of a social historian
This is the miscellaneous category, where you’ll find blog posts on various aspects of social, cultural and political history that sit in some way outside of my usual themes. What you’ll find below ranges from write-ups of history conferences and museum exhibitions to mini-biographies of interesting lives I come across, whether they be LGBT rights or anti-poverty campaigners, diplomats, punk poets or tennis champions.
As the summer sun first starting to make an appearance, with many of the lockdown restrictions just lifted, I spent a day taking a friend on a history walking tour of London. It was an opportunity for me to find out or remind myself what it's like to see for yourself each of the charity …
This recent round of council elections provided plenty of worrying headlines for the Labour Party, including losing my home city of Bristol to No Overall Control. They won the region's metro mayor race against the Tories and saw their incumbent city mayor re-elected, but it was clear something unusual was happening from the fact that …
Continue reading "Labour and its rivals in Bristol: some historical perspective"
For the last few years, I've been researching the history of charity shops - and, importantly, the various types of shops set up and run by charities that don't look so much like what we picture when we image a 'charity shop'. When I'm not busy just coping with the chaos and uncertainty of the …
Continue reading "Shopping for a cause? Discussing the history of charity shops"
