Podcasts about Historic Royal Palaces

For GAAD (Global Accessibility Awareness Day) 2025 (Thursday 15 May 2025) we are focusing on access to heritage for blind and partially sighted people as RNIB Connect Radio's Toby Davey is joined by Aileen Pierce, Head of Interpretation and Design at Historic Royal palaces to find out more about HRP and an overview of their access offer which includes Digital Video Guides with audio description, some tactile experiences and a couple of highlights of accessible events for blind and partially sighted people coming up over the summer too. For more about access at Historic Royal Palaces do visit the individual sites access pages of the HRP website - https://www.hrp.org.uk/#gs.lox24t (Image shows RNIB logo. 'RNIB' written in black capital letters over a white background and underlined with a bold pink line, with the words 'See differently' underneath)

The later Tudor years were a time of turmoil, political intrigue, and national transformation. Initially defined by crises of succession, and shifts in the religious landscape, the period went on to see the reign of some of the most famous royal women in history. And, under the 44-year reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Britain experienced a golden age of culture and exploration.  But what made Elizabeth excel as a sovereign in a way that outshone her predecessors? Did ordinary Tudors care who was on the throne? And how did such a powerful dynasty come to an end after only three generations?  This is a Short History Of The Tudors - part two of two. A Noiser production. Written by Nicola Rayner. With thanks to Tracy Borman OBE, Chief Historian at Historic Royal Palaces and the author of several historical biographies, including The Private Lives of the Tudors.   Get every episode of Short History Of a week early with Noiser+. You'll also get ad-free listening, bonus material, and early access to shows across the Noiser network. Click the Noiser+ banner to get started. Or, if you're on Spotify or Android, go to noiser.com/subscriptions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week's House Guest is Lee Lovett, co-founder and creative director of Soho Lighting. She shares her best lighting tips, discusses the evolution of the business, and gives us the rundown on their brand new collaboration with Historic Royal Palaces.

The Tudors are the most famous royal family in English history, ruling from 1485 to 1603. The dynasty began with the reign of King Henry VII, and ended with his granddaughter, Elizabeth I. Marked by political, religious, and cultural change, the Tudor era shaped the course of English history, and paved the way for modern Britain.  But how did the first Tudor king fight his way to power? What drove his son, Henry VIII, to break away from Rome and establish his own church? And who were the astonishing women who defined the reign of the Tudors? This is a Short History Of The Tudors, part one of two. A Noiser production. Written by Nicola Rayner. With thanks to Tracy Norman OBE, Chief Historian at Historic Royal Palaces and the author of several historical biographies, including The Private Lives of the Tudors.   Get every episode of Short History Of a week early with Noiser+. You'll also get ad-free listening, bonus material, and early access to shows across the Noiser network. Click the Noiser+ banner to get started. Or, if you're on Spotify or Android, go to noiser.com/subscriptions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this Inspiring Editions episode, we're joined by renowned historian, author, and broadcaster, Lucy Worsley OBE. Known for bringing history to life through her fascinating storytelling, Lucy takes us on a journey through time and uncovers how history continues to shape the way we travel today. From grand palaces and historic homes to the intriguing literary worlds of Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lucy shares her insights on the most inspiring historical and literary destinations, the joys of immersive travel, and the stories hidden in the places we visit.   Discover More Lucy is a podcast host, the author of several books, and a television presenter. She is an Ambassador for Historic Royal Palaces and can be found sharing her thoughts here.   Join the Conversation! Whether you're a history enthusiast, a book lover, or simply curious about the places that shaped our world, this episode is packed with inspiration for your next adventure! Follow Inspiring Travel on Instagram and let us know which historical or literary destination is on your bucket list.   More Travel Inspiration Find Inspiring Travel across social media for more travel inspiration. Check out some of our top offers, and remember, our dedicated team of Travel Specialists are here to help you start planning your next tailor-made adventure, wherever you want to explore next.    Inspiring Travel Website Instagram: inspiringtravelco TikTok: @inspiringtravelco Facebook: InspiringTravelCo   Music: Jakob Ahlbom | Sense of Space | courtesy of Triple Scoop Music by Getty  Music: Artmuz | Unplugged Fantasy | courtesy of courtesy of Triple Scoop Music by Getty

We're going medieval this week to rectify some misconceptions about castles. Despite what many believe and what's put out there in fairy tales, castles are a very specific thing built in a specific time and place for a specific purpose. We'll examine the medieval period (AKA the middle ages or the dark ages) in Europe to better understand why and how castles were built and what they were used for. We'll also unpack the story of lesser known heroine, Nicola de la Haye, who defied gender norms to defend England's Lincoln Castle against invaders on more than one occasion, successfully withstanding siege after siege. Support the show! Join the Patreon (patreon.com/historyfixpodcast)Buy some merchBuy Me a CoffeeVenmo @Shea-LaFountaineSources: How Stuff Works "How Castles Work"History.com "Middle Ages"Wikipedia "Castles"Road Trips Around the World "Why Are There So Many Castles in Europe?"History in the Margins "From the Archives: a Woman's Home Is Her Castle"Catherine Hanley "Nicola de la Haye"Summoning Magna Carta "Who Was King John?"Royal UK "Royal Residences: Windsor Castle"Historic Royal Palaces "The Story of the Tower of London"Shoot me a message!

In this episode, I am joined by Matthew Storey, curator of the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection at Historic Royal Palaces, to discuss the upcoming Dress Codes exhibition at Kensington Palace, opening March 13th, 2025. Matthew takes us behind the scenes of the exhibition, sharing the inspiration, research process, and challenges of curating royal fashion spanning 500 years. From rare garments worn by figures like Princess Diana and Queen Victoria to the collaboration with the Young Producers, this episode offers an exclusive look at the fascinating world of royal attire.This is part one in a two part series, tune in for a sneak peek of what's to come at Dress Codes - a must-see exhibition for anyone interested in the intersection between fashion and daily life!Join the Behind The Seams family to support the podcast and access bonus content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠www.patreon.com/silhouettespodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠Thanks for listening, and stay fab everyone.Follow the podcast on ⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠ @Silhouettespodcast for more updates

Nicola Andrews, palaces group director at Historic Royal Palaces, talks with James Shillinglaw of Insider Travel Report about Hampton Court Palace, famed as the residence of Henry VIII. Andrews explains how you can set up visits to Hampton Court and other royal palaces in Britain. For more information, visit www.hrp.org.uk or www.visitbritain.com. All our Insider Travel Report video interviews are archived and available on our Youtube channel  (youtube.com/insidertravelreport), and as podcasts with the same title on: Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, PlayerFM, Listen Notes, Podchaser, TuneIn + Alexa, Podbean,  iHeartRadio,  Google, Amazon Music/Audible, Deezer, Podcast Addict, and iTunes Apple Podcasts, which supports Overcast, Pocket Cast, Castro and Castbox.  

The Tower of London is almost synonymous with the idea of torture, especially in the 16th and 17th centuries. When we think of this iconic historic site, the history of violence is one of the first things to come to mind, yet to what extent is this a fabrication of history? In this episode, Dr Catherine Jenkinson from the University of Oxford talks us through one of the latest research projects at Historic Royal Palaces, the question of how the history of torture is, and should be told at the Tower of London.  To take part in our survey and be in for a chance to win a £100 voucher, visit here: https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/HRPPodcastSurvey/ 

George III's mental incapacitation was formally recognised by Parliament on February 5th, 1811, when The Regency Act handed power to his son, the future George IV.  Though George III had struggled with bouts of illness for decades, his periods of lucidity made it difficult to decide when, or even if, he should be replaced. He resisted the idea of ceding power, particularly to his son, with whom he had a notoriously difficult relationship. Parliament wasn't thrilled about George IV either, seeing him as indulgent, irresponsible, and politically aligned with the opposition. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly examine George III's "mad spells"; discover the shockingly cruel treatments contemporary medicine offered up - including blistering his skin with arsenic, dunking him in freezing water, and using leeches to "suck out the madness" - and explain how he kept the love of his people even as his health declined… CONTENT WARNING: mental health trauma, infant mortality. Further Reading: • 'The King's 'Malady': George III's Mental Illness Explored' (Historic Royal Palaces): https://www.hrp.org.uk/blog/the-kings-malady-george-iiis-mental-illness-explored/#gs.jra39q • ‘George IV' (Historic UK): https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/George-IV/ • ‘Mad King of Britain: King George III

In this mini-series on new research at our palaces, PhD student Ellis Huddart joins Lucy Worsley to explore the history of the Royal Yacht. Ellis' PhD hopes to examine how Royal Yachts existed as places outside of the usual rules and conventions of both royal palaces and royalty. They can therefore reveal a lot about the material culture of British Imperialism in the Victorian era, and the changing image of royalty. This episode is part of a mini-series about new research at our palaces. Explore more about research at Historic Royal Palaces.

In this mini-series on new research at our palaces, Dr Holly Marsden joins Lucy Worsley to explore the many identities of Mary II, disentangling her story from that of her husband and co-ruler William III. The product of four years of research, Holly's PhD ultimately aims to disrupt the perception that Mary did not have political agency. This episode is part of a mini-series about new research at our palaces. Explore more about research at Historic Royal Palaces.

