Minister won’t confirm or deny whether Government is carrying out surveillance of ice cream vans on Westminster Bridge www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=20...

This month, 1889, England's first Black Lady Boxers continued to give exhibition matches, performing at the New Cross Public Hall, South London 🥊 Here's 'Violet' and 'Rosaline', the Sisters Mills, pictured with their promotor, top middleweight Alf Ball: grapplingwithhistory.com/2024/03/10/f...

Work in progress. I'm slightly obsessed with turn-of-the-(19th)century theatre/pantomime/circus playbills at the moment, so I'm re-creating posters and ads for more recent productions (and products) in that style. #graphics #movies #davidlynch #victorian

Boxing Day, chasing Hezekiah Moscow's ghost in Nottingham! (Day off?? 😂). The Malt Cross Music Hall was the first home of the Nottingham Amateur Boxing Association, inaugural coaches - Will Atkins (Irish) and 'Prince Ching Ghook' aka Hezekiah Moscow (Caribbean). 1886 🥊

The Embassy staff of Germany, France and the United Kingdom sing Schedryk in the Kyiv underground. Wonderful!

Washington is to be renamed Trumpton.

📣 New #OpenAccess article 🏮 Margo Buelens-Terryn, Ilja Van Damme and @thomassmits.bsky.social, 'Projecting cities: illustrated lantern lectures as forgotten practice of place promotion in Belgium, c. 1900 – c. 1920' 🔗 doi.org/10.1017/S096... #UrbanHistory

Just a reminder that at least 600 Americans were fired for failing to show sufficient respect after Charlie Kirk's murder.

We are monitoring, thinking, and praying.

In late 2020 a Chinese man called Guan Heng travelled to Xinjiang with our BuzzFeed map of detention facilities to provide ground truth for our work - he provided the first corroborating evidence for many sites. He escaped to the US - then ICE detained him. www.wsj.com/world/china/...

Fantastic image!

I was upgrading the quality of a WW1 image and came across this. 🗃️

Current challenge - which hippodrome (word on the caps) / circus does this c1890s photo, by Albert E. Coe of Norwich, show? Do click on the image!

also mention of garden implements, singing birds, ornamental fish, basket work and children's toys ... so when was the UK's first garden centre? Wikipedia thinks 1955 but I'll lay odds this lease (1857) was copying the sort of things you could get from some Victorian 'nurseries'

What skill did you master that you will never, ever use again? Riding a giraffe unicycle (and - not shown here - juggling fire torches on it, including a throw under a leg).

The results that @marinelives.bsky.social is getting using Gemini 3 Pro, transcribing and translating Armenian ms materials are stunning. Historians, teachers and archivists really need to be discussing where we want to be with this stuff. open.substack.com/pub/generati...

Brilliant piece by @mjrobbins.com on the Oxfordshire rubbish dump - and what it says about the failure of state institutions and rising sense of lawlessness. martinrobbins.substack.com/p/rubbish-mo...

It's #MuseumShopSunday weekend! 🎉 Celebrate by taking 20% off your new individual membership – you could join us and get all our great benefits from as little as £3.84 per month 💸 Just use code MUSSHOP20 by Monday 1 December to grab the deal 👉 https://ow.ly/h2ch50XyViE

I've realised what "See it, say it, sorted" is advertising: driving I'm at a station and there's a constant barrage of announcements about danger. *See it say it... Transport Police... Mind the gap... For your own safety..." You know what doesn't constantly tell me I'm in danger? My car

The footway parking ban in England consultation closed 5 years ago tomorrow. The Tories' inaction is now Labour's inaction. www.gov.uk/government/c...

New research article: 'Capital Entertainment: The London Pantomimes of Nelson Lee, c.1830–1870', by Stephen Ridgwell: www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

BREAKING: The Supreme Court has ruled in favour of a Belfast-based non-religious father and his child that the exclusively Christian teaching of Religious Education and mandatory Christian collective worship in Northern Ireland are discriminatory under human rights law.

