London has the distinction of having the world’s oldest underground railway system, with the original section of the Metropolitan Railway opening in 1863. This was built to main line gauge on a ‘cut and cover’ system and of course initially...

John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, was the husband of a princess, the brother-in-law of two kings and the uncle by marriage of a queen. Despite this, he was not often involved in national politics. This was not due...

In writing this book I wanted to examine how a relatively unimportant settlement on the river Tiber eventually came to govern most of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and how the resultant Empire eventually broke up, with parts of...

Much of what we experience in terms of folklore comes in the form of storytelling. To tell and listen to stories has been part of human life since cavemen carved pictures on stones. The medicinal Pennywort and Pellitory-of-the-Wall plants. (Soo...

The house in which I grew up was part of what had been large stables in Glasgow’s West End built by my great-grandfather. Although by my time the business had become a garage, old horse stalls remained in the unused...

One of the earliest references to the historical King Arthur was collected by a monk named Nennius in the ninth century A.D.  It reads:  Then Arthur fought against them in those days, together with the kings of the British; but...

It’s 1970, the United States have landed on the moon, the Vietnam war is raging, and The Beatles have just split up. Meanwhile, the world’s most famous steam locomotive Flying Scotsman is embarking on its second tour of America and...

I once had the dubious pleasure of working with a young man who, when asked for information, would respond with “I’ll dig a hole and look into it.” Fortunately Going Underground: The Potteries does not contain any such appalling jokes...

The four modern counties of Yorkshire were once, like all of England and most of Britain, part of the Roman Empire from the mid-first to early fifth centuries AD. Yorkshire did not exist then, but the area that it covered...

While this book may be a collection of images of motive power in the 1980s, it is not necessarily a collection of images showing motive power of the 1980s. That was really all part of the appeal of observing and...