On season seven, episode two we learn about an industry at the intersection between science, art and history. On this episode our podcast hosts Erin and Emily are joined by Caitlin Hartmann, a tapestry conservation intern at Hampton Court Palace of Historic Royal Palaces. We hear from her about her work in tapestry conservation as well as the science behind textile conservation in general, including a fun fact about why historic textiles often have a blue hue to them! You can find Caitlin on Instagram @caitlinannatextiles. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Not Another Science Podcast was co-created by Helena Cornu and Tom Edwick, brought to you by Edinburgh University Science Media. The hosts are Erin Howat and Emily Robertshaw-McFarlane and our podcast editor is Wan Gee Tan. The logo was designed by Apple Chew and the cover art was designed by Elizabeth Carmichael. You can visit our website at www.eusci.org.uk to check out the latest issue of the magazine, a ton of other cool science content by our student journalists, and see how to get involved. You can also follow EUSci on Instagram, LinkedIn and X. All podcast episodes can be found at www.eusci.org.uk/podcasts/ . Music by Kevin Macleod: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3788-funkorama http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Music by Professor Colin Campbell: https://youtu.be/-ZhfAZ-gCEQ?si=gc_pMMG0KeXz2VC0

Tudor Christmas was a time for revelry and fun. Henry VIII and his court celebrated the full 12 days of Christmas in excess, with tables ladened with roast swan, suckling pig and venison pasties, among other delights. It's believed one Christmas, the King spent the equivalent of £13 million on the celebrations. He loved to dress up and tease his wives as well as take part in festive games.Dan travels to what was once the heart of Henry's court, Hampton Court Palace, to meet with Historic Royal Palaces chief curator Tracy Borman and Richard Fitch, of the Historic Kitchens Team, to discover how the Tudors celebrated and what of their traditions we still have today.This is episode 2 of our 'Origins of Christmas' series. Every Wednesday in December, Dan explores the history behind our Christmas traditions—from extravagant Tudor feasts and carolling to midwinter Solstice celebrations, the bawdy entertainment of the Georgians, and the family-focused customs of the Victorians.Produced and edited by Mariana Des ForgesMusic by Epidemic Sounds & All3Media Music LibraryDan Snow's History Hit is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  

The ghost of Catherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII, screaming down a corridor. A nursemaid's spinning wheel clicking in the walls. Robed Tudor figures slamming open fire exits. A noisy group of ghosts haunt Hampton Court Palace.Tracy Borman, Joint Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, joins Maddy Pelling and Anthony Delaney to guide them through the spectres of Hampton Court.Edited by Tomos Delargy, Produced by Freddy Chick, Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code AFTERDARKYou can take part in our listener survey here.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

This week, I'll examine several cases of historical hauntings. These are ghost stories where you actually get to find out the single most important question... who was that? We'll go all the way back to ancient Babylon, cruise through ancient Greece and Rome and then spend some time in London and, later, Washington DC. Several of the "ghosts" we'll hear about have even been subjects of past History Fix episodes! There will be queens, there will be presidents, there will be weird old guys rattling chains, and you'll even get to here my very own personal ghost story! Happy Spooktober y'all! YouTube video of "ghost" footage from Hampton Court PalaceSupport the show! Join the PatreonBuy Me a CoffeeVenmo @Shea-LaFountaineSources: history.co.uk "8 Famous Ghosts From History"history.com "History of Ghost Stories"Washington Post "Is the White House Haunted?"Historic Royal Palaces "Historic Hauntings at Hampton Court Palace"Smithsonian Magazine "3,500 Year Old Babylonian Tablet May Contain Earliest Known Depiction of a Ghost"VRoma "Pliny Book Seven Letter 27 to Sura"Live Science "Poltergeists: Noisy Spirits"Shoot me a message!

