Applications are also invited for a new RHS programme for 2026, co-hosted with @ihr.bsky.social and @chalkefestival.bsky.social. 'Pitch my Project' is for early career historians to present their research at the Chalke History Festival in June bit.ly/44kfUMM. Closing date: 6 February. #Skystorians

christ, what the fuck are we even doing here

Tomorrow marks 10 years since the greatest piece of art of our generation

Some of the best telly ever.

Halal butchers in Newham are advertising their “festive Halal turkeys”. Tommy Robinson is scared of Newham but it’s most a place that shows what happen when lots of different faiths and cultures live happily alongside each other.

‘A sound archivist told me he and his colleagues could earn more in the private sector but they work here for less pay because “we believe in what we do.”’ Anna Aslanyan on the picket line at the British Library, from the blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

Uh oh

"Write! The written letter endures!" Scribal wit at the start of financial records for London bridge in 1424. Cleverly, the scribe created the letter 'S' by folding a speech scroll, so the form of the letter conveys the meaning of the conventional proverb, "speech is fleeting but writing endures."

I wish a notice like this wasn't necessary. www.icrc.org/en/article/i...

👑 A slice of 20th century London design heritage is making an unexpected comeback: In a story first reported by @ianvisits.co.uk, the historic GLC coat of arms, used between 1965 and 1986, will soon become the emblem of the Greater London Authority (GLA), as the body celebrates its 25th birthday.

To propose that GenAI can compensate for "archival silences" perverts Trouillot's work. It's is a contradiction to say that a product whose logic exacerbates power imbalances--creating a most-likely guess based on the existing record--can restore absences that are the product of those imbalances.

Some of London's urban motorways were built. Some were planned but spades never hit the ground. And some were so vague, so ethereal, that we still don't even know what they were called. Take a journey with us on a road that's little more than a ghost. www.roads.org.uk/ringways/nor...

I have a new Substack article about the potential of Gemi 3 Pro to assist with machine transcription of medium and low resource languages #history #translation #palaeography #digitalhumanities @timhitchcock.bsky.social @dancohen.org @tedunderwood.com open.substack.com/pub/generati...

Who pays for upgrading the energy network, the private energy companies making huge profits, or us? Ofgem, the energy regulator, has announced that £108 will be added to our bills by 2031 to pay for upgrading the network.

For today's Explore Archives - #EYAPets: the amazing Amy Dillwyn, pioneer of industry AND lesbian fiction, with her pet dog. For her diary see www.southwalesrecordsociety.co.uk/37.htm

If JKR is willing to destroy every women's and girls' organisation and institution in this country in her crusade against trans rights, make her fucking do it. Call her bluff. Full juridicial kamikaze. Show everyone how much these ghouls really care about women's and girls' spaces.

It is essential to remember that Sensible centrists got everything they wanted in the UK. The left smashed, their Competent Sensible politicians won by a landslide last year and have a huge majority and the policies they dreamed of implemented. And the result is endless horror.

Happy Birthday to William Blake, who knows where the wild things are...

I'm no Luddite - far from it - but the ways in which in this development has been spoken of seem blind to, or completely uninterested in, what cannot be machine read and searched for: the pounce, sweat marks, soot, or wax; the non-semantic yet semiotically rich substrate that OCR strips away.

Exactly the same as the Iraq Inquiry though: straight in the bin and never spoken of again, not least because none of it would’ve happened this way without the close, hand-in-glove cooperation of the British press. Don’t want to look to hard at that stuff.

Exactly one woman has won the Booker in the past six years www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

January is bleak with nothing happening EXCEPT you can come to the London Metropolitan Archives for my talk on sexuality in the capital during the Second World War, from the cover of the blackout to LGBT+ lives AND new research on the mackintosh fetish scene: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/men-at-war...

This is an amazing piece of work, the London Ringways being one of the great “what ifs” of 20C town planning

Congratulations to Labour who have won the coveted Tommy Robinson endorsement. Excited for sensibles to explain to me why I have to vote for the people enacting actual fascist policy.

