England held its breath as the mighty Spanish Armada sailed up the English Channel. Invasion appeared imminent. Then Queen Elizabeth I is reputed to have made a rousing speech to her troops as they ...

Pancake Day, or Shrove Tuesday, is the traditional feast day before the start of Lent on Ash Wednesday. Lent – the 40 days leading up to Easter – was traditionally a time of fasting and on Shrove ...

While Singapore had been a trading hub since the 14th century, it first really appeared on the British radar in the 19th century when statesman Stamford Raffles successfully negotiated to establish a ...

Today’s modern world is powered by the magic that is electricity. It is the power that keeps the lights on, cooks our food, warms our homes or cools them, depending where in the world you live, and ...

On Tuesday 29th October 1929 the Wall Street Crash caused a cataclysmic chain of events which affected nearly every country across the globe. The Great Depression, also known as ‘The Slump’ ...

Who are the British? Do they really drink tea, eat roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and never leave home without an umbrella? Find out more about true Brits; past and present, myth and legend, fact ...

“There were opium dens where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.” Oscar Wilde in his novel, ‘The Picture of ...

The Highland Clearances remain a controversial period in Scotland’s history and are still talked of with great bitterness, particularly by those families who were dispossessed of their land and even, ...

The year was 1888 and the location Bow in the East End of London, a place where some of the most poverty stricken in society lived and worked. The Match Girls’ Strike was industrial action taken up by ...

Britain’s ports and harbours were once menaced by the dreaded press-gangs. Impressment, to give it its proper name, was the scourge of maritime communities across the British Isles and Britain’s North ...

The Victorian Workhouse was an institution that was intended to provide work and shelter for poverty stricken people who had no means to support themselves. With the advent of the Poor Law system, ...