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.
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…
Richard Arkwright
The archetypal “self-made man” of the Industrial Revolution, Richard Arkwright is known as the father of the factory…
Barnum and Bailey: Revolt of the Freaks
In January 1899 Barnum and Bailey’s ‘Greatest Show on Earth’ was a few weeks into its second winter season at London’s Olympia when something extraordinary happened. The performers in the so-called ‘freak show’ rebelled: they protested at being known as ‘freaks’ and demanded a new name. The move hit the headlines and caused a public sensation…
