For our last Hidden London tour of 2016, we headed for Euston – hardly where you would expect to find ‘lost’ stations given how central it is to the rail network both above and below ground. However, it’s Euston’s key role in the growth of transport both in and out of, and within, London […]
For anyone fascinated by how the world looked earlier in the 20th Century, maps are an absorbing and reliable window into the past. Pour over any old Ordnance Survey map, and one can discern the shape and size of the towns our midcentury forebears lived in, the routes of the A-roads they drove their […]
Just recently we found ourselves watching an episode of Dan Cruickshank’s excellent TV series on the history of housing focussing on post-War living, quickly followed by one in the ‘Hidden Killers’ series again dealing with the post-War home. Both were fascinating, both filled with highly-desirable mid-Century items (not all of them potentially lethal!), but […]
Having missed the first two Atomic Vintage Festivals because it was just too far to make in a day, our relocation to within striking distance looked like failing us thanks to a diary clash until a waterlogged site forced the organisers to delay the event from April to August. Even then, the weekend dawned […]
It’s somehow fitting that an attraction dubbed ‘The Land of Lost Content’ should sit off the beaten track, and you can’t get much further off than Craven Arms in deepest Shropshire, at the gateway to the Welsh Marches. But a location like that has given Stella Mitchell, a devotee of domestic ephemera, a venue […]
There can be very few British children who grew up in the 60s and 70s, and beyond, for whom the work of Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate does not form a significant part of their earliest memories. Chances are, those children will never have registered those names, nor of the Smallfilms company they ran […]
Elena Salvoni wasn’t particularly keen on her unofficial title of The Queen of Soho – it was all too reminiscent of the girls who plied their trade on the streets outside her restaurants – but it’s hard to think of her by any other and, as her death this week at the age of […]
There are some great rock’n’roll movies out there – great in that they capture artists in their prime, performing the numbers they’re remembered for, at the time they were fresh and contemporary. On the down side, the ephemeral nature of any movie designed principally to exploit the popularity of a music genre means that […]
We didn’t specifically set out to have a ‘Vintage’ Christmas – that would be awfully contrived – but a mixture of opportunity and natural inclination propelled us through the festive season on a wave of retro joys.
For me, a last working week in London gave me the chance to escape the round of office […]
Hancock’s Half Hour has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. By the time I was 13, I was sneaking my little transistor radio down to our holiday hotel dining room to listen in to the summer re-runs on Radio 4 (egged on by my Dad), so I […]
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