Henry VIII built the first permanent tiltyard (for jousting) in England at his palace in Greenwich - and everyone knew where it was more or less. This was because we have lots of paintings from the seventeenth century showing it in relation to the Queen’s House, which was built between 1616 and 1635 by architect Inigo Jones and still stands today. The Tudor Palace, along with its tiltyard fell into serious decay during the Civil War and after, and its remnants were finally pulled down in Ch...

Hiding in plain sight on Clapham Common are a series of fairly dull-looking brown posts. Anonymous and overlooked, these posts mark a dark bit of the Common's history. The Common, as the name suggests, was common land, people could graze their sheep, collect firewood and get water. 

Now there has always been a bit of tension between Clapham and neighbour Battersea about the rights to these freedoms. This tension was only heightened when during the English Civil War the lord of Battersea suppo...

Henry Greathead had been pressed into his Majesty's navy in Portsmouth having returned to England in 1784. His dream was to become a boat builder in his home in South-Shields. He had designed a boat to withstand rough seas. In order to build the boat he needed materials, and to get those he needed money (something which he didn't have). 

Greathead wrote to two underwriters with whom he had been in correspondence with during an incident in Calais of a false insurance claim by his captain. He wr...