Andrew Simpson

I have long had a fascination for trams and I have just bought Eltham and Woolwich Tramways which contains “a wealth of nostalgia with m...

Madeline Alberta Linford was by any measure a remarkable woman. Madeline Alberta Linford, 1921 At just 22 in 1917 she was writing for the Ma...

Now I bet the Handbook of Manchester would have caused a stir amongst the elegant tea rooms and learned libraries of London back in 1842 wh...

Now I have no idea why I never got a copy of This Is London. * Cover of This is London I guess that there are only so many books th...

"Of the thousand millions of human beings that are said to constitute  the population of the entire globe, there are – socially, moral...

  I am a great admirer of Mary Mills and her work which over the years has revealed the industrial archaeology of where I grew up. Entitled ...

  I am not the only one who has looked forward to the second novel about the lives of Mr. and Mrs Rylands. It is the second in a trilogy whi...

The parish church in 1860  I am back with Bradshaw in 1862  continuing  to explore one of the walks laid out in the Illustrated Handboo...

Now if you are of certain age, old enough to remember hearing She Love You in 1963, and feeling the light had gone out of the world at the n...

I have come back to a book I first read over thirty years ago, and it seems as relevant today as it was when it was published in 1938. ...

Today I am going to revisit Akenfield by Ronald Blythe a favourite book which I first came across in the mid-1970s. By then it had been on t...

The thing about guide books is that they date so quickly.   But that can be what makes them so intriguing and that pretty much sums up ...

There are plenty of ways of telling the story of Greater Manchester’s history but no one has done it by using the tram network, and yet with...

Now until very recently I had no idea that a small community of 1500 families lived close to where I grew up on Well Hall Road. But the...

Now every place deserves a historian and a good history book and Eltham had R.R.C.Gregory who wrote the Story of Royal Eltham in 1909 which...

The idea of using the writings of authors, playwrights  and poets to help describe the history of a country is not new, but I am enjoying Ra...

Now I found Charlton House by accident not long after we moved to Well Hall and I had taken myself off on “an adventure.” And over half...

There is nothing quite as good as listening to live poetry and that was what Chorlton Library offered up yesterday. Peter Topping, 2025 So, ...