HS2 phase 2 is the high-speed train line that will connect Manchester and Leeds to Birmingham and on to London. Promoted as an attempt to bring ‘the UK’s Victorian railway infrastructure dramatically into the 21st Century,’ the Government expects to spend billions in a plan set to transform North-South transport infrastructure, encourage business, boost employment Continue Reading
Other than by the Olympians of Greece, sport has not been influenced and organised so effectively before or since the Victorians. Take a selection of sports known and cultivated by the British. I suppose football is on your list, as is rugby and probably tennis and cricket too. The Victorians had a say in all Continue Reading
Victorian parliamentary politics is remembered for its great reforms and ideological battles. William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli have come to define this period. This was no age of the soundbite and there was certainly no ‘call me Tony’ culture in the corridors of power, Gladstone’s first speech as Chancellor went on for almost five hours Continue Reading
Manchester’s Arndale covers 1,500,000 square feet of retail floor space, making it Europe’s largest city-centre shopping mall. How Manchester’s streets see over 750,000 shoppers flocking to the city centre on a weekly basis, a step backwards into history is necessary. Mass consumerism as we know it developed from the late Victorian period, in which the Continue Reading
Such conditions worried the early Victorian state immensely. Emerging social research confirmed that the environment as well as the physical and moral habits of a locality’s inhabitants stimulated disease and ensured its spread. The belief proliferated that sexual debauchery was at once a product of material squalor and a causal factor in the decline of Continue Reading
