Bristol and Beyond
Welcome to Bristol and Beyond, the website for hands-free, thrill-seeking local history.
Bristol has a lot of history. But only this site has original, cutting edge independent research, producing eyecatching affordable books, essays and walks. This is so far off the beaten track that you will need a map to find your way back to it. The facts presented here will make you look at places and events with fresh eyes. You will never walk a street again without wondering what is around that bend, who lived there, what's it all about, Alfie?
Cities can be boring places.
When the author was young, she had the choice of catching a bus to school or spending her fares on chocolates. To avoid the boredom of daily walks, she challenged herself to see something different every day. From such tiny acorns great confused trees can grow. The choice is yours - walk with chocolate or get on the bus like everyone else.
This photo was taken at great personal risk to the author, dodging Bristol's traffic whilst being heckled by drunks and trying not to gag on the smell of the industrial bins. This is the action packed, thrill-seeking life of a local historian/publisher.
Contact her on [email protected] or 07792 543490
click here for more information: www.barbdrummond.webs
for more information on castle park, see www.castleparkbristol.co.uk
You can also contact me on facebook.
If you go to any bookshop it seems there is almost no English history between Elizabeth and Victoria, but this is the most interesting and important time for this country, and in some ways for the world. I am fascinated by the 18th century as so much changed then. It was the Georgians who invented the modern world. As we see its rapid dismantling, there are lessons for us all in how these people lived and coped with change. Life was incredibly rich but tough, as Peter Quenell so brilliantly claims about the mid century:
"Theirs was an age conscious of its own englightenment. already the beginning of the century seemed barbarous and far away. Not only had the period developed a social conscience - tentative attacks were being made upon a dozen public abuses, the filth of the prisons, the plight of debtors, the condition of the poor; but its manners had been purified and its taste refined. During the 'thirties, a diarist had observed that the farm-carts which came up to London frequently travelled home again bearing a cargo of play-books and romances; and since that time teh apetite of the English readers had grown more and more exacting. Yes, the period, not inacurately, might be described as an Augustan age; but with the urbanity of its civilization went an appalling physical harshness. The hand holding a calf-bound volume had been twisted and knobbled by gout; the face under the candle-light was scarred by small-pox. Child after child died before it had left its cradle; women struggled resignedly from one child-birth to the next: the young and hopefull dropped off overnight, a prey to mysterious disorders that the contemporary phusician could neither diagnose nor remedy. But these tragedies brought their compensation. Since the accidents of birth and the maladies of childhood then accounted for a large proportion of human offspring, few men and women reached maturity who did not posses deep reserves of physical and nervous strength. In the debility of such a man as Horace Walpole there was, he himself admitted, something Herculean; and it is, no doubt, this element of intense vitality hidden beneath the surface, which gives to so many 18th century protraits their vigorous and personal quality. Seldom have human characters been so boldly and frankly displayed:"
Bristol has a lot of history. But only this site has original, cutting edge independent research, producing eyecatching affordable books, essays and walks. This is so far off the beaten track that you will need a map to find your way back to it. The facts presented here will make you look at places and events with fresh eyes. You will never walk a street again without wondering what is around that bend, who lived there, what's it all about, Alfie?
Cities can be boring places.
When the author was young, she had the choice of catching a bus to school or spending her fares on chocolates. To avoid the boredom of daily walks, she challenged herself to see something different every day. From such tiny acorns great confused trees can grow. The choice is yours - walk with chocolate or get on the bus like everyone else.
This photo was taken at great personal risk to the author, dodging Bristol's traffic whilst being heckled by drunks and trying not to gag on the smell of the industrial bins. This is the action packed, thrill-seeking life of a local historian/publisher.
Contact her on [email protected] or 07792 543490
click here for more information: www.barbdrummond.webs
for more information on castle park, see www.castleparkbristol.co.uk
You can also contact me on facebook.
If you go to any bookshop it seems there is almost no English history between Elizabeth and Victoria, but this is the most interesting and important time for this country, and in some ways for the world. I am fascinated by the 18th century as so much changed then. It was the Georgians who invented the modern world. As we see its rapid dismantling, there are lessons for us all in how these people lived and coped with change. Life was incredibly rich but tough, as Peter Quenell so brilliantly claims about the mid century:
"Theirs was an age conscious of its own englightenment. already the beginning of the century seemed barbarous and far away. Not only had the period developed a social conscience - tentative attacks were being made upon a dozen public abuses, the filth of the prisons, the plight of debtors, the condition of the poor; but its manners had been purified and its taste refined. During the 'thirties, a diarist had observed that the farm-carts which came up to London frequently travelled home again bearing a cargo of play-books and romances; and since that time teh apetite of the English readers had grown more and more exacting. Yes, the period, not inacurately, might be described as an Augustan age; but with the urbanity of its civilization went an appalling physical harshness. The hand holding a calf-bound volume had been twisted and knobbled by gout; the face under the candle-light was scarred by small-pox. Child after child died before it had left its cradle; women struggled resignedly from one child-birth to the next: the young and hopefull dropped off overnight, a prey to mysterious disorders that the contemporary phusician could neither diagnose nor remedy. But these tragedies brought their compensation. Since the accidents of birth and the maladies of childhood then accounted for a large proportion of human offspring, few men and women reached maturity who did not posses deep reserves of physical and nervous strength. In the debility of such a man as Horace Walpole there was, he himself admitted, something Herculean; and it is, no doubt, this element of intense vitality hidden beneath the surface, which gives to so many 18th century protraits their vigorous and personal quality. Seldom have human characters been so boldly and frankly displayed:"