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is Paul Marden.If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast. Special Clips from our previous guests:Understanding Sustainability Reporting https://skipthequeue.fm/episodes/polly-bucklandPolly Buckland sat on the client side in a marketing manager role at BMW (UK) Ltd before co-founding The Typeface Group in 2010. She's an ideas person, blending creativity and commercial awareness to get the best outcomes for our clients.The Typeface Group is a B Corp Communications Agency + Design Studio based in North Hampshire. Their mission is to counteract digital chatter by championing authentic and strategic communication. Team TFG work with brilliant minds in business to extract, optimise and amplify their expertise, cutting through content clutter and stimulating saleswhile reducing digital waste at all costs.  The Typeface Group have been B Corp certified since October 2021 and is currently going through recertification. Digital Sustainability and the Elephant in the Room https://skipthequeue.fm/episodes/james-hobbsJames Hobbs is a people-focused technologist with over 15 years experience working in a range of senior software engineering roles with a particular focus on digital sustainability.He is Head of Technology at creative technology studio, aer studios, leading the technology team delivering outstanding work for clients including Dogs Trust, BBC, Historic Royal Palaces, and many others. Prior to joining aer studios, James was Head of Engineering at digital agency Great State, where he led a multi-award-winning software engineering team working with clients including the Royal Navy, Ministry of Defence, Honda Europe, the Scouts, and others.He also has many years experience building and running high-traffic, global e-commerce systems while working at Dyson, where he headed up the global digital technical team. Making Holkham the UK's most pioneering and sustainable rural estatehttps://skipthequeue.fm/episodes/lucy-downing-and-sue-penlingtonLucy Downing - Head of Marketing and Sue Penlington - Sustainability Manager at Holkham Estates.  Transcription:  Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in and working with visitor attractions. Paul Marden: When consumers are asked if they care about buying environmentally and ethically sustainable products, they overwhelmingly answer yes. A recent study by Nielsen IQ found that 78% of us consumers say that a sustainable lifestyle is important to them. And while attractions have been great at a wide range of initiatives to improve their sustainability, this year's Visitor Attraction Website Survey will show that as a sector, we're lagging behind on digital sustainability. Paul Marden: So in today's episode, I'm going to talk about the learning journey I've been on personally, along with my colleagues at Rubber Cheese, to understand digital sustainability and how to affect real change. Paul Marden: I'll talk about what I've learned from hosting this podcast and how we've started to make real changes to our processes and our client sites to make them more sustainable. Welcome to Skip the queue. I'm your host, Paul Marden. Paul Marden: Back in April, I spoke to Polly Buckland from The Typeface Group about the importance of sustainability reporting. Polly Buckland: There's buckets of research out there as to the relationship between consumer behaviour and sustainability. So McKinsey did a study. “60% of customers actively prioritise purchasing from sustainable businesses.” Capgemini, “77% of customers buy from and remain loyal to brands that show their social responsibility.” I could literally keep quoting stats as to why businesses should take their sustainability goals very seriously and the communication of their sustainability initiatives very seriously, because it's becoming clearer. There was another stat about primarily women making the decisions based on sustainability of a business, and Millennials and Gen Z being sort of high up the list of people that are taking sustainability creds into consideration when they're making a purchase. So, I mean, it's a barrel load of stats that suggest if you don't have your eye on sustainability reporting and communicating your sustainability goals, you perhaps should have. Paul Marden: Of course, many attractions have been blazing a trail on the subject of sustainability for years. Going back in the archives of Skip the Queue to 2021, Kelly spoke to Lucy Downing, the Head of Marketing, and Sue Penlington, the Sustainability Manager for the Holkham Estate. First, let's hear from Kelly and Lucy. Kelly Molson: Lucy, I wondered if you could just give us an overview of Holkham Estates for our listeners that might not be aware of you or visited there themselves. Lucy Downing: So if you sort of picture it, most of the time when you think about stately homes, you picture a stately home with a garden. At Holkham, we are very much a landscape with a stately home. So 25,000 acres. We have a national nature reserve. A beach, b eautiful beach. It's been in Shakespeare in love. If you know the final scenes of Gwyneth Paltrow walking across the sands, that's Holkham, a bsolutely stunning. We're a farm, but at the centre of that, we've also got our 18th century palladian style mansion and that's home to Lord Lady Leicester and their family. They live in the halls. It's a lived in family home. But then we also have all of our visitor facing businesses. Lucy Downing: So we've got the hall, our Holkham stories experience, which is an attraction museum telling us all history and the now and the future of Holkham. Lucy Downing: We've got a high ropes course, cycle hire, boat hire, normally a really buzzing events calendar. We have accommodations. We've got Victoria Inn, which is near the beach. We've also got Pine Woods, which is a holiday park with caravans and lodgers. We have our self catering lodges, which within the park. And then we've got farming, conservation, gamekeeping, land and properties. We've got nearly 300 properties on the estate that are tenanted. A lot of those people work for Holkham, or if not, they work in the local community. We've got forestry and then we've also officiated and it's won lovely awards for the best place to work in the UK. It's a stunning landscape that surrounds it and we've got. I don't know if you've heard of her, but Monica Binnedo, which is global jewellery brand, she's based at Longlands at the offices. Lucy Downing: She decided a few years back to base her whole business there. She got all of her shops around the world, but that's where her business is. And I think she's ahead of the times, ahead of this year. She sort of knew how wonderful it would be to be working, I suppose, and not in a city centre, so I hope that gives you a flavour. But, yeah, I think it's 25,000 acres of beauty, landscapes with a house in the middle and lots of wildlife. Kelly Molson: I mean, it really is one of the most beautiful places and that stretch of the world holds a really special place in our hearts. It's somewhere that we visit very frequently and it's stunningly beautiful. Paul Marden: Later in that episode, Sue shared her insights on their sustainability strategies. Sue Penlington: So we've got three main themes. One is pioneering environmental gain I, which is all about connecting ecosystems and biodiversity and habitats. One is champion low carbon living, which is all about carbon emissions, our impact on construction and housing, our leisure operations. That sort of thing, and farming. And then the last one is the one that we always talk about. Tread lightly, stamp out waste. So that's all about recycling, reducing single use plastics and that sort of thing. So those three themes are what we're running with for 2021. We've got three goals, which are quite ambitious as well. And for me, I just see 2021 as that year of change where we'll make an impact. So we've done quite a lot of talking, and rightly so, and we want to take our visitors on that journey and really start to chip away at those goals. Paul Marden:  Now, let's talk a little bit about the fears around talking about sustainability. I think one of the things that is getting in the way of an open discourse around digital sustainability is fear. We're afraid of being judged by our actions and our intentions. In a recent survey by Unilever of social media influencers, 38% were afraid to openly discuss sustainability for fear of being accused of greenwashing. Again, let's hear from Polly, which is. Polly Buckland: Why, again, that storytelling part of the impact reporting is really important for me, because I will say we are not perfect. These are the things that we know we need to work on, but these are the things we've done better. And that's what I really like. The BCorp BIA assessment and their framework is because it takes you across five categories of measurement, and no one's perfect in any of them, but what it does do is it provides a framework for you to better. Paul Marden: Yes, absolutely. Polly Buckland: And measure yourself against. Yeah, I think if. I think the messaging behind your sustainability is really important. If you're professing to be perfect and you're not, you will get stung, because I think people can see through that. But if you are showing that you're trying to better, I don't think many people could argue with that. Paul Marden: Now, let's rewind a little and talk about my interest in digital sustainability. When I spoke to James Hobbs of the aer studios about digital sustainability back in July, we talked about my ignorance. So my background was at British Airways and I was there for ten years. It really wasn't that hard to spot the fact that environmentally, that we have a challenging problem, because when you stood on the end of Heathrow Runway, you can see what's coming out the back end of a 747 as it takes off. But I don't think I ever quite understood the impact of what I do now and how that's contributing more to CO2 emissions than what I was doing previously, which, yeah, I just don't think there's an awareness of that more broadly. James Hobbs: No, yeah, I'd agree. And it's complicated. Paul Marden: In what way? James Hobbs: I guess it's complicated to quantify the carbon impact of the type of work that we do in the digital industry because I guess there's what we're shipping to end users, which is one thing, but most modern websites and applications and stuff are built on a big tower of cloud services providers and all of their equipment has to be manufactured which has a carbon impact and rare earth metals need to be mined out of the grid. All of that stuff. Theres a big supply chain backing all this stuff and we can influence some of that directly, but a large chunk of it, we cant. So it makes choosing your suppliers quite important. Paul Marden: But in a presentation by my friend Andy Eva-Dale, now CTO of the agency Tangent, he opened my eyes to the impact that the digital sector has on the environment. The Internet consumes 1021 terawatt hours of electricity per year. That's more than the entire United Kingdom. Globally, the average webpage consumes approximately 0.8 grammes of CO2 per page view. For a website with 10,000 monthly page views, that's 102 kilos of CO2 per year. And as we'll see in a bit, the Rubber Cheese Visitor Attraction Website Survey shows this year that the websites in our sector are anything but average. But let's talk about my learning journey. I've used this podcast as a way to learn about the sector and to drill down into sustainability itself. My interviews with Polly and James taught me a lot. It's one of the real benefits of running a podcast. Paul Marden: I can sit and ask people questions that in real life they may not want to talk about. Beginning from absolute first principles. Following the advice from James in the podcast, I've gone and studied the online materials published by the Green Software foundation, including their green software practitioners certificate. Some of that is quite technical, but a lot of what's in there is a real interest to a lot of people. Now let's talk a little bit about what I've learned along that journey. In an interesting conversation with Andy Povey the other day, he talked about people's innate reaction to digital sustainability and that for many people, the move to digital feels sustainable. I'm not printing things out anymore, so it must be sustainable. Of course, all that computation and networking has a massive global impact on greenhouse gas emissions, so not every website is sustainable. Paul Marden: In another conversation I had recently, someone said to me, why does all of this digital sustainability stuff matter? If I host my site on a green hosting server, there's no harmful emissions from the server. But that's only one part of a complex web. The power needed to connect up all the servers in the world and to all of the endpoint devices is immense. Of course, the carbon emitted to generate power varies country by country as well as by time. And that's not really in our control. But we can definitely control the impact our website has on all of that infrastructure. As the web page is in flight over the Internet to somebody's mobile device, the power it uses and consequently the carbon emitted along the way is therefore something that's definitely in our control. Paul Marden: The other source of learning for us this year has been the sustainability elements of the rubber cheese survey of visitor attraction websites. We made sustainability a core theme of this year's survey and we found some really interesting things. 80% of attractions in our survey have got some sort of sustainability policy, which is an amazing achievement and sets a benchmark for the sector. Also, a number of attractions are taking active steps to improve the sustainability of their website. But we found that this isn't necessarily being done in a framework of measuring and monitoring the sustainability of their website. So the changes that people are making could be making improvements to the sustainability of their site, but at worst, some of the techniques being used could actually harm the performance and sustainability of the website. Paul Marden: The thing is, if you're not testing and measuring, you can't ever know whether the changes that you're making are effective. The Green Business Bureau talk about how benchmarks provide a reference point to assess trends and measure progress and baseline global data. They say, "Companies have begun measuring sustainability performance, which allows them to make continuous assessments, evaluate where they lie on the sustainability agenda and make data driven decisions and policies. Measuring sustainability requires proper selection of key sustainability metrics and a means of making effective process improvements. These measures provide real time data and much needed quantitative basis for organisations to strategise and mitigate environmental and social and economic risks." I'll come back to making process improvements later, but for now let's just stick with measures. Back to James Hobbs, who talked about the ways in which you can measure the CO2 emissions on our website. James Hobbs: There are some tools out there that you can use to help you quantify the carbon impact of what you've got out there in the wild now. So the big one that most people talk about is websitecarbon.com, which is the website carbon calculator that was built by, I think a combination of an agency and some other organisations come up with an algorithm, it's obviously not going to be 100% accurate because every single website app is slightly different and so on, and as a consistent benchmark for where you are and a starting point for improvement. Tools like that are really good. Ecograder is another one. Those offer non technical routes to using them. Paul Marden: Now, both of these websites use similar technologies and methodologies to understand the CO2 emissions of a website. But the survey shows more than half of attractions have never tested the CO2 emissions of their site. This got me thinking. If it's that easy to test the sustainability of a single webpage and you can run them on any website, but most attractions aren't doing it, then what can we as Rubber Cheese do to help? So in this year's survey, we've run the largest audit of visitor attraction sustainability scores that we're aware of. So working with our lovely podcast producer Wenalyn, who also supports me with the survey, firstly, I run a proof of concept gathering and comparing data for a small number of attractions in our database this year. Paul Marden: Once we began to better understand the data, Wenalyn went and ran this against all of the sites that were in our database. With this, we hope to support the sector with a benchmark of webpage sustainability that can be used by anyone in the sector. And what this has shown us is that 58% of attraction websites are rated f by Website Carbon. That's 8% worse than the general population of all websites. But the sobering thing for me as an agency owner is that the sites that we build were in that 58%. The work that we've been doing recently isn't good enough from a sustainability perspective. So this triggered a number of projects internally for us to improve the sustainability posture of the sites that we design and build. Paul Marden: So I'm going to dig into one of those sites and the journey we've been on to remediate the sustainability of their site, because I think it can give a really nice understanding of the journey that you have to go on, the changes that you can make, and what the impact of those changes could be. Now, we started by benchmarking the scores