A new display of ‘Jolly Roger’ flags flown by Royal Navy submarines is launched today (27/03/2024) at The Royal Navy Submarine Museum, Gosport. It will expand the museum’s previous collection of Jolly Rogers by including the earliest known surviving example and the museum’s newest acquisition, a Jolly...
The London Canal Museum (LCM) has launched its new summer season of canal boat trips on the Regent’s canal. Booking is open now and the trips start on 28th March. This is the museum’s second season of trips made possible by a collaboration with the nearby Angel...
Ever wondered just how busy your street is? Telraam is a clever technical initiative that enables ordinary residents to gather data on the traffic passing their window. The Telraam sensor continuously monitors a street from a citizen’s window, providing crucial data on various types of transport, including...
A memorial garden in Senghenydd, which commemorates those who died in the worst disaster in the history of British mining, has been given the “recognition it deserves” and formally acknowledged by the Welsh Government as the National Mining Disaster Memorial Garden of Wales. The garden was officially...
Hagerty’s Festival of the Unexceptional (FOTU) celebrates its 10-year anniversary at Grimsthorpe Castle, Lincolnshire on Saturday 27th July. I didn’t know there was such a thing, but I love the way it gently sends itself up! Festival of the Unexceptional, a show dedicated to great everyday classic...
The Normandy Victory Museum, sub-titled the Musée de la Bataille des Haies (Battle of the Hedgerows Museum) is quite a large museum (2,000 m²) and is definitely worth a visit, especially around lunchtime, because it also has a large brasserie restaurant split into a bistro and pizzeria....
A new photographic exhibition, Echoes of the Blitz: Underground shelters in Ukraine and London, is opening at the London Transport Museum tomorrow (Fri 1st March 2024). The exhibition compares and contrasts 70 wartime images taken almost 80 years apart in the Tube stations of London and the...
This is a bit of fun. What if the world’s most famous fashion houses muscled their way into the automobile industry? How would their distinctive house styles emerge on four wheels? Of course, in real life many of the world’s top fashion designers have been invited to...
The 100-year-old American steam logging locomotive, Mount Emily Shay No.1, travelled by flatcar to its new home, the Oregon Rail Heritage Center, on Thursday (15 Feb). The historic locomotive had been in the care of the Oregon Historical Society (OHS) for more than six decades when, in...
A new exhibition featuring 23 exotic clockwork treasures beloved by Chinese emperors, and loaned from The Palace Museum in Beijing, opened this week at the Science Museum in London. The magnificent 18th century automata, called Zimingzhong 凝时聚珍: meaning ‘self-sounding bells’ or ‘bells that ring themselves’, combine timekeeping,...
The Bawdsey Radar Museum is a small museum set up in the former transmission bunker on the 168-acre Bawdsey Manor estate, which became the home of British radar development in the 1930s, and later became RAF Bawdsey, a radar training school and Cold War missile base. The...
After a successful and busy centenary year in 2023, Flying Scotsman‘s future was unclear at the start of this year. Now we are being drip fed more news as 2024 progresses. Flying Scotsman is owned by the National Railway Museum (NRM). UPDATE 18/12/2024 – Woah! Two updates...
Blenheim Palace, home to the Dukes of Marlborough since 1705, has started its annual deep clean, which, it turns out, is quite a complex process requiring more than a can of Pledge (other multi-surface cleaners are available) and a feather duster! The deep clean includes everything from...
The National Motor Museum at Beaulieu says that fundraising for its Sunbeam 1000hp restoration, began last March and has now reached £50,000, putting it well on the path to raising the £300k needed to take the car to Daytona in the USA for the centenary of its...
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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