HMS Victory’s team of conservators, shipwrights and riggers have started taking down her remaining masts as part of The Big Repair – the ten-year, £42m project to conserve Nelson’s flagship for future generations. As Stuart Sheldon, Lead Rigger at the National Museum of the Royal Navy, puts...
The London Museum Docklands is a ‘must-see’ museum that tells the history of the River Thames and the growth of London’s huge port system from the first Roman settlements to the modern-day regeneration of the Canary Wharf area. It is housed, appropriately, right at the heart of...
The National Motor Museum has opened its new exhibition gallery, Driven: Britain’s Motoring Story. The exhibition focuses on how Britain has changed over the decades, delving into the social and cultural impact of motoring. It features stories, artefacts and images to surprise, engage and inspire visitors, plus...
The Škoda Museum in Mladá Boleslav, Czechia, has opened a new gallery in the former car plant buildings, featuring 31 ‘concept cars’, design studies and prototypes from the late 1950s to the present day. The museum, which opened in 1995 in the original factory building and underwent...
Operation Dynamo was the name given to the hurried extraction of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), plus allies (mostly French), from the beach at Dunkirk (Dunkerque) in May/June 1940. The Musée Dunkerque 1940 is located in Bastion 32, the headquarters for the French and Allied forces during...
The Museum of Science and Technology in Vienna (Technisches Museum Wien) is, like us in the UK, celebrating 200 years of technical and social advances brought about by the railway. Their temporary exhibition Under the Spell of the Railway – 200 Years of Rail Transport, opened in...
The Airborne Museum at Sainte-Mère-Église is considered a ‘must see’ for those touring Normandy, and it’s usually one of the first or last stops on a tour of the Normandy beaches because it’s out there on the western flank, which is exactly why the US airborne forces...
I love this quirky little French 6-wheeler from 1939. It’s a Laffly V15T with 4-wheel drive, plus an extra two wheels to get it over lumps & bumps! It had a top speed of 58 kph and was used primary by the French cavalry as an artillery...
The Marmon Herrington Mk4 SARC (South African Reconnaissance Car) was introduced to Allied forces in 1943 after wheeled vehicles had proved very useful in the first engagements with the Afrika Korps. The SARC was a speedy (85 km/h, 53 mph) reconnaissance vehicle, lightly armoured (12mm – 30mm)...
The Caldwell Collection at Mustang Field, will be opening to the public in October at the El Reno Regional Airport just west of Oklahoma City. The museum will have approximately two dozen historic aircraft on display from the pioneering years of aviation in the 1920s & 30s....
London’s Science Museum has today (20 Sep 2025) opened its new ‘Space’ gallery showcasing some historic pieces of space equipment, together with some new technologies from the UK space industry. The ‘stars of the show’ are two historic space vehicles: the Soyuz TMA-19M Descent Module and the...
The Wellington Quarry, or Carrière Wellington, is a World War I memorial, museum and battlefield site, in, or rather under, the streets of Arras in Pas-de-Calais, France. It played a significant role in hiding thousands of British & Commonwealth troops for weeks before unleashing them in a...
This is the fuselage, or ‘gondola’, of the rather extraordinary French WW1 Voisin X bomber and gunship. The Voisin X was a two-seat pusher biplane produced either as a night bomber or a gunship armed with a 37 mm (1½”) Hotchkiss cannon and a defensive 7.7mm machine...
The London Canal Museum (LCM) is housed in an historic canal warehouse, just north of King’s Cross. It has displays and artefacts on two floors, telling the story of canals, and London’s canals in particular, from their construction, the goods and industries that relied on them for...
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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