' Tonite let's male Love in London' 60s documentary

https://vimeo.com/111691128

Radical Walking and other pyschogeographic activiites

Triarchy Press has a set of authors who are developing the idea of walking as a radical art form.

To find out more, follow this link:

https://www.triarchypress.net/walking.html

Victorian Buildings in London you did not know about

This is an excellent selection of buildings, most of which , I did not know about but wish I had!



https://londonist.com/london/best-of-london/five-victorian-buildings-you-didn-t-know-about?utm_source=Today%27s+posts+from+Londonist&utm_campaign=f988096749-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_03_27&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_acfd22879f-f988096749-219853617

Mary Ward House

Great bit of Arts and Crafts Architecture in Tavistock Place

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/27/gun-debate-culture-war-young-people-will-win?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+main+NEW+H+categories&utm_term=269200&subid=1563368&CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2

Beautiful Brutalism in Camden

This is one of the great estates in London.

Its said to be one of the largest listed buildings in Britain. the Alexandra And Ainsworth Estate and is by the great Neave Brown of Camden Council's Architects Department 1968.


http://londonist.com/london/videos/alexandra-and-ainsworth-estate?rel=handpicked

How many coffee houses in 18th Century London?

I seem to remember they numbered in thousands but initial searches suggest 500. But I came across this web site which gives the answer.

https://publicdomainreview.org/2013/08/07/the-lost-world-of-the-london-coffeehouse/

'By the dawn of the eighteenth century, contemporaries were counting between 1,000 and 8,000 coffeehouses in the capital even if a street survey conducted in 1734 (which excluded unlicensed premises) counted only 551. Even so, Europe had never seen anything like it. Protestant Amsterdam, a rival hub of international trade, could only muster 32 coffeehouses by 1700 and the cluster of coffeehouses in St Mark’s Square in Venice were forbidden from seating more than five customers (presumably to stifle the coalescence of public opinion) whereas North’s, in Cheapside, could happily seat 90 people. '

Milk or Tea first?

I have always believed that you put the milk in first because of the risk of cracking your bone china with boiling hot water.  But have just heard what sounds like a definitive answer to the question:

 

BUT if you are wealthy you can afford cups that don't crack under boiling water AND by the time the hot water comes up from downstairs the water is not so boiling so UPSTAIRS you can put the tea in first DOWNSTAIRS you put the milk in first

So which goes in first becomes a measure of class.  Just like everything else in the UK.

Tudor Map of London 1520

This is another Tudor mapping project. This time it hopes to create a new map fitted to the modern street plan showing the identified parts of Tudor London. And they are printing it!

Here is the link to buy a copy

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Map-Tudor-London-Englands-Historical/dp/0993469833

Here is a link to the project.

http://www.historictownsatlas.org.uk/content/tudor-london-1520

Layers of London Project

This is a project to create an online mapping project for the history of London.

I can't yet see how it is going to work. It has a lot of ambition and very little detail as yet.

Vanessa Harding said the Tudor Map of London project she and Caroling Barron have been working on will link to it.

https://layersoflondon.blogs.sas.ac.uk/

"The Agas Map." and the Map of Early Modern London project

This is one of two really great mapping projects ongoing about Tudor London. 

This one is based at the University of Victoria and is an attempt to populate a digital version of Agas' Early Tudor London Map with information from Stow's 'Survey of London'  and other sources .

I found it very useful for my research for my Cornhill Walk. I also felt sad as I was working reading Stow and looking at hard copies of maps, and then found it all on a plate on this web site.

So it felt like an end of an era.

This is the reference and the link.
 

Jenstad, Janelle. The Agas Map. The Map of Early Modern London. Ed. Janelle Jenstad. Victoria: University of Victoria. Web. 01 March, 2018. <http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/map.htm>.

Refugium

 Refugium

This is one of my students' projects which is about the issue surrounding being a Refugee.

