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Great Fires of London and the West India Docks
The River Thames and the new West India Docks Jamaican sugar planters sometimes struggled to get their produce back to England. Freight rates were often high, ships sometimes in short supply and of...
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A Parcel of Ribbons – The Book – Now available
Available in perfect bound paperback 6″ x 9″ – 374 pages with illustrations. ISBN: 9781105809743 When I set up this website it was with the aim of sharing material I had come across during research...
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London graveyards and the Wonderful Mrs Basil Holmes
”Bella” Holmes, photographed in 1895 (courtesy of Jake Holmes) But for the efforts of the wonderful Mrs Basil Holmes much of what we know about London graveyards and burial grounds would have been...
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First Catch Your Hare
The title page from the facsimile first edition, Prospect Books 2012[1] ‘First Catch Your Hare’ is one of those apocryphal quotations that was in fact never written, in spite of being repeatedly...
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Family stories – the vital clues
If you ever doubt how much can be gleaned from even the smallest scraps of information left by your ancestors take a look at the piece of paper my mother received in the 1950s in a bundle of family...
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Puritans and Planters – the Halhed family
The Cloisters at Westminster Abbey from http://home2.btconnect.com/Crusader-Product/Westminster-Abbey.html I encountered the name Halhed recently while reading about the early British Colony...
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Loose ends and Christmas wishes
Egmont Villa, Fulham, the last home of Theodore Hook (from The Man who was John Bull) I dislike loose ends. Last week I ended the piece on Berners Street with a brief reference to Theodore Hook and...
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Joseph Stone Williams
Emancipation celebrations in Spanish Town 1838 I wrote last time about the Legacies of British Slave-ownership website, and quite by chance I have now found a Will which illustrates that period of...
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Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men
The newly built London Hospital in fields outside London at Whitechapel c.1752 Readers who are within travelling distance of the Museum of London have one week left in which to visit the...
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Sugar loaves and coal scuttles
Coal boats loading at North Shields c.1795 - J M W Turner (via Wikimedia Commons) It’s that time of year when preserving garden produce for the winter is on my mind. It’s been a fantastic year for...
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