for the site in question from Website Carbon and Ecograder. And this site was a grade F and marked 51 out of 100 by Ecograder. From there, we drove our improvements off of the feedback that Ecograder gave us. We worked as a team to estimate the work involved in the feedback from Ecograder to identify the tasks with the lowest estimated effort and the highest potential impact. Paul Marden: Essentially going for the quick wins, we implemented a number of really simple measures, we implemented lazy loading of images. This is making the browser only download images when they're just about to show on screen. If you don't lazy load an image on a page, then when the webpage opens, the browser will go and grab the image, calculate the size, and redraw the webpage with that image in it, even though the image is off screen. If the user then clicks something in the top part of the screen, maybe in the top navigation, and they never scroll down, they will never see that image. So all that network traffic that was used, all the computation in the browser to be able to figure out the size and paint the screen, was completely wasted because the user never got to see the image. Paul Marden: So by lazy loading, it means that if a person doesn't scroll all the way down the page, then an image near the bottom of the page will never get loaded. And it's an incredibly simple code change that you can write in now. This used to be something that you had to write custom code to implement, but most browsers now support lazy loading, so it should be really easy for people to implement that. Paul Marden: Another thing that we did was to correctly size images. We found that, but with best rule in the world, our editors were uploading images that were very high resolution, very big images, even though on screen we might only show a thumbnail. By resizing the images inside WordPress, we've made it easy for our editors to upload whatever size image that they like. But we only share the smaller image when somebody views the webpage, again, cutting down network traffic as a result of that. One other thing that we made a change on was to make the website serve more modern image formats. Paul Marden: Again, we used a WordPress package to do this, called imagify, and it means that our editors can upload images using the file formats that they're familiar with, like JPEG, GIF and PNG, but that we convert them to more modern formats like WebP inside WordPress. And that has better compression, making the images smaller without any discernible loss of quality, and making the whole webpage smaller, lighter, faster as a result of it, which has the impact of reducing the CO2 emissions that are needed to be able to use that webpage just as a guide. We measure everything that we do in the business in terms of the time it takes us to do things. So we're real sticklers for time tracking, but it was really important in this project for sustainability to work out what the differences were that were making. Paul Marden: So these changes, those three that I just outlined there cost us about a day and a half of development effort and much of that was done by one of our junior developers. So it wasn't hugely complex work that was done by an expensive, experienced developer. But in return for those changes, that one and a half days of effort, we've seen an improvement in rating by website carbon from F  to B and on eco grader from 54 out of 100 to 83 out of 100. This puts the site well into the realm of better than most websites on the Internet and better than 84% of attractions in this year's survey. Is it enough? No, of course not. We can do more and in fact, there are still technical improvements that we can make that don't impinge at all on the user's experience. Paul Marden: We can and we will make more changes to move the site from B to A or even to A+. But there's no doubt that following the old 80-20 rule, these marginal gains will be progressively harder and more costly to achieve. And there may be changes that are needed that will impinge on the user experience. Some things you cannot improve from a sustainability perspective without changing what the user is going to experience. If you've got an auto playing video on your website that consumes bandwidth, it generates network traffic. You cannot remove that video without removing the video entirely and changing it to be something that isn't autoplay but plays w hen a button presses that will have an impact on the user experience. Not everyone will click that button. Paul Marden: Not everyone will watch that video and say not everyone will necessarily have the same feeling about the attraction that they got when there was an autoplay video in place. But there are undoubtedly lots of things that can be done that don't impact the user experience of the site. One of the changes that we still haven't made, which is a little bit more effort, it's a little bit more complexity, and adds a little bit of costs to the hosting of the website is the introduction of a Content Delivery Network or CDN. Here's James Hobbs again from aer. James Hobbs: From a technical angle, I think one of the most impactful things you can do, beyond making sure that your code is optimised and is running at the right times, at the right place, is simply to consider using a content delivery network. And for your listeners who aren't familiar with a content delivery network, a CDN is something that all of us have interacted with at one point or another, probably without realising. In the traditional way of serving or having a website, you've got some service somewhere in a data centre somewhere. When someone types your website address in, it goes and fetches that information from the web server and back comes a web page in the simplest sense. James Hobbs: Now, if your website servers live in Amsterdam and your users on the west coast of America, that's a big old trip for that information to come back and forth, and it's got to go through lots of different hops, uses up lots of energy. A Content Delivery Network is basically lots and lots of servers dotted all over the planet in all of the major cities and things like that can keep a copy of your website. So that if someone from the West Coast of America says, "Oh, I'm really interested in looking at this w ebsite.", types the address in, they get the copy from a server that might be 10,20, 50 miles away from them, instead of several thousand across an ocean. James Hobbs: So it loads quicker for the user, which is great from a user experience, SEO, but it's also great from an energy point of view, because it's coming from somewhere nearby and it's not having to bounce around the planet. That's one thing that you could do that will make a massive and immediate impact commercially and from a sustainability point of view. Paul Marden: So there's another example of something that you can do that has very little impact on the experience of the website. In fact, it massively improves the user experience of the website, takes relatively little effort, but offers a huge improvement. Those are all things that we've done to one individual website. Let's talk a little bit about how we bake that into our process. In a 2022 article in the Harvard Business Review about how sustainability efforts fall apart, they recommend embedding sustainability by design into every process and trade off decision making. I found that language really interesting. It's similar to the language used widely in technology and security that was popularised during the launch of the EU General Data Protection Legislation, which talks a lot about having a security by design approach. Paul Marden: So taking this idea of designing sustainability into every process and trading off the decision making, we've incorporated it into our sales proposal, writing, designing and testing processes. Our people responsible for selling need to bake sustainability into the contract. We want to hold ourselves and our clients accountable for the sometimes difficult decisions around meeting a sustainability target. So we'll discuss that target at the beginning of the project and then hold ourselves to that throughout the design and build process, thereby not needing to do all the remediations that we've just done on the other website, because it's typically much easier, quicker, cheaper for us to implement a lot of those things. The first time through the project, as opposed to as a remediation at the end. We've also baked sustainability testing into our process. Paul Marden: No site goes live without having been tested by both website carbon and eco grader to make sure that the site meets the criteria that we set out at the beginning of the work. So we've thought a lot about how we can improve what we do and we've started to go back and remediate over some of the work that we've done more recently to make improvements. But my learning journey hasn't been entirely smooth. There are challenges that I've hit along the way. I think there's a few interesting challenges that are to be expected as you're going about learning things that I wanted to share. For example, we've done work to remediate the scores of one of our sites and been super excited with the impact score. Paul Marden: I mean, went from bottom of the Fs to A+, only to deploy those changes into production and it didn't move the dial at all on the production website. And that was heartbreaking. Once we looked into that in more detail, thinking that we've done loads of changes, move the dial such a dramatic amount, only to launch it into the wild and it barely touched things. What we realised that in the test environment that we used, we had password protection in place and the website carbon and Ecograder were testing the password screen, not the actual homepage underneath it. So there was a lesson learned for us. The other area where we've made lots of learnings is during the survey when we created our sustainability benchmark. We've seen test results so good that they can't be explained. We've seen somebody hitting 100 on Ecograder. Paul Marden: We've also seen scores that were contradictory on Ecograder and Website Carbon, and also scores that have dropped dramatically. When we first tested in August and did a validation test checked last week, we're still working our way through these wrinkles and I think some of it is because we're looking at many hundreds of websites rather than trying to learn by testing and improving just one site. But beyond the kind of technical challenges, there remain some things that I simply don't understand. And my mission going forward is to fill those gaps. Firstly, while both Ecograder and Website Carbon use the same underlying principles and tools to calculate CO2 emissions, they often can and do give different results. Paul Marden: Not just in the fact that one is A+, a F score and the other is out of 100, but that the basic page sizing in kilobytes and consequently the CO2 can and often is different depending on which tool you look at. And I don't understand why that is, and I need to look into that. And I'm sure we'll come back to the podcast and talk more about that once I do understand it better. But the other problem is that I'm struggling with the size of the problem and the size of the prize. There's no doubt in my mind that making these improvements is the morally right thing to do, and commercially it's right as well, because it improves your outcomes on the website as well as the sustainability. Paul Marden: I'm just struggling with the business case, because if I had an unlimited budget, I do make every change in business that improves the sustainability posture of the business. But most marketers, most people that listen to this podcast don't have an infinite budget. They have a very finite budget, and so they have to put their budget to work where it's going to have the most impact. And what's the return on investment of spending 5k on improving the website versus changing light bulbs to leds, or moving away from gas powered water heaters in the outside toilets by the penguins? It's really difficult at the moment for me to be able to understand where this is the right and sensible investment of sustainability funding within an organisation. So I've shared my learning journey over the year. What about you? What can you do next? Paul Marden: For one last thought, let's head back to the conversation between Kelly and Lucy and Sue from Holkham. Kelly Molson: Are there any advice that you could share with our listeners in terms of how they start or begin to look at sustainability? Lucy Downing: Interesting. I was chatting with Lord Leicester yesterday about the subject and were sort of agreeing that I think you definitely need to know where you are, particularly as a business. You know where you are, because then you can set your goals in a realistic fashion. And I think the one thing to remember is that it has to be realistic, because you need to set goals that you can financially deliver, because if they're not financially viable, then you're not going to be here as a business to deliver them. And what we're also finding and talking to other businesses that actually quite a lot of the sustainability gains that you can make are actually in financial ones too, because you probably cut down on some of your resources that you're using, you'll think better, you'll work smarter. Lucy Downing: So it's just, I think that's something to definitely remember, that it has to be sustainable in all ways, socially, financially and environmentally. That's definitely some key advice. And I think be authentic. There's a lot of talk around greenwashing. Don't be guilty of thinking, wow, this is something we really should do and we're going to do it and just talk about it. It has to be authentic. So really think about where you can make the biggest changes environmentally for sustainability and focus on those and just make sure. Yeah, it's like us really. We're saying we're launching our sustainability strategy, but actually for the past ten years, we've now we've got 100 acre solar farm, we've got anaerobic digester, we heat the hall and all of our businesses with woodchip, so we've got our biomass boilers. Lucy Downing: So we've been doing it for quite a long time without telling anyone. But what we're now doing is saying, actually, that's not even enough, we need to up it further. So, yeah, that's the thing. I think it just has to be authentic and realistic. Sue Penlington: Yeah. And from my point of view, I'm a bit of a doer do and not a talker, so don't get bogged down. It could be absolutely overwhelming. And I think when I was first approached by my boss here, I was just like, wow. Because it isn't just rubbish, it's every single business. Sue Penlington: It's huge. But from my point of view, small differences can make a really big impact and keep chipping away at it because solutions are out there. There's loads of people doing really cool things. And, you know, every night I'm on Google looking up something else or going down another rabbit hole because I've seen something on Twitter. So for me, every day is a school day. But, yeah, get stuck in and collaborate with other like minded people. You know, nowadays you're not considered swampy because you're talking about sustainability. Sue Penlington: Well, you know, it's totally on brand, isn't it? And let's not reinvent the wheel. If we can learn from other people, then let's do that. I mean, go for it. Literally, every single individual can make a difference. Kelly Molson: Oh, Sue, that's. Yeah, you've just got me right there, sue. And I think what you said about collaborating and learning from people, that has been something that's so key this year. People are so willing to share their plans, they're so willing to share what they're doing and how they're doing things. Especially within this sector, there's always somebody that's doing or, you know, a couple of steps ahead of you that you can learn from. And people are so willing to kind of give up that advice and their time at the moment as well. So definitely that's a key one for me. Ask people. Ask people for help. Ask people how to do things. Paul Marden: I'd like to thank everyone that contributed to this episode, including Kelly, Lucy and Sue at Holkham, Polly at TFG and James at aer. Thanks to everyone that's helped me with this journey in the last year, the lovely clients we've talked to, the survey respondents, and my team at Rubber Cheese, Steve, Ben, Tom, Sinead, Wenalyn, and Oz, who've all worked really hard to benchmark the sector and to make continuous improvements to our client's sustainability. As you know, we're really experimenting with the podcast format at the moment, and if you like this or any of the other changes, I'd love to hear. And if you don't, then tough, go make your own podcast. Only joking. I'd love to hear. If you think we can make improvements, you can find me on X, @paulmarden and also on LinkedIn. Paul Marden: If you're at VAC this week, the Visitor Attraction Conference, then I'll be there with Oz and Andy. So come and say hi to us and I'll see you again in a couple of weeks time. Paul Marden: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, SkiptheQueue.fm. The 2024 Visitor Attraction Website Survey is now LIVE! Help the entire sector:Dive into groundbreaking benchmarks for the industryGain a better understanding of how to achieve the highest conversion ratesExplore the "why" behind visitor attraction site performanceLearn the impact of website optimisation and visitor engagement on conversion ratesUncover key steps to enhance user experience for greater conversionsFill in your data now (opens in new tab)

