The Coffee House Ships List
A 1772 list of East India Company ships, from the Jerusalem Coffee House.
Read More The Coffee House Ships ListCesar Picton
Cesaer Picton. Slave, servant, gentleman.
Read More Cesar PictonMinerva and the Water God
Minerva and the Water God. I thought There was nothing between Minerva and the Water God. But I was wrong…
Read More Minerva and the Water GodWater God
My very first archaeological dig was on a massive Roman farm estate, located right in the centre of the wheat production area of Roman Britain. It was a huge excavation and I spent a wonderful summer living in a tent. The Roman owner of this estate would have been a business “magnate”, as opposed to […]
Read More Water GodAnother dirty book
The Metorpolitan Commission of Sewers, surveryors report, Soho, 1855 Thinking of my previous article on dirty books and manuscripts, I once worked on a book that was covered in very different kind of grime, and a very different context. This could be some archaeology I discovered in the archives? One area of history I have […]
Read More Another dirty bookDusty and Dirty Books
As soon as you walk into an archive store, you can smell the dust. 100,000s of books and documents dating back hundreds of years, all carry dust and dirt they picked up along the way. They are encrusted with it. As you open a book or the lid of an archive box, it hits you […]
Read More Dusty and Dirty BooksPostcards, Woolwich Arsenal, 1917
Many years ago, I found a box in the attic of my auntie’s house. She had just passed away and I was clearing the place. It was odd, as the whole of the attic was empty apart from this one box in the centre of it. The box was full of postcards, photographs, a piece […]
Read More Postcards, Woolwich Arsenal, 1917The Gard’ners Almanac cont’d; Orange Trees
Kalendarium Hortense; OR THE Gard’ner’s Almanac, Directing what he is to do MONTHLY throughout The YEAR. AND what FRUITS and FLOWERS ARE IN PRIME. By John Evelyn. Esq; Fellow of the Royal Society Evelyn’s Kelendarium Hortense for May. It is very hot this weekend, so time to move your Orange trees from the Conservatory. […]
Read More The Gard’ners Almanac cont’d; Orange TreesThe Gard’ner’s Almanac
The Kaledarium Hortense is a classic gardening book by John Evelyn. It takes the gentleman gardener through the year, detailing what he is meant to do in the garden with fruit vegetables and flowers. Much of his advice is straight forward gardening knowledge and logic, and something you may well hear on TV, radio or […]
Read More The Gard’ner’s AlmanacSHOCKING ACCIDENT
“On Saturday morning, an accident which has unfortunately terminated fatally, occurred to a man named Dobson,” starts a news article from the 1850s. “The deceased sat upon the stone while it was being raised, to prevent it shaking the scaffolding”. I read this out loud to an audience as part of a talk on the […]
Read More SHOCKING ACCIDENT