“Only one woman author—not as famous as Capote—equaled the power of his 1947 photograph: Jane Bowles in Karl Bissinger‘s portrait, taken in 1946 to accompany a story of hers that appeared in Harper‘s Bazaar.” — Hilton Als, The Women, WHITE GIRLS (p109) *Loving this book.

I would quite like his high-collared winter overcoat. And those natty little yellow gloves.

It’s difficult to underestimate the extra burden that this is placing on our public libraries. For example, on a daily basis library workers are now filling the in-person/human service gap that billion euro banking institutions have abdicated from to maximise their profit margins.

🚨 Archive Job Alert 🚨 📜 Fancy working with our fantastic archive collections? We're looking for a *new* MRC Manager to lead our service! Could this be YOU? Find out more about the role at warwick-careers.tal.net/vx/lang-en-G... More about the MRC at warwick.ac.uk/services/lib...

The ability of the far right to insist that their views - trans people are lying perverts, climate change is a hoax, immigrants are all thieving, raping scum - are necessarily legitimate & must be given a hearing is already a vast victory for forms of extremism beyond the pale not long ago.

Really pleased to announce the launch of the all-new, all-dancing, London Lives website - www.londonlives.org It has been thoroughly re-engineered to facilitate more types of search, and redesigned for phones and tablets. The team very much hopes peope like it. 1/

Hi Lisa Nandy! I’m a BAFTA winner from a small town. Instead of asinine questions like this, why not tell us how we can continue to make a living in the eviscerated creative sector over which you notionally preside?

Everytime I think about this I get so angry. Not just my wasted time but the ~20 other ppl who helped me with this internally & externally, the fricking community partners who put in time and got NOTHING. For a 1-2% success rate. How on EARTH is this good use of tax funding? Wish I hadn't bothered.

Welp The dead internet theory is feeling pretty smug right now

I’m going to tell my students this was Brexit

the tories are proposing to deport 5-7% of the UK's (legal) population not of immigrants, of all of us

Step back into London's Music Hall! 🎩 🏛️ Join The London Archives for talks, rare document displays & expert insights : www.thelondonarchives.org/whats-on/cen... 🎭 Head to @canalmuseum.bsky.social for 'Gatti's Music Hall' – a live Victorian performance www.canalmuseum.org.uk/whatson/musi...

🐸

Almost everything I've seen about implementing AI in archives feels as though it was written in a world with neither archivists nor archival description

The LCC planners in County Hall couldn't open the windows because their plans would be covered in dirt and grit. Up to 4,000 died in the Great Smog of 1952. Today? Air quality is on the up and up. 'Yesterday's Britain, A Better Britain' is a sick joke. Never go back. (2/2)

How has paperwork served as a tool of empowerment for people who often find power elusive? In our latest podcast, a group of historians, archivists, and activists met at the Raphael Samuel History Centre (@rshc.bsky.social) to discuss the hidden history of paperwork 🗃️🎙️

Making archival boxes: Human🤝Machine If you don't fancy watching a box being made for 90 seconds, I would look away now. Our conservation team, and their big scary machine, make around 2000 boxes every year. They can be made to almost any size and dimension, and can be completely customised.

At Lambeth Archives we are recruiting a Borough Archivist, details: effe.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid... Please share!

Great news! JSTOR now have a free account with an Independent Researcher category. You can access 100 documents per month www.jstor.org/action/showL...

Hold up, hold up. *This* is a key financial backer of the Tony Blair Institute for Change, and the owner of the company in pole position to deal with the UK's digital ID roll-out? RIGHTO. fortune.com/2024/09/17/o...

A short post about the Modern British City, out in November: www.lundhumphries.com/blogs/featur...

And also that to be autistic is to be a tragedy, a burden on society, a problem that must be solved. This is deeply dangerous stuff.

Marginalia... Ornate H's... Indeterminate beasts... Snails with ears.... Declarations of love for Elizabeth I.... This Churchwarden's account book from the 1570s has it all.

seems about right

So the DFS sale really has been going on as long as we thought

And to say once again: Maureen is co-responsible for the existence of both PLR & ALCS, so every writer in the UK & Ireland should give her 💐💐💐. And read her books!