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your hosts are Paul Marden and Oz Austwick.If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. Show references: https://ukthemeparkawards.com/winners https://ukthemeparkawards.com/sponsorsWatch the UK Theme Park Awards 2024 on YouTube. Interviewed Guests:Paul Kelly: BALPPA  Neil Poulter: Thorpe ParkRoss Ballinger: Drayton ManorDanielle Nicholls & Sophie Tickle: Alton TowersJennifer Howlett & Charlotte Peirce-Gregory: Legoland https://www.linkedin.com/in/sineadwaldron/Sinead Kimberley is the Senior Client Success Manager of Rubber Cheese and has a background in digital marketing, engagement software and all things client satisfaction. She guides clients through the various stages of their project, ensuring they have the information they need when they need it, as well as being the link between our developers and clients. https://x.com/MrTicketeerhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/andypovey/ Transcription:  Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in and working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Paul Marden. Paul Marden:  Hello and welcome to our first Skip the Queue Season Six Rubber Cheese get together. And we've got a corker. Today, there's four of us virtually together for our meetup after having been together yesterday in real life at the UK Theme Park Awards. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Paul Marden: We're going to talk a little bit about all the cool stuff that we saw yesterday at Thorpe park and enjoyed those theme park awards. But before we do that, should we do some introductions? Because I think everyone knows me and others, don't they? Oz Austwick: I'm here again. Paul Marden: You can sound more pleased. Everyone will love you. I'm thrilled. Oz Austwick: Absolutely thrilled. I couldn't wish to be anywhere nicer. Back in my office, not surrounded by monkeys. Paul Marden:  We are also joined by Sinead Kimberley, who is the Senior Client Success Manager here at Rubber Cheese. Say hi, Sinead, and tell everyone what you do. Sinead Kimberley: Yeah, so I work with our clients and making sure they've got everything they need for the website and try and act as the voice of the client, essentially with our developers, so that what you ask for, they know how to make it technical. I can pass it back to you and make it all visible on the website and get everything done. Paul Marden: That you need the glue that binds us together. And today we are also joined by the probably I've got to prove this. I'm going to have to do the counting because I know that other people do count. I'm thinking Dom from Mary Rose for sure counts the number of times he's been there. Andy Povey: So am I. Paul Marden: But I think Andy Povey, roaving ticketing expert and gentleman of leisure, joins us today possibly as the most frequent guest on Skip the Queue. But today you get upgraded to co host status because you joined us. Andy Povey: Well, I feel honoured, Paul. Thank you. Oz Austwick: Is that actually an upgrade? Paul Marden: I definitely think co host is an upgrade. For sure. For sure. Oz Austwick: Speaking of co hosting, I'll just point out that also in this episode we have some interviews recorded at the awards, some with winners, some with prize givers. It'll make more sense in the YouTube version where you can actually see them. But if you're listening to this just as an audio podcast, you need to know that when the room gets noisy or you can hear people screaming in the background, that's a clip from Thorpe Park itself. So that's coming up throughout the podcast today. But as always we start with where we've been recently, other than Thorpe Park. Paul Marden: Why don't I start with you, Andy, because I know you've been on a few trips just recently with the family. Where's an attraction you've been to recently that sticks in your mind as being pretty cool? Andy Povey: So most recently was a couple of weekends ago. We took the kids Tower of London on a Sunday afternoon or a sunny Sunday afternoon. It's absolutely superb experience. We've been members of Historic Royal Palaces for six months, eight months, something like that. And it's one of those that just sits in the dusty corner of a drawer somewhere and didn't get used. So we dusted it off and said, "All right, let's go to the tower.". Brilliant experience, absolutely superb. The kids loved it and they really engaged with all of the interpretation there. And it's probably my third or fourth time of taking my ten year old girls there. And there's something new every time or something different every time that we haven't picked up on, we haven't seen so great experience. Paul Marden: I love it. And I love it going there with membership because I think when you go the first time, you get wowed by all the really big stuff, you know, the shiny jewels and all of that kind of good stuff. By the time you go there second or third time, you begin to notice some of the other stuff. There's some lovely little regimental museums hidden off in the corner. Aren't there lots to find in there? Which if you only go the once and you do it as a set piece, you don't necessarily notice it because you want to go and look at the court stuff. Andy Povey: Yeah, it's just the single visit. It's just a high pressure environment, isn't it? You want to catch everything, you want to get the best value out of it. I mean, we got there at 02:00 in the afternoon. I don't think I'd have done that if I was just paying for the single day entry. Paul Marden: What about you, Sinead? Where have you been recently? Sinead Kimberley: Mine is up north, Wyresdale Park. And it's just an outdoor park, so not kind of a ticket place that you need to kind of buy a ticket for. But I loved it because when went, it felt like we'd just gone into a normal park, but you felt like you were at some kind of holiday camp and you could hear kids playing in the water on the paddle boards and the kayaks and then you had all the dogs running around and then you had the hikers going past you to go up. And we did go for a walk. So went, I think it was maybe two and a half hours up to the peak and it was just lovely to see all the families as well on a sunny day. Rare up in Lancaster. No rain for once. Sinead Kimberley: And, yeah, it was just a lovely place to be. You had a really nice feel of just people having fun and enjoying nature, which I think is really lovely. So, yeah, that was my favourite recently, besides Thorpe park, obviously. Paul Marden: Oz, what about you, mate? Oz Austwick: Goodrich Castle. We took the family away and we did a couple of nights glamping. Amazing place. I won't go on too much about that, but went to Goodrich Castle, just outside Ross on Wye, and it's the first time I've ever been. It's amazing. So many of these castles are just a series of small walls and there's nothing to actually see, but it's a proper castle. There's a moat and a bridge over it to get in, and there are dungeons and towers. You can go up and it's. Yeah, it's fantastic. If you're in the area, definitely go check it out. It's well worth it. Paul Marden: Lovely for the kids, isn't it? Because I do think, whilst it can be a really lovely day out to go to some of these castle ruins, it can be pretty tough to imagine as a ten year old what it was actually like and what that low wall over there actually was. Oz Austwick: There's definitely a trade off, though, because the more castle there is, the more the older kids love it. But I've got a four year old as well and I'm much happier when it's a flat bit of grass with a couple of stones in it than when she's trying desperately to scale up a spiral staircase that has been worn down for 500 years. Paul Marden: We did the wall around Warwick Castle a few years ago and I was at a heightened state of anxiety, I think it's fair to say. Oz Austwick: Yeah. Paul Marden: So mine is the National Marine Aquarium, which is one of the Rubber Cheese clients down in Plymouth, and it's my first time of actually going and seeing it. And were there. We were coming back from a holiday in Cornwall, so it was a stop off on the way back and it was such a lovely stop off. My memory of it is we've been. We were avid watchers of the anime show that was on at Christmas last year. We really enjoyed watching that. Millie loves animals and she loved the turtle that was in the show last year. And went and I. We were there. It must have been ten minutes before closing time. They were trying to get people to leave. Paul Marden: We were one of the last families there, but were just sat on the floor, on the top floor looking into the tank where the turtle was. It was just so relaxing to just watch this turtle coming in and going out and the sharks that were in there. It was a really beautiful place. Lovely place. Really enjoyed that. So going from serene, calm aquarium, let's talk about Thorpe Park and the National Theme Park Awards. How was it for you guys? I hasten to add, I didn't make it Hyperia yesterday, which we did. Oz Austwick: Notice that Sinead and I did. Sinead Kimberley: My eyes were closed. Paul Marden: So what was Hyperia actually like then? Was it, was it as scary as I thought it might be? Oz Austwick: Yes. Sinead Kimberley: Yes. But also as incredible. Yeah. I was sad I didn't go on twice. Oz Austwick: You know, all of those feelings you get when you go on a roller coaster, that kind of the adrenaline and the sense of fear and all of that you get that gives you a bit of a buzz when you get off it. Imagine just dialing all of that up to eleven and. Yeah, mind blowing. It's too far, it's too big, it's too high, too scary. No, I'm glad I did it. Paul Marden: They did say yesterday, didn't they, when they were talking about the ride itself, that it was the tallest roller coaster in the UK, I think. But also the one with the most weightlessness in the UK, which I can't imagine how you measure it and I can't imagine what it's like. So can you put into words what the weightlessness was like? Oz Austwick: You know, if they've got these big over the shoulder harnesses that come down and you're in the seat and, you know you're safe, you know you're trapped and you're sitting with all your weight on a seat because that's just how you sit. Right? Paul Marden: Yeah. Oz Austwick: But for most of this ride, you're not. You're somewhere in between the two. You're not sitting and you're not pushed up against the harness, you're just being flung around constantly. Sinead Kimberley: Yeah, yeah, it is weird. I think I didn't notice when the harness thing you get is different to the normal one, so you don't have that big thing pushing your shoulders back. It just goes around your waist and then there's like a bar you can hold in front. It is safe, we can confirm because we are here, but it did make you feel like you weren't quite as stuck to something as normal. And then add to that you were moving faster, and you were dropping from higher heights. You realise that you were still falling, which you don't normally do on a roller coaster. Normally you realise you're falling and then you're done, whereas this, you realise you're falling. You start to be like, okay, but I'm still safe. And then you maybe open your eyes and you look around this I couldn't. Sinead Kimberley: I carried on realising I was falling a lot longer. You really felt it in your body. Oz Austwick: That first peak where you go and it starts to move, and then it literally, it takes you up and you're lying backwards and you're going up, and you can just about see the track ahead of you up there. And then you get to the top, and it's such a tight curve that as you drop, you can't see the track, and you just drop. Yeah. Sinead Kimberley: I loved it, though. Paul Marden: Should we go back to the podcast and move away from therapy session? Oz Austwick: Yeah, we can come back to therapy later, though, right? Because I think I need it. Paul Marden: So yesterday was the third year that we've sponsored one of the awards, so it was the third time I've been to the awards. Third time it was in real life, fifth year of running, and it was just lovely, wasn't it? It was such a nice industry get together. I think you were commenting this morning, Andy, on LinkedIn, about the networking effect of it. Andy Povey: Yeah. The industry we're in is a very physical, actual industry. People go to attractions because they want to do something so well. Virtual is great, and digital is great, obviously. I mean, it's what I've been doing for a very long time. There's nothing that really gets to the heart of what this industry is all about better than the face to face physical interactions. And that was a real sort of epiphany away, I think I said on a message to someone the other day, yesterday, that's just really important. It was the first event I've been to since May. Very good. Oz Austwick: Good. I thought it was a real eye opener how you kind of going there as an exhibitor. And it was my first time. I kind of assumed that I'd stand next to a stall and people would come over and I'd try and talk to them, and all they'd want was whatever free merch I'd have on this. But it wasn't like that. It was like being in a big room with a bunch of people who were friends and they were happy you were there, too, and it was just a really lovely experience. It didn't feel like a corporate trade show type event, which is exactly what I was expecting. Paul Marden: And it is fiercely competitive. So everybody does want to win in the categories they're in. Oz Austwick: Yes. But Alton Towers wins them all. Paul Marden: Right, so I am here with Sophie and Danielle from Alton Towers. It's been a successful day for you guys, hasn't it? Did you manage to count the number of awards or did you just lose count? Danielle Nicholls: I think it was a level, maybe round and fair. Paul Marden: Definitely double figures. Definitely double figures. We saw both of you going up and down the stage. Up and down the stage. Highlight, which was the one for you, Danielle, that you really appreciated. Danielle Nicholls: You know, what it was between two. So super proud of everything we did with Nemesis. Like Nemesis Reborn has been such a momentous campaign throughout. Paul Marden: Yeah. Danielle Nicholls: And so I'm super proud of that one. But for me, I think the one that has my heart in, it's our community award. So I was super proud to play silver for that one. Paul Marden: It was brilliant to get you up on the stage, bring the band back together again with you and Ross up there. And Sophie, what about you? What was the biggest highlight for you? Sophie Tickle: So I was really keen for the Best Marketing Campaign purely because I know how hard our team works on it. So I was really kind of brutal. And the nemesis story is just incredible. So we felt like that was. That was a really good win for us. And then best ride storytelling is always a nice one just because we feel like it just captures everything. The resources. Paul Marden: I really enjoyed watching when we had the. ad campaigns that came on and we saw everything that everyone had produced and you could see the storytelling that goes into something like nemesis reborn. And then the room was just quiet at the end of it because were all just captured by all of these videos. Danielle Nicholls: Everyone could have won that one, genuinely. But we're so proud. Like, Alton is such a lovely, friendly community in itself. Like, there's hundreds of people that work all the towers. Like, you can never just put it down to one person. It's such a big team effort. Everyone pulls together for everything. So, like, Alton After Dark winning golf best of event, that was amazing as well. I'm super proud of that one. Paul Marden: Everyone loves an after dark event, don't they? Yeah, it's awesome. Awesome. Danielle Nicholls: They do. Paul Marden: Thank you for joining me, ladies. It's been really good to talk to you all. Cheers. So, yes, it is fair to say that Alton Towers did make a lot of trips onto the stage. Danielle and her yellow jacket was seen going up on stage quite a lot yesterday. But there's a real diversity of different attractions that were nominated. So I think they said more than 30, nearly 40. I think it was attractions that were nominated. 20 attractions overall. Yeah, 20 attractions overall. One prizes. There was one that was really close to my heart. Brean Theme Park. It was where my granddad and my dad played golf 45 years ago. I would go to Brean Leisure Park, as it was then, and go down helter skelter all the time. So to see that up on the awards for a nomination was really lovely. Paul Marden: And there's quite a few other smaller attractions like that got nominated. Talk a little bit about the categories or the memories that we got yesterday that stuck in our minds. Andy, was there a category for you that you were really impressed by? Andy Povey: Yeah, there was. For me, it was the Accessibility initiative the Katapult sponsored. Obviously, Merlin were very heavily represented in the nominations for that category. I think there were five out of the eight nominations were for either for Merlin Parks or things that Merlin were doing as a bigger or as a cross group activity. But there were also some really quite simple things from much smaller parks. So noticeably there was a Camel Creek, again, down in deepest, darkest Cornwall, who were nominated for their changing places facility. And that just really brought home to me. Yes, it's important that Merlin, as the largest operator in the country, are leading the way and they've got the resources to put behind this and all that kind of stuff. But it's not just about doing those big things. Andy Povey: Small things can make a difference and can make a really significant difference. And that's really key to. Was one of the key messages in the industry, I think. Paul Marden: Yeah, I thought it was an interesting category. First time that it appeared in the awards, as you say, Katapult sponsored it, and it was quite a nice match between Katapult and that category because they've been doing quite a lot of work in designing spaces and attractions that are more accessible to people. So that was really. It was quite a nice match between sponsor and category. And as you say, there was some really lovely stories to be told around. What was there? I loved there was a Merlin initiative where they were taking the characters and the stories of the parks out to hospitals and places where they were terminally ill children, which there's lots of stories that have existed for a long time of kids being taken to the parks themselves. Paul Marden: But what about when they can't make it to the park and can you bring the magic of the park to them? I thought that was a really lovely idea. Andy Povey: Magic tour, they call that. And it's actually run by the Merlin charity, Merlin's Magic Wand. Paul Marden: Yeah. It's a cracking idea, isn't it? Yeah. But then you take it down to the changing places toilets and the initiatives to make places and make it clear what the accessibility of the place actually is, because we know that's really important, that people that have accessibility needs will not go to new places if they're not completely sure that it is accessible to them. And having a space on your website and winning an award, or even being shortlisted for an award for having that information on your website, I think is amazing. It's a cracking idea and there's so much that the sector is doing that has opened my eyes just in the last year, from the M&H show that were at six months ago to just seeing some of the stuff yesterday, thought it was brilliant. Oz Austwick: Shall we have another interview from the awards? Paul caught up with another Paul. Paul Kelly from BALPPA. Paul Marden: So, Paul, you've just come from the first session of giving out awards and you on stage giving out bridge award. Paul Kelly: I was doing the best theme park