The London Museum Docklands opened its new exhibition ‘Secrets of the Thames: mudlarking London’s lost treasures’ last week. It’s an exquisite exhibition focused on fascinating archaeological objects found on the Thames foreshore and the role of the “mudlarks” who found them and continue to expose thousands of...
This is an interesting tale. A Fokker D.VII fighter aircraft is being returned to the Netherlands where it will go on display at the National Military Museum, Soesterberg. The biplane was designed during the First World War, and went into service with the Dutch Fleet Air Arm...
The Swedish army has always wanted to arm itself independently with Swedish designed vehicles (The Strv S being an obvious example), but at the same time it has been pragmatic enough to recognise when local design and development is lagging behind, and has gone shopping for foreign...
The Cambrai Tank 1917 Museum is built around the remains of Deborah, a British WW1 tank that took part in a major armoured attack on German lines in November 1917. Battle of Cambrai The town of Cambrai in the Nord department of France, north of Paris and...
One of the world’s most valuable watches will go on display for the first time in the UK in a new exhibition: Versailles: Science and Splendour, which opens on 12 December at the Science Museum in London. The No.160 watch by Abraham-Louis Breguet – named ‘Marie Antoinette’...
The Dunkirk Maritime and Port Museum (Musée Maritime & Portuaire de Dunkerque) tells the history of France’s third largest port, its workers, its ships, and its seamen. “Wait! What? Third largest?” That may come as a surprise to some, because to most people, especially anglophiles, Dunkerque or...
Plans are underway at the Royal Air Force Museum Midlands* for the wing section of an iconic Second World War Dornier Do 17 to go on public display in early 2025. Salvaged after more than 70 years submerged beneath the waters of the Goodwin Sands, this unique...
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...
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 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...
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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