Eighty years have passed since the soothing sound of By the Sleeping Lagoon was first heard across our airwaves as the theme tune to the debut episode of BBC Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs. A multitude of MPs and Peers …
The writer F Scott Fitzgerald memorably once said that ‘There are no second acts in American life’. Thankfully Christopher Chataway was British and didn’t adhere one iota to that maxim. Mirroring the standard structure of a theatrical play his …
‘We all have a book in us’ as the saying goes. There are some long-forgotten manuscripts in our collections written by various individuals that unfortunately never had the glory of going to print. A red-ribboned bundle titled In the House …
This blog explores several petitions from early 1621 which tell the story of accusations, evading arrest warrants, eventual arrests, and imprisonment in the infamous Fleet Prison. The two main characters of this tale are Jeffrey Passmore, a wax chandler, otherwise …
What is… Longer than the length of three football fields? 200 years old? And made of animal skin? It's the Longest Act! To give it its proper title, it's the Land Tax Commissioners' Act 1821, which at 348 metres is …
An influx of rookie MPs entered the House of Commons after the post-war 1945 General Election. One of the new intakes was the celebrated playwright, Benn Levy who’d won the Eton & Slough seat for the victorious Labour Party. …
Over the past year of Elizabeth Tower blog posts from the Parliamentary Archives, we’ve taken a deeper look at the Ayrton Light, Big Ben and the quarter bells and the decorative shields which adorn the Tower’s façade. As restoration of …
In this period, Poplar was one of the poorest areas of London, with high levels of unemployment, poverty and hunger. Under the Poor Law, initiatives to alleviate these issues by the Poplar Poor Law Union had to be funded by …
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs National Portrait Gallery To mark South Asian Heritage Month, here’s a profile of Shapurji Saklatvala, a pioneering British Parliamentarian of Indian birth. Prepare to be enlightened about The Man, The Myth, The Marxist. This blog was …
This year marks the 200th anniversary of the coronation of George IV. It took place on 19th July 1821. The coronation ceremony was held in Westminster Abbey, followed by an extravagant coronation banquet held in Westminster Hall. There is a …
