If people were transported back to a kitchen from the 1830s, what would be the most obvious differences? Paul Couchman, The Regency Chef, has the answer.

Paul Couchman: If we could all go back in time If you went through the kitchen door, I imagine you'd be hit by the heat. Because what you've got is a big old range that used to use and a big sort of cast iron heated box, really, and they'd glow and they'd burn Argas so it would have been absolute boiling hot. So that's the first thing you not...

Today Danson House in the London Borough of Bexley is home to a rather wonderful tea room and provides a stunning venue for weddings, but it was built on the proceeds of human misery and was not a happy place for its owner Sir John Boyd.

John Boyd’s father Augustus left Donegal in 1700 to run a sugar plantation on the island of St Kitts that had belonged to his uncle. The plantation was worked by African people brought as slaves from Sierra Leone. Augustus bought more plantations but gradua...

London’s first coffeehouse was founded in 1652 by the churchyard of St Michael’s, Cornhill. It was not quite the first coffeehouse in England, which had been founded in Oxford two years earlier, and it was not really a coffeehouse - more of a coffee shack. Business blossomed for the man behind it, Pasqua Rosee, and soon he was selling 600 dishes a day. From this start, the capital had acquired several hundred coffeehouses by the turn of the century, a development which set London apart fr...