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.
Sir Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott was born on 15 August 1771, in a small third floor flat in College Wynd in Edinburgh’s Old Town. Scott was the ninth child of Anne Rutherford and Walter Scott, a solicitor and member of the private society the Writers of the Signet.
Old Billy The Barge Horse
Holder of the record for equine longevity, Old Billy The Barge Horse is said to have died at the ripe old age of 62…
Thomas Willson’s Pyramid Mortuary
Architect Thomas Willson had great plans; he had an audacious scheme for a giant pyramid mortuary, 90 stories high and capable of holding up to five million dead, in 19th century London…
The Cottingley Fairies
“There are fairies at the bottom of our garden,” announces the opening line of a poem by Rose Fyleman first published in 1917. Coincidentally, that was also the year two intelligent and talented young conspirators managed to convince some very well-known people that there really were fairies living near Cottingley Beck, the stream that ran past the foot of their garden.
Crossword Panic of 1944
The planning of the D Day landings was almost complete – what could possibly go wrong?…
Piltdown Man: Anatomy of a Hoax
It was a storyline worthy of the world’s most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes; and Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, the creator of the great sleuth, was caught up in the plot…
King Henry III’s Polar Bear
Until the 19th century, the Tower of London played host to a whole menagerie of exotic animals…
Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling, poet and author, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907 in recognition of his great body of work, including ‘The Jungle Book’, ‘Kim’ and the poem ‘If’.
