Not many people outside France have heard of Puy du Fou*. Those international visitors who discover it, almost always become fans for life. The 500 acre park in the Vendée region of France, packed with extraordinary attractions, refers to itself as a historical ‘theme park’ with period...
The Indian Government has approved plans for a huge National Maritime Heritage Complex (NMHC) at Lothal in Gujarat, an inland archaeological port site from the Harappan era (aka the Indus Valley Civilisation), now 30 miles from the sea. It is being billed as the biggest maritime heritage...
Over 300,000 historic items from the Science Museum Group* collection have been carefully moved into a new facility at the National Collections Centre in the Science and Innovation Park near Swindon in Wiltshire. The new Hawking Building, named after Prof. Stephen Hawking, is not a museum. It...
The Calais Memorial Museum (Le Musée Mémoire 39-45 de Calais) is housed in a large (94m long) German WW2 concrete bunker in the middle of the Saint-Pierre park in downtown Calais. The bunker was a command post, built in 1941 for the Kriegsmarine (German Navy). Hidden among...
The ‘Bullecourt 1917, Jean & Denise Letaille Museum’, to give it its full name, is the home of an evocative collection of WW1 artefacts collected and preserved by Bullecourt farmer and former mayor, Jean Letaille and his wife Denise. Jean had been finding battlefield relics in his...
United have signed a deal with SpaceX to bring the Starlink Wi-Fi service to the airline’s mainline and regional aircraft fleet, for free. United customers will enjoy the same high-speed, low-latency internet service in the air that they enjoy on the ground. The new, gate-to-gate connectivity will...
Engineers at the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu are working hard to bring one of the classic cars in their collection back to life – the extraordinary record-breaking Sunbeam 1000hp. See: The car and the story so far – Back in January the museum began fund-raising for...
The search is on for a priceless piece of British luxury car brand Aston Martin’s earliest history. A1 was the very first car to be built by Bamford & Martin Ltd, the company that would quickly become Aston Martin. Nicknamed ‘Coal Scuttle’ because of its simple styling...
Dondi’s Astrarium is considered to be the very first mechanical planetary clock. It was designed in Italy at the end of the 14th century by Giovanni Dondi (1330-1388) who created this large brass mechanism, roughly a metre tall, to automate the complex calculations necessary to create horoscopes....
The huge World War II underground site in a clay quarry at Mimoyecques was the secret location intended for several batteries of German ultra long range superguns, Hitler’s V3 weapon, aimed at London. The V-Weapon Programme The Third Reich’s propaganda ministry first mentioned a sinister programme of...
The London Transport Museum has a huge collection of fascinating vehicles, artefacts, documents and memorabilia covering, not only the technical history of London’s growing transport networks from the 19th century and earlier, but also many of the social changes that developed alongside them. The collection was started...
The word is, Australian filmmaker Anthony Maras is working on a new WW2 movie titled Pressure, which focuses on the go/no-go decision that Gen Eisenhower had to make on the eve of D-Day and the role that meteorologist Group Captain James Stagg played in that famous decision....
The citizens of Paris, and visitors to the Olympic Games (26 Jul – 11 Aug), may be among the first to see how close we all are to the new world of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) now that the French Government has given the go ahead to...
You could say, the Newark Aviation Museum is having a bit of a lie down! The museum has just been loaned the extraordinary Gloster Meteor F8 Prone, which has been on display at the RAF Museum, Cosford* for many years. The Meteor F8 Prone was built in...
This is a niche blog about technically-minded travel. It reflects my own interests in the mechanical, technical, historical, engineering, transport and military world.
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