact of climate change on Arctic archaeology. Project leader Lise Loktu tells us more.
Analysis of the brains of individuals from 17th-century Milan indicates that they were utilising the coca plant (Erythroxylum spp.) several centuries before the drug was previously believed to have reached Europe. The coca plant originates in South America, where it…
REVIEW BY GRAHAM GOODLAD It is now three years since Bristol University historian Ronald Hutton’s The Making of Oliver Cromwell appeared. That earlier volume took Britain’s first commoner head of state from his origins as a minor East Anglian landowner…
When skeletal timbers emerged from intertidal deposits at Sand o’Erraby beach on Sanday, Orkney, earlier this year, they were soon identified as part of a shipwreck – specifically, the midships section of a vessel’s lower hull. Current thinking is that…
An anonymous shipwreck discovered off St Alban’s Head in Dorset more than 30 years ago has finally been identified by marine archaeologists from Bournemouth University. Found in 1990 at a depth of c.27m, the 24m-long vessel was nicknamed the ‘Pin…
A handful of tiny paper items discovered at Sutton House in Hackney offer a unique insight into the interests of the girls who were educated there in the 17th century. Carly Hilts spoke to Nathalie Cohen, Isabella Rosner, Kate Simpson, and Abigail Winslow to find out more.
Two hundred years ago, George Smith was granted the first licence to distil whisky legally in the Glenlivet area of Speyside, in the Scottish Highlands. Now archaeological fieldwork by the National Trust for Scotland, in partnership with The Glenlivet, has shed new light on how the whisky-making process was industrialised in the 19th century, as Derek Alexander and Daniel Rhodes report.
REVIEW BY WILL FLETCHER This is a charming book. It features the conservation of a fine Grade II*-listed English vernacular building, situated in rural Norfolk. In total, the 13 chapters and appendices describe the building, its history, the former occupants,…
Archaeological investigations in south Lincolnshire, linked to the ‘Digging Market Garden’ project, have uncovered objects relating to one of the largest airborne assaults in history – as well as some unexpected medieval finds. Operation Market Garden was an attempt by…
The remains of a ‘lost’ 17th-century house built by a friend of Oliver Cromwell has been rediscovered during excavations at Auckland Castle in County Durham. During the Interregnum (the period between the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the…
In 1418, Captain ‘One-eyed’ Zarco sailed out from Lisbon to plant the flag of Portugal on the islands first of Porto Santo and then of Madeira. In doing so, he not only claimed for Portugal a useful harbour and a staging post that would enable explorations further out into the Atlantic – first to the Azores and then to Brazil – he also secured a fertile, well-wooded, and well-watered island where sugar cane flourished, making Madeiran landowners and the Portuguese Crown extremely rich for a century by selling ‘white gold’ through the markets of Venice, London, and Antwerp.