All articles in Transport & Industry
19th May, 2021 in Transport & Industry
The listening stick: The car mechanic’s best friend
When a modern car goes into the garage with an engine misfire or warning light glowing on the dashboard, the technician will plug in a diagnostic computer. This will display one or more fault-codes which identify the problem and advise which component needs to be replaced; often…
6th May, 2021 in Local & Family History, Transport & Industry
A Tyneside Heritage: business, employment and communities on Tyneside
Spanning 150 years of South Shields’ changing fortunes, A Tyneside Heritage is a pioneering work of interwoven local and family history. After the nineteenth-century boom years of coal exporting and shipbuilding for global markets came the First World War and then the mass unempl…
27th April, 2021 in Society & Culture, Transport & Industry
The call of the water: Life on Britain’s rivers and canals
Since being born on a Thames houseboat many moons ago the river has cast a spell across my soul; its soft lappings, its secret islets, its wildly changing moods – reckless and brave one minute, mournful and dissipated the next. My new book, Water Gypsies, is inspired of cour…
11th November, 2020 in Military, Transport & Industry
The final journey of the Unknown Warrior
11 November 2020 marked the centenary of the burial within Westminster Abbey of the Unknown Warrior. This was a British soldier who was killed in the First World War, someone who was originally buried in or near one of the many battlefields of the Western Front. The idea of comme…
4th November, 2020 in Society & Culture, Transport & Industry, Women in History
Married to a coal miner
Life was difficult for women from the coalfields during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Those girls who were daughters of miners understood some of the difficulties, but it was still their ambition to marry into the industry and take on the responsibility for looking…
12th November, 2019 in Transport & Industry
It’s an Akroyd not a Diesel!
The history of technology is full of myths and half-truths about who invented what. One of the real problems is to define exactly what we mean by ‘invented’. For example, do we mean: The first time an idea was suggested? The first time working drawings were produced? The first ti…
18th July, 2019 in Transport & Industry
10 things you (probably) didn’t know about the history of the static caravan
From the 1950s onwards, the boom in car ownership soared and the static caravan offered people their very own ‘cottages’ by the sea or in the countryside. Here author Andrew Jenkinson shares 10 facts about Britain’s favourite holiday homes. 1. In the early 1900s, the…
27th March, 2019 in Local & Family History, Transport & Industry
Aberdeen’s granite men: Hard men, hard work
Granite is the hardest of building materials. In the North East of Scotland it has been used for centuries – for stone circles, burial cairns and later for castles. Even large parts of the great cathedral of St. Machar in Old Aberdeen were built from granite. The hard nature of t…
26th February, 2019 in Archaeology, Transport & Industry
Ask the author: Phil Stride on London’s Thames Tideway Tunnel
Leading civil engineer and Tideway’s Strategic Projects Director Phil Stride reveals an inside look at how the ‘Super Sewer’ was planned, designed, approved, funded and is being built in his new book The Thames Tideway Tunnel: Preventing Another Great Stink, which provides…
14th January, 2019 in Local & Family History, Transport & Industry, Women in History
Women of the Durham Coalfields
Back in 1984, when I began tracing my own family story, there was excitement in learning to use census records to discover where my ancestors were living. There was also satisfaction in locating them in baptisms, marriages and burials in parish records. I soon realised however th…
14th September, 2018 in Transport & Industry
Victorian King’s Cross and the Maiden Lane GNR terminus
London’s Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park from 1 May to 15 October 1851 was in need of a temporary passenger station to transport the crowds of visitors. Great Northern Railway quickly provided the Maiden Lane terminus as a temporary passenger station for the d…
14th September, 2018 in Transport & Industry
Tube Life: Archival images from London’s Underground
The London Underground has always been key to the lives of Londoners; from when its stations and stairwells offered refuge from the barrage of the Blitz to its ability to transport 4.8 million people every day. It was the world’s first underground railway, opening in 1863 as the…