For the last eleven years of my government service, I worked for the Department for Transport (DfT) in Great Minister House (GMH), overlooking Horseferry Road, a dreary thoroughfare. At my previous department I'd once enjoyed a view of the river, so this was a comedown. But in London, nowhere is truly dull. Great Minister House, built in 1995 Rise and Fall of the Horse Ferry There are many blue plaques in the City of Westminster showing where the famous once lived or worked,

Years ago I had a debate with an acquaintance who insisted he would never read a work of fiction because it is not true, and therefore by definition, it is a lie. But although characters and events may be made up, fiction can still help us see the truth in a way that whole volumes of facts and statistics cannot. A history book can accurately tell us what happened when and where, but it cannot take you there and make you feel it, unless your powers of imagination are truly ext

After I’d left my father’s primary school our relationship entered a new phase. We were no longer living in each other’s pockets nearly every minute of nearly every day. Perhaps that is why in the summer of 1970, he decided that it would be a good idea to leave Mum behind and go on a road trip, just the two of us. Mum and Dad in London in 1968 I wrote before about my struggles with car sickness, but, rather embarrassingly, this Welsh boy has never been car sick in England. Th

Sixty-eight. Blimey. Now that I am of an age that my father never reached, I find myself thinking about him a lot and regretting that, as an adult, I never got to know him. When you are a child you don’t consider your parents to be people…they’re just parents aren't they. They’re all right, but you do sometimes wish they were richer, more accomplished or perhaps just a little bit cooler. Could my father not have had a Zodiac convertible rather than a poky little Anglia? In

Things that helped me remember. A Mass of Contradictions As a child, I adored motor cars and everything associated with them - garages, road signs, tax disks. I had quite an impressive selection of Dinky and Corgi diecast toy cars. I may have had James Bond’s golden Aston Martin, complete with bullet-proof shield and ejector seat, but most of the models were replicas of the saloons, estates and convertibles one saw on the roads at the time. If anyone in our family bought a ne

Between the wars, aviation became a national obsession. Besides the thrill of it, its potential for drawing the rest of the empire closer was increasingly appreciated - and unfortunately the Great War had also proven how effective it could be in attacking an enemy. Not that aviators were much safer in peacetime, in rickety wooden planes and gas filled dirigibles. R101 at its Cardington mooring tower (British Newspaper Archive) In November 2024, I caught a train to Bedford to

The everyday experience of ordinary people in any era has little to do with the words and deeds of monarchs and politicians, and everything to do with work, transport, shops, food, sport and pubs. These things are so common that an appreciation of them only seems to grow as they change or fade and disappear. In recreating the past, I aim to recall these things and immerse the reader in the period, which means getting the details right, as far as I can. Take a simple bus ride.

In the late 1980s, when I lived in Wood Green and worked at King’s Cross, the underground line I used most was the Piccadilly Line. Between Caledonian Road and King’s Cross, if you look out of the correct side of the train, a break in the cables that run through the tunnels heralds a fleeting glimpse of the deserted platforms of a disused station. This was York Road which was closed on 17th September 1932. It certainly caught my imagination and I desperately wished that I co