for toddlers, both in the small category. And the large category. Paul Marden: And who was winning? Paul Kelly: Well, unsurprisingly, I think it's not the first time they've won small categories won by Paulton's Park. And considering the amount of investment they've done, and I'm not surprised, they also won the large as well. So, really good taking off. Paul Marden: It is, yeah. We were talking on our table that they've been doing this now for a very long time, able to get up on stage and win awards. Still, they must really be investing in what they're doing. Paul Kelly: Continuous investments. I mean, if you get a chance like I do, look behind the scenes, they're investing infrastructure, their staff, for how they run the park, but think of ten years ahead. So, yeah, incredible family, incredible journey. So, yeah, good luck. Paul Marden: Behind the scenes, Pickworld must be quite the operation. Paul Kelly: Yeah. I mean, again, well, one of the things they've done, although it is photographers, they do very well in bandits now, builds them on that because they have invested in trying. I don't think they might be saying, "They do very well in bandits now," builds them on that because they have invested in trying. I don't think they might be saying. Paul Marden: That it is just about having. Paul Kelly: Well, but, yeah, paddlings are well deserved. Paul Marden: Amazing. Well done. Thank you. Paul Kelly: Yeah, no problem. Paul Marden: Sinead, what about you? What was the category that jumped out to you? Sinead Kimberley: Yeah, so for me, I think it was the sustainability, partly because it's something that I am kind of working on, looking at a lot at the minute with clients and also a thing that I've been kind of getting myself up to speed on within the industry, because I think everyone talks about sustainability, but often it will be either a really big initiative or it's something that's just what everybody else is doing. So, you know, more recyclable packaging or that kind of thing. And I really loved. There was a roller coaster, I think it was Greenwoods, was it, Andy? Andy Povey: Yes. Sinead Kimberley: They had like a people powered or counterbalanced roller coaster. And I was sat on a table and kind of asked what that was. And the person next to me explained that it doesn't use electricity, it just uses people. So as you're going up, you're powering people, going around the roller coaster, essentially. And it just sounds incredible. I've never heard of anything like that before. And I was also talking to some of the people about the sustainability of a website and something that we don't think about. You think about how many clicks to get tickets sold or to get you to see the video or whatever, but you don't necessarily think about the server powering every single click, empowering every single page view. Sinead Kimberley: And so to kind of see how different places have worked with sustainability, whether it's the reusable cups or roller coaster that's literally using people to power it and then enjoy it at the same time, was really interesting to kind of complete my picture of what sustainability looks like in the industry and all the different things it could touch on from the website to literally on the park itself. And when the parks are by nature not going to be the most, you know, energy efficient, maybe because you've got these massive roller coasters you need to power safely. It's really interesting to see that the small things, like you mentioned, Andy, with accessibility, the small things really can altogether make a really big impact on how you as an organisation can be more sustainable. Sinead Kimberley: So, yeah, that was really eye opening, I think, seeing those different nominees. Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. Oz Austwick: I think the one that won it as well is a lovely example of however much you ask people to do something because it's the right thing to do. If you actually make it in their interests to do it, suddenly it becomes much more viable. So you can. Everyone's got recycling bins, but if you've got this reverse vending machine where you put your empty plastic bottles in and you get something back out of that, then clearly people are going to do. If you were there with your kids, they're going to be collecting bottles they find lying around and making sure they go in the right bin because they get something. Paul Marden:  And it wasn't just a little something, was it? It wasn't just a couple of tokens. You could win some pretty amazing prizes out of it. Oz Austwick: Absolutely. Yeah. Andy Povey: Yeah. I was at the Latitude Festival last year and they were charging a temp deposit on every waxed paper cup. And the number of kids running around collecting huge stacks of these cups. Oz Austwick: Yeah. Andy Povey: And they were even going into the bins and taking them out of the bins, which I'm not sure was the real driver behind, but they were making. It must have been hundreds of pounds. Oz Austwick: Absolutely. It was the same. I used to go to the rugby quite a lot before my rugby team disappeared. And they would charge a one pound deposit on plastic reusable cups and you could either keep it as a one pound cup or give it back and get your pound back. And most people just. They'd have a few beers and they'd leave them. But at the end of the match, kids, just like you say, would be running around collecting these and they'd be walking away with 20, 30 quid's worth of cups. You know, what an amazing thing for the kids to do. Just makes it worth their while, doesn't it? Paul Marden: So I'm here with Jennifer and Charlotte from Legoland. So you've been at the awards today with us. How's it been? Was it a successful day for you guys? Jennifer Howlett: Pretty successful, yeah. A few wins across the category. Paul Marden: Yeah. So what. What categories did you. Did you get awards for? Charlotte Peirce-Gregory: So we've got new band, which I was Ninja tonight, which is really exciting. That was our summer first year. Jennifer Howlett: We've done it as well. So it's really exciting to see that. Paul Marden: So I love Ninjago. The ride itself. What's the event all about? Charlotte Peirce-Gregory: So, literally, we had loads of different things going on. We had dragons, drumsy, we had loads of different entertainments. We had characters, meet and greets, and were new characters, which was really exciting. Aaron and Sora. So, yes, that was great. And that finished quite long ago. Sarah's missing to see that. Paul Marden: Excellent, excellent and highlight of the day for you guys. What did you see that has really got you excited? Charlotte Peirce-Gregory: Do you know what, thing is for me with the map? I look after all things catholic events and stuff, and that was quite nice that you see. Paul Marden: It's funny because everyone was laughing a little bit. I know award for the maps, but actually, the maps and the attraction is so important. It is, it is. If you walk in and you don't get a map, it's like, How do you figure out where you're going, you're always going and looking at the map on the wall instead of having it in your hand. So, yeah, it's a bit of a laugh, but actually I think it's a really important. Yeah. Lovely to meet you guys. Thank you for joining us. Cheers. Paul Marden: So, Oz, tell us what was the standout moment for you yesterday? Oz Austwick: I thought it was really lovely to see in amongst all of these theme parks and massive organisations getting up there to win awards, that there was an award specifically for content creator of the year, that these people are out there producing content that literally markets and drives visitors to these attractions to go on these rides and they were actually recognised a change. And I thought that was both a lovely thing as a concept, but also as a YouTuber myself, within a very small and specific niche, it was really nice to get to chat to some other YouTubers from an equally small niche and spend a bit of time with them. I thought it was really. It was lovely. So I just want to shout out to Andy from Coaster Crazy and Digital Daniel, lovely people. Sinead Kimberley: Thank you, Andy, for helping me on the roller coaster as well. It was needed. Paul Marden: You were with those influencers, weren't you, during the awards itself? I think. I think it's a bit of a challenge having a daytime awards, that it can be a bit of a struggle to get some life out of the audience. And George, the compare does graft to try and get us into the mood. But I've noticed every year I've been there that if you sit anywhere near the influencers, that's usually the naughty table with lots going on. Sinead Kimberley: They were very well behaved. Oz Austwick: Because you were sat with them at the award. We went with them round the park later and it was lovely to see people visiting the park, recognizing them and coming up to say hi and that this is genuinely a thing that really works. Yeah, I just thought it was. It was great. Let's recognize these guys because I doubt any of them are making a full time living out of this. They're doing it in their own time because they love her. So if you're. If you're from a theme park, support them a little bit more, get them in there, let them. Let them do this stuff because it does benefit you. Paul Marden: You say they're not making a full time living. I can't remember what the couple are, Andy, who have every year at theme park awards, they're never there to collect their award because they're always somewhere in Florida or California, because September is a perfect time for them to go and do all the recordings. I guess parks are a little bit quiet. Weather's still good. Oz Austwick: Yeah, but that's the thing. Maybe they go in then because it's cheaper. Paul Marden: Yeah. Still having a good time recording to make a good living.Oz Austwick: You can make a good living from social media, but it's pretty rare. Paul Marden: So I am going to claim. Yeah. Executive prerogative and I'm going to take two memories and talk about them. Oz Austwick: That is definitely cheating. Paul Marden: So I'm going to talk first about the. The main awards, the best theme park, which, strangely, last year were at Chessington, won by Chessington. This year were at Thorpe park, won by Thorpe park. Oz Austwick: What are you saying? Paul Marden: I don't know. I don't know. But what I am. I guess what I am saying was what I really loved was the recognition of the whole thought pop team. Now, it wasn't the whole thought pub team because that would probably be hundreds of people and the stage wouldn't take it, but we had a little kind of troop of different people from across the park come and collect the award and I just. I really liked that. I thought that was a lovely thing to see those people being recognized. Neil Poulter: And that's exactly. It's a team effort, there's no doubt about it. Obviously, many people in the room, but the people behind the scenes as well. And we've had a fantastic year. It's been a journey. You don't just arrive at winning best theme park and best new attraction. It's a journey that we've been on for the last three and a half years. We haven't previously won that award, so I think it's testament to where we've come from, but hopefully where we're going as well. So, super excited. Paul Marden: Highlight for you? Neil Poulter: I think, obviously, Best Theme Park. I think winning the big one is something that, you know, is. Feels like new territory for us, but I think, you know, we deserve our seat at the table. Neil Poulter: But, you know, across the awards, you know, best new attraction, obviously, for Hyperia is that also some entertainment in terms of stitches and Friday nights, which we're so proud of, you know, a fantastic maze. The team that do our social, which, again, you know, allows us to speak with our audience, our most passionate audience and really, you know, them winning the gold was also a huge highlight for me as well. Paul Marden: Awesome. So time for some food and then some fun after Hyperia. And here's some screaming. Neil Poulter: Yeah, absolutely. Can't wait to ride it. I actually wrote it yesterday for about only the 6th time and I went on the back. It was amazing. But, yeah, hoping people that haven't even experienced it yet will get a chance to. And if people have, which I'm sure many have, they will come back and enjoy it. And the sun's shining, so what better time to be at the Thorpe Park? Paul Marden: So congratulations, Neil. Thank you for talking. Neil Poulter: Thank you very much. You're welcome. Paul Marden: But then the other memory for me was our own award. We sponsor the Social Media Content Category and I nearly missed my queue. I was quite happy sitting there listening to all of these parks being nominated, thinking, well, that's interesting. Well, that sounded very good. And then I realized it was me and I was supposed to get on stage and hand the award out, so there's a little rush to the stage. But what I really liked, it was lovely to hand over the gold award to Thorpe Park, meet the social media team there. Paul Marden: But it was also really nice because it was an opportunity to meet a couple more Skip the Queue alumni, Danielle and Ross, they used to work together at Drayton Manor and as we've already said, Danielle is now at Thorpe Towers and was up and down like a fiddler's elbow on the staircase yesterday. Oz Austwick: She's a full time award collector. Paul Marden: But it was lovely to get the band back together again up on stage. Handsome. Some bronze and silver awards out to Ross and Danielle. I really enjoyed that. It was just nice. It's really nice because Kelly first met them at the awards three years ago. Again, she was sat on the naughty table at the back with the two of them making lots of noise and enjoying themselves. But just, we got immediately the sense of enjoyment and fun that the two of them had and that they bring to the work that they do. And it was lovely to see that recognised yesterday on stage because we have nothing to do as sponsors of the award, we have nothing to do with choosing who the winners actually are as a team of esteemed judges. And then the public vote also counted this time. Paul Marden: But, yeah, to see, to see the growth of people that have been on the podcast, their careers growing, and then seeing them back on stage again yesterday, that was really lovely. I enjoyed that. Paul Marden: It's a bit weird, isn't it, because the awards are in the daytime, it's. All a little bit where we can. You always come and you bring the energy to the room, don't you? Yes. We got the band back together up on the stage with you and Danielle. Ross Ballinger: Yeah. Paul Marden: Both in the social media category. So that was nice. To see what have you got in your hands at the moment? Ross Ballinger: I've actually just got pleasure Wood Hills award because I'm representing them today as well as part of the luping UK contingency. Paul Marden: Okay, so what did they win? Ross Ballinger: They got bronze for Best Theme Park. Paul Marden: Oh, wow. Ross Ballinger: Which they have overhauled their map this year, which is really fantastic. So we're getting too excited never to excited about. Paul Marden: No. Ross Ballinger: But maps are a great addition to any park. Paul Marden: Do you know when you walk in the gates and you don't get the map and it's like, oh, people have got it. Yeah. People will complain. Absolutely. And everyone loves a map. Ross Ballinger: They take a lot of. It's no easy task. They can take six to twelve months to get a really, you know, popping man. Yeah, yeah. And it's obviously all down to the illustrators and everything like that. Paul Marden: And the life of the park as well, because you're telling stories. Andy Povey: Oh, yeah. Ross Ballinger: You've got to bring the paper to life. Paul Marden: So highlight for today for you. Ross Ballinger: Highlight, obviously, being on the show, on stage, being on stage for the social media category. Close to my heart, that kind of category. I love socials. I love doing what we do on socials. And it's a big core team for Drayton Manor. Paul Marden: Is it really? Ross Ballinger: It's the whole team that really. It doesn't really channel itself into one person. We have a great executive, Morgan McHenry, that looks after the top end of all the social media. So she's the goddess that orchestrates it all. But she will be. She will say that it's not just her, but everyone just contributed to making sure our social media channels are like, just absolutely fantastic and great for people to watch. Paul Marden: I think they're most authentic, aren't they? When you get everybody involved all across the park, all the people telling their little stories and showcasing what party's like. Ross Ballinger: That's what it's all about. A lot of other departments do their job. They think they're just having fun on TikTok again. But we're not, you know, we're really like behind the scenes thinking of content, going out, filming the content, you know, putting the content together, scheduling it to go out. Paul Marden: It doesn't just happen by itself. Ross Ballinger: It doesn't happen. Paul Marden: You don't just walk out with a phone and get yourself a smash hit video that just goes viral. Ross Ballinger: Well, the more fun we have, the more engaging it is. So it's our job to be fun. You have fun. Paul Marden: It's a tough life. Right. Lovely. See you again. Bringing the alumni back together again. Ross Ballinger: Great. Thank you. Thank you. Paul Marden: So that was the UK theme park awards yesterday, but that's not the only thing happening in the industry at the moment, is it, Andy? Something big and important is happening next week. Andy Povey: You mean my trip to Amsterdam? Paul Marden: Well, I was thinking more about the IAAPA conference that was at Amsterdam as opposed to your particular trip to the. Andy Povey: Yeah, so it's the 20th 30th instance of the IAAPA Europe show, IAAPA Europe Expo, this time taking place in the RAI at Amsterdam, or in Amsterdam from Tuesday to Thursday next week. Lots of great stuff, lots of great people. All about the attractions industry. There might be an occasional beer or two while we're there on the short. Paul Marden: I think it is important to note for Mrs. Povey, if she actually does listen in, that this is an important work event and there will be lots of networking. And if you're not networking, you're not working. We know that. However, it is also worth mentioning that on numerous occasions yesterday I heard you talking to people about the after parties that you were planning to attend. And yeah, it's a busy social calendar that you've got signed up to next week. Andy Povey: It certainly is. I think I might need to cut down on the pre party work to give time for the after party to take the best. Paul Marden: So you're going to enjoy yourself and do lots of important networking next week. But I guess the call to action for listeners today is if you are planning on being at IAAPA next week, hunt down Andy. He's a tough guy to miss and everybody knows him. So go and find him, have a chat with him and enjoy yourselves in IAAPA and we will be back in two weeks time. Thank you very much guys. It's been delightful having a foursome as co hosts and I think we get to do this again. Oz Austwick: I quite like this. We should do this more often. Paul Marden: Absolutely. Paul Marden: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.   The 2024 Visitor Attraction Website Survey is now LIVE! Help the entire sector:Dive into groundbreaking benchmarks for the industryGain a better understanding of how to achieve the highest conversion ratesExplore the "why" behind visitor attraction site performanceLearn the impact of website optimisation and visitor engagement on conversion ratesUncover key steps to enhance user experience for greater conversionsFill in your data now (opens in new tab)

