It's that week again, when all the new intake at Lowestoft's Benjamin Britten Academy get to visit the Red House and find out about their town's most famous native. A busy week for us all but immensely rewarding: with luck they leave here with a sense of ownership about heritage and the arts.

Walking over the Red House garden between meetings: light fading over the Archive (and the medlar tree).

Fascinating and vital work (though the detail that when you clock up three years in service you become eligible for inclusion in a terracotta-army style group of statues is a bit disconcerting).

Attention, SE19 people and those within reach...

At the @lithouse.bsky.social conference at Elizabeth Gaskell's house (@eilzabethgaskellsh.bsky.social) and really enjoying the way there are even quotes in the Gents. (I'm pleased to report there was *no* pestiferous smell.)

Setting off to the @lithouse.bsky.social conference in Manchester today; the glamour of work travel...

There is still time to apply for one of our 50+ Visiting Fellowships @bodleian.ox.ac.uk for the 2026-27 academic year! A vibrant interdisciplinary research centre in the heart of one of the world’s great libraries!

Quayside at Snape Maltings this morning, en route between meetings.

The man on a mission to save Mauritania’s ‘city of libraries’ from encroaching desert sands

On this day in 2017, I was at a conference in Manchester and as I had time, walked there from Piccadilly along the Rochdale Canal. (I found myself passing the site of the legendary Haçienda, now gone.) All utterly transformed since I mooched around there in a trench-coat in the early 1980s.

“Against stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.” Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens. (Die Jungfrau von Orleans) Friedrich Schiller, German philosopher, playwright, co-founder with Goethe of Weimar Theatre; born #OTD 1759. Portrait c 1810 by von Kügelgen Frankfurter Goethe-Haus

Out exploring medieval Suffolk churches in the autumn landscape and as light faded we came to the tiny church at Hoo, held together by buttresses and giant staples. Nice to stumble across somewhere with a (partial) dedication to St. Eustachius; not a name you often see in the UK.

A good time, it seems, for a thread about public sculptures of, and by, women that have been installed in the last 10 years or so... Aphra Benn in Canterbury, Licoricia in Winchester, Mary Anning in Lyme Regis, Dervorguilla in Oxford...

Interesting on the way nations and their zones of interest meet out at sea, over the horizon. (Also good to see a @geograph-gbi.bsky.social image from @grahamar.bsky.social in there....)

I'd never thought about this; but of course, all those consistenty-coloured war grave headstones one sees all over, had to be quarried somewhere.

Fascinating from an urban history perspective (I've only ever ticked off the outside of these shelters) and, simultaneously, worrying from an archival one: as a profession we send (sometimes confidential) stuff to places like this and would like to think strangers can't just wander in and get at it.

How things linger: it'll be 40 years next year since the GLC was abolished and this is still there. (Mind you, a lot of London street signs still carry the names of Metropolitan Boroughs swept away when the GLC came in in '65; if no-one's tasked with tidying things up, stuff can linger for ever.)

Job klaxon 📢: fancy managing a busy University archives service? Now's your chance: warwick-careers.tal.net/vx/lang-en-G...

I grew up roughly halfway between Keele (good, "somebody here really cares") and Sandbach (appalling, "we could hardly believe anyone would serve it, but they did"). What this says about my own culinary prowess I'm not sure - could swing either way, I suppose.

Wow! 😮🤩 There's a new interactive map of Every Known Road in the Roman Empire!! 🤓 itiner-e.org We might have to have a lie-down.

Out on the beach between Aldeburgh and Thorpeness, reconnoitring for a heritage walk I'm going to be leading during the Aldeburgh Festival next summer.

A few days ago I spoke to Thordis Fridriksson of BBC Radio Suffolk about the Red House - events coming up in the next few days, and the House in general. You can hear it on BBC Sounds, here, from about 2:13:25: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Poet Wilfred Owen died #OTD in 1918, a week short of the Armistice: this is the statue of him in his home town, Oswestry. Britten used Owen's poetry in his 1962 War Requiem and the following year Owen's brother Harold sent him a manuscript of Wilfred's "Anthem For Doomed Youth" in appreciation.

Relaxed hours: Secret Maps @britishlibrary.bsky.social for visitors 14+. Sunday 23 November two sessions available 11.15am-1pm and 11.45am-1pm. This is a free opportunity to visit the new exhibition in a more relaxed environment. events.bl.uk/events/secre... #Autism #AutisminMuseums

Britten Pears Arts has a stall at today's #HistDay25 in Senate House - come along and find out what research sources we can offer!

Furry seal skin AND tiny Icelandic manuscripts! www.sciencenorway.no/cultural-his... www.icelandreview.com/news/rare-15...

Olympe de Gouges was executed #OTD 1793. A pioneering French feminist and abolitionist, de Gouges wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen in 1791, demanding equal rights for women during the French Revolution.

