Samuel Baker, Enslavement and the Railways
Gloucester Quays and Making the Connections Start your walk by Phillpott’s Warehouse – No plaque mentions that Thomas Phillpotts Benefitted from some seven hundred enslaved people, Nearly three hundred of whom were shared ‘investments’ With Samuel Baker of...
Old King Coal
Old King Coal My generation of boys saw steam as a hobby: We grew up with Ian Allan loco-spotting books, Gazing in wonder at the wreathes of smoke Curling through countryside and town, Enjoying November fogs: ‘No sun, no moon, No hint of noon …’ And we took a certain...
Chalford and the East India Company
The Golden Valley I first visited Stroud on the train in the early 1960s, pulled by a 1400 class locomotive, 1463, I think. I would study my Ian Allan trainspotter’s book or read my history books until we reached Chalford, when I would stare, mesmerized by the beauty...
Railway Rural Rides
Citizen John Thelwall, William Cobbett, and Rural Rides on the Train In the summer of 1797, when the country feared a French invasion and the Fleet mutinied at the Nore and Spithead, ‘the most dangerous man in England’, ‘that Jacobin fox’, the republican,...
Brimscombe and Heritage
Brimscombe and Heritage One night in the trenches, Ivor Gurney, the Great War poet, suddenly remembered Brimscombe: ‘One lucky hour in the middle of my tiredness I came under the pines of the sheer steep And saw the stars like steady candles gleam Above and...
Stroud Time
Stroud Time It’s a funny thing, Time, isn’t it, when you stop to think about it. And I’m not talking Einstein. Just that we measure it in so many different ways: watch, clock, phone, analogue, digital, sun, moon, religion, the seasons, calendar, years, decades, eras,...