In this episode, host Ellie Woodacre interviews Dr Mishka Sinha, co-curator of the Untold Lives: A Palace at Work exhibition at Historic Royal Palaces (running until 27 October 2024). In the interview we discuss how the development of the exhibition. the ways it which it reveals the hidden histories of palace courtiers and servants and the unexpected modern twist which brings the past and present inhabitants of the palace together.Episode Notes:Polly Putnam is co-curator of the exhibitionClarification--during the discussion of fires at Kensington Palace it should be noted that the palace nearly burnt down three timesGuest Bio: Mishka is a cultural and intellectual historian of global and imperial history from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Her interdisciplinary research interests include the histories of universities, knowledge, texts, oriental languages, cultural and material heritage, women's history, and underrepresented people and cultures in Europe, the United States and Asia. Mishka received her B.A. degree from St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, an M.Phil from the University of Oxford, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. She has taught at several UK and continental European universities and received several research grants and fellowships including a British Academy PDF at Cambridge, a Max Weber Fellowship in Florence, and others at Edinburgh, Oxford and Berlin. Mishka has worked with museums and heritage in India, and collaborated as an actor and performer with a contemporary Indian artist on multiple projects since 2003. Blog Posts written by Dr SinhaHRP: The tale of Abdullah and 'the Shah Goest'HRP: Searching for the young Black man in the portrait of William III, with Camilla de KoningPart I Part IISt. John's College, Oxford

