I was in London on Monday for a mini-conference on ‘mobile learning’ for the museums & archives sector. My colleague James Boardwell was presenting, but I was just there to learn what other people were doing. One of the things that struck me was that when museums talk about ‘mobile learning’, what they tend to [...]
Thought I’d point people towards the great 1988 Alton Towers promotional video that I posted to YouTube a couple of weeks ago. Not only is it entertaining in a retro old tourist attraction kind of way (with amusing English voiceover), but it has a mention of their Battersea Power Station project at the end – [...]
Fiona and I have been trying to do a bit of a clearout, and as part of that we decided to see if we could get rid of some old academic textbooks, which have been sitting on our shelves pointlessly for a few months (or in my case, a year). As students are only just [...]
I went to Dulwich Park, which is pretty local to me, last weekend to enjoy the lovely weather and go for a walk. When I first moved into this area, the park was in the middle of some heavy restoration work, and so there were lots of bits closed off, including the pond, which was [...]
I went to visit NMSI Wroughton yesterday, the old RAF airbase where much of the big bits of the NMSI museums’ collections are stored. It’s a huge site, near Swindon, and quite amazing to visit. The collections themselves are stored in huge old aircraft hangers. Inside there are airplanes, buses, fire engines, bits of machinery, [...]
I’ve been reading more local history books… The first is Metro-land, which is a facsimilie of the 1924 edition of ‘Metro-land’, a pamphlet published by the Metropolitan Railway to promote travel on their tube network and home ownership in the North London area. The 1924 edition also promoted the British Empire Exhibition, which was taking [...]
I’ve been reading The Subterranean Railway over the weekend, an excellent history of the London Underground. It’s written in an entertaining way, with some great nuggets of information (such as the tube’s original no smoking policy being overturned by an amendment to the Railway Regulation Bill requiring all railways to provide a smoking car). What’s [...]