It is running on 18th March if you wish to attend.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeQsy-fTQoOshwa5HVVW60FS_BYhudaPdYHzspnpgtZFsATOw/viewform

Cornhill Ward Walk

The next in my series of Ward Walks of the City of London, I am doing Cornhill Ward. 

We will look at the archaeology and history of the Ward from the earliest times to the present day.

10th March 18 Cornhill Ward of the City of London
2.30 Bank Tube. Exit 3

Ancient DNA Revolution

We are witnessing a revolution in ancient DNA. The first results came from inference from modern DNA and seem to have given results which are somewhat dubious. But recently changes in cost and technology has built up a new and expanding database of Ancient DNA which is shaking prehistory.

This article gives a good summary.

https://phys.org/news/2018-02-ancient-dna-tales-humans-migrant.html#jCp

One result is that the Beaker folk have been restored to a genuine folk movement after a couple of decades of PC cultural diffusion of a pottery style. But more than that the Beakers Folk are not only an intrusion from abroad But they replaced 90% of the Neolithic genome. The mechanism by which this happened is not yet established. 

So the great Henge projects were created by the first farmers who were largely descended from the Hunter-Gatherers.  Around 2,400 B.C. the beaker folk came over. This was after the Sarsen phase of Stonehenge.  They seem to have adopted neolithic use of henges but not the desire or ability to build huge new ones.

The DNA report is published here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25738.epdf?referrer_access_token=VWOWCyPVVXLk4xPfgQahc9RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0MvCgRpafo1l7XRALArFgCO6vOi1SAh6jgQaefsnzZX1pGLIas5jRPHdWo7nCUK_NDOU3EOuvXbOrokXtSkYpMwwyPp1RX8x9L3YKpE-avBD7y8BMXJGkh-s2PAa-PuH7cIWtx6FXGfFnry1J9SOi7RD1_Z0pibAnYRUIYfq10aZna5ImBOjjsywu8l14vdp0I%3D&tracking_referrer=www.bbc.co.uk

Salon IFA 402 wrote:

'Ancient DNA Continues to Revolutionise the Past

Around 4,500 years ago migrants entered Britain from the European continent, probably travelling from the coasts of France, Belgium or Germany, and initiated a substantial population replacement. The impact is still felt today, with only 10% of the preceding Neolithic genome remaining. The copper age in the UK truly marked the beginning of a new era.

We knew this from a Harvard University research paper published online last year ahead of peer review (‘Pots on the March’, Salon 388). Nature published the article on 21 February, allowing its authors to talk to the press. Among those who did was Mike Parker Pearson FSA (UCL). He told BBC News that the Neolithic British community had monument building ‘absolutely as its core rationale’, while the incoming makers of Beaker pottery were ‘not prepared to collaborate on enormous labour-mobilising projects; their society [was] more de-centralised.’

The context for this is Stonehenge, where our current dating suggests the main structure was built at the very end of the neolithic and shortly before the arrival of Beaker migrants – though smaller megaliths continued to be re-arranged during the Beaker era. There was no ‘violent invasion’, however. The Beaker people, said Parker Pearson, were ‘moving in very small groups or individually’. Steven Shennan FSA (also UCL) noted that ‘around 2500 BC the population [in Britain] is very low and that's precisely when the Beaker population seems to come in.’

In a press release from the University of Cambridge, Christopher Evans FSA (Executive Director of the Cambridge Archaeological Unit) said, ‘this study has been a tremendous project to be involved with. The results are truly ground-breaking and suggest that, with the influx of Continental communities, Britain’s prehistoric story needs to be rewritten in a much more dynamic manner.’ ‘Different teams had different key samples,’ said co-senior author Kristian Kristiansen FSA (University of Gothenburg), ‘and we decided to put together our resources to make possible a study that was more definitive than any of us could have achieved alone.’ The Cambridge Archaeological Unit has supplied many further samples for another Harvard study, of a thousand British Iron Age individuals.'