Culture UK
Who are the British? Do they really drink tea, eat roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and never leave home without an umbrella? Find out more about true Brits; past and present, myth and legend, fact and fiction.
Lady Florence Dixie
The aristocratic Lady Florence Dixie threw off the shackles of her Victorian upbringing and embraced a career as a war correspondent, feminist writer, traveller, campaigner – and first President of the British Ladies Football Club…
The Chorleywood Experiment: Give us this day our daily bread…
During the 1960s when US boffins were involved in some serious research into how to conquer space and deliver a man to the moon, 130 of the finest food scientists in ‘Good Ole Blighty’ were assembled for the Chorleywood Experiment…
The Birth of Forensics: Dr Buck Ruxton
The Moffat Ravine Murders: the chilling case of Dr Buck Ruxton and how it lead to great advances in forensic investigation…
The Mail Must Get Through…
A most unusual incident occurred on the night of Sunday 20th October, 1816. The mail coach from Devonport to London was on its regular route when suddenly, a mysterious creature leapt out of the darkness and attacked the team of horses…
Growing Up In Cardiff: A Wartime Childhood
Thomas Gareth Thomas was born in Cardiff on 13th July 1936 at 154 Inverness Place, Roath. Gareth’s most powerful childhood memories were of his childhood during the Second World War and the Cardiff Blitz…
History of London through the Lens of a Movie Camera
London is like an onion with layers and layers of history spanning back 2,000 years, meaning the most surprising buildings, ruins and memorials can often be found in the most unlikely places. And many of these hidden gems turn up in the movies…
Sheffield’s Greenwich Time Ball
Time, as the Hatter in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland knew, is relative. He claimed he was on such good terms with Time that he could live at any time he wanted. Time worked for him, not the other way round. As a genuine eccentric, he would probably also have enjoyed a curious time tradition that continues to the present day. That is, the sounding of a siren at precisely 1pm every day in the city of Sheffield in Yorkshire…
The Lambton Worm – The Lord and The Legend
Legend tells of young John Lambton, fishing in the River Wear on a Sunday. Catching no fish, he cursed the river – and immediately hooked a strange worm-like creature…
Green Police Boxes of Sheffield
One dark November evening in 1963, an unlikely form of time travel was revealed to the British public. The time-travelling Doctor Who had arrived on Planet Earth’s TV screens, and his intergalactic machine of choice was, of all things, a common-or-garden police telephone box…
Dioramas: the IMAX of the Georgian era
“…we consider this view to be decidedly the best that has yet been exhibited, and so good, that for excellence of painting, for force of illusion, we cannot believe it will be possible to surpass it.” So reported The Times, describing Louis Daguerre’s Diorama in London…