Category Archives: history

Chocks away

Posted on April 1, 2014 by things magazine

The UK’s lost, abandoned and obscure control towers / aerial views of UK Active & Disused Airports, Airfields, Heliports & Landing Sites / related, ghostly images of abandoned wartime airbases / Bunkertours, no longer updated but hunkering down for eternity … Continue reading →

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Oklahoma City sonic boom tests

Posted on March 25, 2014 by things magazine

The Oklahoma City sonic boom tests, or the Oklahoma Public Reaction Study, was conducted from February 3 to July 31, 1964. ‘A total of 1,253 booms were included in the program.’ ‘However, a large percentage (40%) of the public polled … Continue reading →

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Then, now and tomorrow

Posted on January 27, 2014 by things magazine

A thoroughly depressing gallery of pictures: Syrian heritage in ruins: before and after. Related, Dresden, before and after; Third Reich Berlin, then and now; WWII Coventry, then and now; San Francisco: Before and After the 1906 Earthquake and Fire; London’s … Continue reading →

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Climbing the ladder

Posted on January 9, 2014 by things magazine

One interesting detail that emerged from last year’s hugely depressing media-saturated celebrity trial was the revelation that Charles Saatchi was his own most avid fan (‘Elisabetta Grillo tells fraud trial of travelling round London four times a week to buy … Continue reading →

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The age of the train

Posted on December 7, 2013 by things magazine

Any historical discussion of British railways has to include the Beeching Report, ‘The Reshaping of British Railways’, now excoriated as ‘one of the most notorious government reports of the 20th century… The report often adopted an overly-simplistic analysis of the … Continue reading →

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Monument to a ruined age

Posted on September 10, 2013 by things magazine

Red Plenty by Francis Spufford uses ficionalised lives to look at the myriad ways the plan affected the lives of Russians, especially those labouring deep within the system. There’s a fascinating post at A Year in Berlin detailing a monument … Continue reading →

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Yellow Fever

Posted on September 5, 2013 by things magazine

Ship of Death: A Voyage That Changed the Atlantic World chronicles the voyage of the Hankey, a British ship travelling from a failed West African colony for freed slaves to the Caribbean and North America. Travelling with them were infected … Continue reading →

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I walk on concrete / I walk on sand

Posted on July 22, 2013 by things magazine

Bob Mazzer’s portfolios of life on the Tube in the 80s and 90s is doing the rounds (posted at Spitalfields Life, linked via MeFi). Flickr is the place to go for countless sets of old London imagery: City of London … Continue reading →

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Reading between the lines

Posted on March 21, 2013 by things magazine

A proto-satnav: leather-cased scrolling travelling map from the 1920s, ‘a Bakelite cased unit housing a pair of rollers manually operated by two winding arms to the side, with 24cm wide plastic window displaying a Bartholomew’s road map for South-West England’ … Continue reading →

Posted in design, history | 1 Comment

Lost in action

Posted on February 13, 2013 by things magazine

John Glassie’s Tumblr is a repository of ‘interesting things’, many of which have some bearing on the great Athanasius Kircher, and specifically to Glassie’s book, A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (more … Continue reading →

Posted in esoterica, history | 1 Comment