From Stonehenge to Stenness, Britain’s stone circles are veiled in mystery and magic. Marc Zakian investigates They are the symbols of the Stone Age: 4,000 giant standing-stone monuments rising up from the British landscape. Built as places to feast, to honour the sun, moon and stars, to summon up the dead and to reach for […]

Sophie Campbell takes us on a tour around Britain’s museums The ‘Wonder House’, they called it – the great museum that opened the story in Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim. ‘Anybody who sought wisdom could ask the curator to explain’, wrote Kipling, describing the people hurrying there ‘to see things made in their own province and […]

“I was seven when we went to Castle Howard – at the end of the visit I told my parents that one day I would work there” “My dad jokes that I started my career as an architectural historian when I was four,” says Kirsty Wardle. “Whenever we took one of our regular family trips […]

Blue Badge Guide and music fan Glen Portch traces the history of British rock and roll in the capital. In March 1980, Glen Portch set off from his family home in the hinterlands of suburban south-east London. The 14- year-old headed west to the Hammersmith Apollo, handed over £3 and sat down to see his […]

Blue Badge Guides show you their favourite places around the UK Lake My favourite lake is the Serpentine in Hyde Park. The 40-acre artificial waterway, created in 1730 by damming the River Westbourne, is home to Britain’s oldest swimming club. Every Christmas Day the club stages the Peter Pan Cup race – a trophy donated […]

From Baroness Thatcher to Birkin, the Victoria and Albert Museum spring exhibition explores the history of the bag. Bags: Inside Out will feature 300 bags, varying in size from tiny purses designed to be carried on one finger to sizeable trunks made to accompany an English gentleman on his Grand Tour. The exhibition will include […]

The Scottish time-travelling series Outlander returns to the screen in February 2020. The fifth season of Amazon TV’s epic tells the story of a married World War II nurse transported back to Scotland in 1743, where she falls in love with a Highland warrior. Set against the backdrop of the Jacobite rising, Outlander is based […]

Four hundred years ago in August 1620, an English merchant ship with 102 settlers on board set off for the New World. After 65 days battling storms, scurvy, pneumonia and TB, 53 surviving passengers – the United States founding fathers – disembarked the Mayflower. 2020 marks the anniversary of the Mayflower transport. There will be […]