Carolineld

LATEST ARTICLES ( 790 )

• Vintage Tractors

  

  For the 22nd year, Plenee Jugon in Brittany hosted a Festival of Mechanisation, featuring farm vehicles from the 1920s to the 1950s. There were lots of vintage... Read more

  Posted on 12 August 2014 CULTURE, DESTINATIONS, HISTORY

• Bristol Time

  

  Moving a country from solar time to unified time is no easy matter (France had three separate kinds of time at one point). However, the railways made it a... Read more

  Posted on 29 July 2014 CULTURE, DESTINATIONS, HISTORY

• Cupboards-full of Roman Wall

  

  Eager to protect Londinium, the Romans built a wall around the city at the turn of the 3rd century, and kept working on it for the next 200 years. Read more

  Posted on 20 July 2014 CULTURE, DESTINATIONS, HISTORY

• Edwardian Tourist Tat

  

  London is awash with tacky souvenirs: improbable snow globe scenes, inaccurate plastic postboxes on keyrings, child-sized fake policemen's hats. Read more

  Posted on 13 July 2014 CULTURE, DESTINATIONS, HISTORY

• Ghost Signs (112): Beds on Whitechapel Road

  

  At first glance, 201 Whitechapel Road is a pleasant Victorian building but not of particular interest. However, above each first-floor window is a painted... Read more

  Posted on 29 June 2014 CULTURE, DESTINATIONS, HISTORY

• Tin Tabernacle, Battleship

  

  Intended to be temporary structures, tin tabernacles were cheap flat-pack churches or chapels, ordered from a catalogue and erected quickly to tide the... Read more

  Posted on 22 June 2014 CULTURE, DESTINATIONS, HISTORY

• Open Garden Squares

  

  Don't forget that this weekend is Open Garden Squares Weekend, when all sorts of London gardens and green spaces welcome visitors. One ticket (£12) gives you... Read more

  Posted on 13 June 2014 CULTURE, DESTINATIONS, HISTORY

• Ghost Signs (111): Gramophones

  

  This ghost sign on Woolwich New Road is a bit of a mystery. Half of it has worn away, and the other half is not easy to decipher. However, it does include the... Read more

  Posted on 08 June 2014 CULTURE, DESTINATIONS, HISTORY

• London's Cleanest Bus

  

  2014 is Transport for London's Year of the Bus. It's well-chosen, as this year is also the centenary of London's motor buses being sent to the Western Front, th... Read more

  Posted on 21 May 2014 CULTURE, DESTINATIONS, HISTORY

• Stonehaven to Dunottar Castle

  

  This blog has been a little neglected while I was on holiday; normal service will be resumed shortly! For today, some photographs of the walk from Stonehaven,... Read more

  Posted on 04 May 2014 CULTURE, DESTINATIONS, HISTORY

• Ghost Signs (110): Royal Mile

  

  Perhaps the biggest surprise on my first visit to Edinburgh's Royal Mile was the number of ghost signs on the close entrances along its length. Read more

  Posted on 21 April 2014 CULTURE, DESTINATIONS, HISTORY

• Middlesex Hospital Chapel, Again

  

  When I visited the top of the BT Tower, one of the most striking sights was Middlesex Hospital Chapel, last survivor of the hospital, alone in an empty... Read more

  Posted on 07 April 2014 CULTURE, DESTINATIONS, HISTORY

• Ghost Signs (109): the Butcher, the Baker ...

  

  Taking the 124 bus from the Excalibur Estate, I travelled along Sandhurst Road, Catford for the first time and found three ghost signs. Read more

  Posted on 23 March 2014 CULTURE, DESTINATIONS, HISTORY

• Seeing the City of London

  

  Tower Bridge is one of my favourite London buildings, and the views from its walkways over the Thames are some of the loveliest in the city. It was, then, a... Read more

  Posted on 20 March 2014 CULTURE, DESTINATIONS, HISTORY

• Excalibur Estate, Catford

  

  It's Britain's largest surviving prefab estate - at least for the moment. The Excalibur Estate in Catford was always designated 'temporary housing', and has bee... Read more

  Posted on 16 March 2014 CULTURE, DESTINATIONS, HISTORY

• Ghost Signs (108): Patience

  

  For a long time, I thought that this wall on New Cross road ought to have a ghost sign under the cream paint. At last, it has started to emerge. However, it... Read more

  Posted on 12 March 2014 CULTURE, DESTINATIONS, HISTORY

• Great St Bartholomew's, Palimpsest

  

  St Bartholomew the Great is, perhaps more than many churches, visibly a palimpsest: changing uses, contexts and fashions are written, rewritten and overwritten... Read more

  Posted on 09 March 2014 CULTURE, DESTINATIONS, HISTORY

• Halfway Railway

  

  The huge Crossrail project, which is digging up or under much of London in order to create a high-frequency, east-west railway, has reached its halfway point. Read more

  Posted on 05 March 2014 CULTURE, DESTINATIONS, HISTORY

• Croydon's Fishy Facade

  

  W H Smith may have settled for a rather uniform, corporate look today but their earlier shops had interesting and unusual facades. The North End, Croydon... Read more

  Posted on 02 March 2014 CULTURE, DESTINATIONS, HISTORY

• Ghost Signs (107): Chocolat Poulain

  

  The logo looks like a cross between a deer and a dog, and the product name is obscured, so it wasn't easy to identify the brand being advertised in this sign... Read more

  Posted on 27 February 2014 CULTURE, DESTINATIONS, HISTORY