If you love maps and you know London, you need to dig into this. (I thought I knew this stuff already, having worked with GLC planning documents back in the late 80s, but keep stumbling on new fab facts - e.g. in the picture below, the way the M11 at Woodford contains the ghost of the unbuilt M12.)

Lovely demonstration of how there are little clues to past life everywhere if you keep your eyes open.

Public service announcement - if you have a LinkedIn account and don't want it used for AI training, this is how to opt out. (Doing this just now I found various other things I could opt out of as well, so that was a fun few minutes shifting sliders to "Off".)

Goodness, this was strangely nostalgic in some respects (grim in others, of course): in my 1970s childhood so many news bulletins seemed to have telephoto shots of a distant hijacked airliner parked in shimmering heat. The extremists who hijacked the 1970s player.fm/1CBRMHM

Archives hive mind! Any ideas for remote online transcribing projects which would appeal to a retired archivist who loves palaeography and is coming to an end of their present project? Could be anything C16th-C20th, but I lean towards the earlier material unless it’s a topic I’m interested in.

Interesting stuff on the transformation of records from paper to digital, and its impact on history: the sort of thing archivists think about a lot.... Myspace and MTV: how will future historians study the 21st century? player.fm/1CBMkWH

Are you a cataloguer or interested in cataloguing and have a view on whether LCSH is fit for purpose in a UK context? CILIP MDG @cilipmdg.bsky.social are hosting a Worldcafe event (a big meeting basically!) to discuss ideas at Wellcome Library in London Wed 26th Nov www.cilip.org.uk/events/Event...

From the weekend: always a joy to go through East Midlands Parkway and see these big beasts again. So many of the cooling tower landmarks that punctuated the landscape in my 20th century youth are gone - Didcot, Ferrybridge - but I hope we can keep a few examples as monuments to the age of coal.

George Eliot's #Geneva window. She translated #Spinoza here! I don't know if the apartment included a room of her own, but she does now have a street of her own. #GeorgeEliot #womenshistory #womenslit #womeninphilosophy #philsky

Should you find yourself in the general Peterborough area, I'm giving a talk in aid of the John Clare Cottage appeal on Sat 15 Nov, 3pm www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/inconvenie...

The historic Dr Johnson’s House in the City, home to the famous dictionary writer, is to start opening on Sundays for a few months to make it easier to visit at weekends. www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/sun...

A week to go in the open season and we've just cracked the 900 mark for visitors to Stories from the Archive sessions. Let's see how many more we can get by the end of the month... 1/2

A map showing how the Post Office Tower was never a secret, next to an Enigma machine that was a flawed attempt to keep secrets, are two highlights of an exhibition about secret maps. www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/war...

Low sun illuminating the pampas grass in front of the archive this morning. (By the time the public arrive the sun will have moved round to the right and this angle will be gone.)

In London today (for a meeting on the AI-driven features arriving in our digital asset management system), and as ever I'm struck how I lived there for 30 years and still find streets in the city centre I've never been down. This is the first time I've seen the former "Intrepid Fox" pub, in Soho.

Head to the Museum of Croydon to celebrate the life and legacy of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor🎶 A brand new, interactive exhibition brings to life the extraordinary story of this Black British composer and conductor. #BlackHistoryMonth www.culturecroydon.com/event/the-so...

A touring exhibition arrives at Grimsby Minster this week telling the story of the lost town of Ravenser Odd: The Sunken Island of the Humber lost in the 14th century. 👇 BBC News - Touring exhibition tells story of lost town www.bbc.com/news/article...

🎨 Discover the genius of Abram Games! Our latest archived lecture ‘Maximum Meaning, Minimum Means’ is now on YouTube 🎥 Naomi Games explores her father’s design philosophy that shaped iconic 20th Century British imagery 🇬🇧 👉https://youtu.be/eS0Xp70Nz1o?si=nSBFbmUpVjaXyxqK&t=25 #AirpowerTalk

Trip to Essex Record Office this afternoon for the East of England Archive Council... Serious hassle on the A12 coming home, so I veered off the main road and ended up in Silver End, built between the wars as a model village for Crittalls workers. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_...

Born #OTD in 1854, French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Here from the Britten Pears archive are some items relating to Britten's setting of his "Les Illuminations": Britten's copy of the text and the page in the score for "Being Beauteous" which he has dedicated to Peter Pears (PNLP).

Reminded by chance that #OTD in 2011 I stumbled on a secret bit of London: a usually-closed gate on Park Crescent led first to a little park and then through a secret tunnel under Marylebone Road to a larger open area bordering Regents Park. 1/3

This is one of the cool things about contributing to @geograph-gbi.bsky.social: stumbling across things that someone else has taken the trouble to get knowledgeable about and to record. I've seen "Observer Corps" sites on old maps, but never known what they were. www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1363594

Well, there's a thing (just as the fact becomes a little less topical)...