The real BBC bias story, narrated by Anna Ford

Gustav Klimt portrait sells for $236.4m, making it the second most expensive artwork ever sold at auction

This is a vital essay by @johnspringford.bsky.social & @acjsissons.bsky.social - diagnosing the British malaise and providing a set of clear policy solutions. You will be much better informed for having read it getting-out-of-the-hole.uk

This perfectly encapsulates why we need the BBC

I've decided to become a thinktank. This is how thinktanks work. They decide to become a thinktank, declare themselves thinktanks and then because they're thinktanks, they can be quoted as newsworthy. I can now spout any bollocks I like, and can be used in any news piece that it suits.

NEW The letter the BBC could send back to Trump A proposal for a reply to his $1bn claim By me. Enjoy. emptycity.substack.com/p/the-letter...

In a celeb-obsessed world, someone thought what could be better than three famous artists collaborating in a new exhibition. As it turns out, the answer is almost anything else could be better. www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/tri...

The Varieties (Variety Theatre or Harwood’s Hall) in Pitfield Street, Hoxton, a short distance from Shoreditch church, was built in 1869 behind the White Horse pub. It was designed by the leading theatre architect, C. J. Phipps, who probably devoted more attention to the pub facade t

Delighted to pick up The Hanlon Volta Waltzes, 1885 sheet music composed by Charles Seaton who had a stall at Crystal Palace where the five strong aerial troupe performed.

Loving today's news that the mysterious "fedora man" outside the Louvre heist was actually a 15-year-old museum visitor who dresses like a 1940s French detective all the time, just because. apnews.com/article/louv...

1/ The US Government has quietly removed a memorial to Black soldiers who died in World War II from the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten, South Limburg. The move follows a complaint from the right-wing Heritage Foundation to the American Battle Monuments Commission. ⬇️

My review of the scratch cabaret by alumni of the National Centre for Circus Arts is online thecircusdiaries.com/scratch-caba...

🎬 The arts aren’t a luxury - they’re an export. At #Lab25, @aiannucci.bsky.social reminds us that the UK’s Creative Industries make up 6% of our economy and 7% of our workforce - the GDP equivalent of oil + car industries combined. 🎥 Watch more clips from the Creative UK Pavilion hubs.ly/Q03QVhV90

It's been a while...my much neglected blog actually has a new post. A lovely follow up to a story I wrote way back in Feb 2017, Panic at the Newport Empire #MusicHall #blog musichallalice.wordpress.com/2025/11/05/p...

As I expected, the NCCA’s scratch cabaret at the Underbelly Boulevard by graduates since 2019 was a succession of solo female single-point aerialists (nine in total) moving competently to backing tracks, plus a female hula-hoopist.

@hackneycyclist.bsky.social have you a council contact please to get the Hoxton Market cycle parking decluttered of dead bikes?

'During a performance for a Shriners convention, a Sky Dancer aerialist skips rope on a small platform high (at least 20 stories) above the streets of downtown, Chicago' John Dominis, 1955

I wrote a piece about London music halls for The Times ahead of an exhibition at The London Archive. @victorianlondon.bsky.social was among the contributors. www.thetimes.com/uk/london/ar...

🚨BREAKING: Activists have imprisoned DANGEROUS TERRORISTS Mandela, Gandhi, and Millicent Fawcett statues in Parliament Square. They've been placed behind bars to expose the UK's extreme crackdown on protest. The heroes the government celebrates would be imprisoned today under their extreme laws.

Oh look @jim.londoncentric.media, The Metro suddenly has an ‘original’ story on snail farming tax avoidance remarkably like the wonderful story that @londoncentric.media comprehensively researched and published a few days earlier.

who creates the lively art and music scenes if the rent is too high? who makes cultural life? who serves you food or washes your dishes? who creates the fancy little restaurants that draw you to urban living? affordable housing is at the heart of what makes city life worthwhile.

Here's a question for you before 7am. If you're in London, 1886, and you pop to your local public hall to watch boxing, wrestling, military displays, a man cutting a sheep in half with a sword &c. would you expect that sheep to be: - a fake sheep - real sheep, but dead - alive (well, briefly) ?

Bit blatant of the Louvre criminals, no? ebay.us/m/OYE8LE

TOMORROW NIGHT - 'In the Limelight' - A History of Black Performers in Morecambe. We look forward to hearing Kirsty Roberts, talking about the Black performers who regularly graced the town's stages—artists like Adelaide Hall, Clayton 'Peg Leg' Bates, and Cassie Walmer. Book HERE

This photo accompanying a news story about the heist at the Louvre is perfection.