We take single-sex public toilets for granted today. It is hard to believe that when public conveniences were first constructed, the vast majority of these toilets were just for men. Great Exhibition ...

"Eat, drink and be merry!" With roots in the Roman festival of Saturnalia, the Lord of Misrule was a festive, roll-reversal ...

On Tuesday 29th October 1929 the Wall Street Crash caused a cataclysmic chain of events which affected nearly every country across the globe. The Great Depression, also known as ‘The Slump’ ...

“There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as a good tavern or inn.” So wrote Samuel Johnson and for many, this remains true today. Think of an ...

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 ...

“There were opium dens where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.” Oscar Wilde in his novel, ‘The Picture of ...

There have always been fashion ‘tribes’, from fops and beaux, bucks and dandies to Goths and punks, but the ‘macaronis’ of the 1760s and 1770s exceeded them all in their dedication to excess and ...

“The unweary, unostentatious, and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations.” ...

Britain’s ports and harbours were once menaced by the dreaded press-gangs. Impressment, to give it its proper name, was the scourge of maritime communities across the British Isles and Britain’s North ...

Lucozade! Many baby boomers will remember this sparkling, lurid-coloured drink when the glass bottle still came wrapped in crinkly cellophane. This iconic tonic only appeared when a child was ill in ...

Cotton, a valuable raw material and a mainstay of the textile industry, has been around for centuries and remains one of the most crucial resources to this day. Cotton has been used by humans as far ...

Carmarthen, pronounced Caerfyrddin in Welsh, is the county town of Carmarthenshire, located besides the River Tywi. It has been an important administrative centre since ancient Rome, while also being ...