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Russell Croft

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A Botanical Building

  • Post published:August 12, 2016
  • Post category:Urban History (Bradford)
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On the road from Leeds to Shipley, I often admire the old Carnegie Library building at Windhill that stands empty and decaying. This fine brown-stone structure has a simple grandeur…

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The People’s Cafe

  • Post published:April 15, 2016
  • Post category:Urban History (Leeds)
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I am not the first idler on his way into the Adelphi pub to notice that Leeds Bridge House bears a striking resemblance to the (rather more famous!) Flatiron Building…

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An Unholy Street

  • Post published:February 2, 2016
  • Post category:Urban History (London)
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When I lived in London I worked for some time in an office overlooking the Aldwych, off the Strand. I did not know then, as I watched the traffic thunder…

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A Sentimental Journey

  • Post published:July 1, 2015
  • Post category:Urban History (Liverpool)
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I was passing through Liverpool lately and thought I would take a sentimental journey (after the title of one of his solo albums) into the city’s South End to look at…

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Sambourne House

  • Post published:June 1, 2015
  • Post category:Urban History (London)
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My cultured friend and I recently visited Sambourne House, a West London terraced home preserved pretty much as it was in the 1890s, complete with its original contents and furnishings.…

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At The Landing Stage

  • Post published:April 6, 2015
  • Post category:Hugh Shimmin/Urban History (Liverpool)
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I have written previously about the journalist Hugh Shimmin, who was such a vivid observer of Liverpool’s mid-Victorian low-life, and such a committed activist for improved social conditions in the…

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Edith Eskrigge

  • Post published:December 1, 2014
  • Post category:Suffragists
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On the eve of the First World War, just over a century ago, the militant “Suffragette” movement demanding votes for women was in full-swing. The names of Emmeline Pankhurst and…

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Liverpool’s Own St Paul’s

  • Post published:October 1, 2014
  • Post category:Urban History (Liverpool)
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One of the most prominent and distinctive buildings on nineteenth century Liverpool’s skyline would have been the beautiful, but now long demolished, St Paul’s church. I have a personal connection…

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An Oriel Prospect

  • Post published:September 3, 2014
  • Post category:Hugh Shimmin/Urban History (Liverpool)
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Liverpool must have presented a magnificent prospect to visitors in the second half of the Nineteenth Century, whether arriving by sea or rail. They could hardly fail to be impressed…

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Hugh Shimmin’s Journalism

  • Post published:July 1, 2014
  • Post category:Hugh Shimmin/Urban History (Liverpool)
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Writing in the 1850s and 1860s, often in his own publication the Porcupine, Hugh Shimmin invokes a desperate Liverpudlian landscape of squalid and overcrowded living, causal labour, acute poverty, hopeless drink…

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Banner image: detail from The Dancing Platform at Cremorne Gardens (Phoebus Levin, 1864), Museum of London.
This setting is featured in the chapter of Bring Him in Mad entitled ‘A Christmas Pantomime’.