The middle and end of the Wars of the Roses is arguably the most complicated period of this history, with big personalities and power players fighting for the top spot in the game of thrones.   In episode three of this series, we hope to unpack the reigns of Edward IV through to the Battle of Bosworth, asking along the way when the real end to the Wars of the Roses was?  Curator Charles Farris is joined by Historic Royal Palaces' Research Lead Dr Laura Tompkins and Dr James Ross from the University of Winchester. 

In this second episode of our five-part series on the Wars of the Roses, we investigate the reign of Henry VI and the start of the dynastic struggle that was the Wars of the Roses.   Henry has often been blamed for the start of the conflict because of his methods of kingship. His experience with mental health challenges was little understood by his contemporaries, and arguably by historians today. This episode will explore the explosive atmosphere of his reign, what factors created it, and ultimately how the Wars of the Roses began.     Curator Charles Farris is joined by Historic Royal Palaces' Head of Research Anthony Musson, and Lynsey Metcalfe who is studying for her PhD at the University of Cambridge.     Read more on the life of Henry VI:  https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/henry-vi/  

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is Paul Marden, CEO of Rubber Cheese.Fill in the Rubber Cheese 2024 Visitor Attraction Website Survey - the annual benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast.Competition ends on 17th July 2024. The winner will be contacted via Twitter. Show references: https://aerstudios.co.uk/https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesliweb/ Tools for Sustainability:https://ecograder.com/https://www.websitecarbon.com/ James Hobss is a people-focused technologist with over 15 years experience working in a range of senior software engineering roles with a particular focus on digital sustainability.He is Head of Technology at creative technology studio, aer studios, leading the technology team delivering outstanding work for clients including Dogs Trust, BBC, Historic Royal Palaces, and many others. Prior to joining aer studios, James was Head of Engineering at digital agency Great State, where he led a multi-award-winning software engineering team working with clients including the Royal Navy, Ministry of Defence, Honda Europe, the Scouts, and others.He also has many years experience building and running high-traffic, global e-commerce systems while working at Dyson, where he headed up the global digital technical team. Transcription:  Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in and working with Mister attractions. I'm your host, Paul Marden. The last twelve months have been the warmest of any twelve month period since records began. And while over 70% of attractions have a sustainability policy, only 12% have actually tested the CO2 emissions of their website. In today's episode, we're joined by James Hobbs, Head of Technology at Air Studios and a member of the Umbraco Community Sustainability Team. James shares some easily actionable tips to reduce the emissions of your website. Paul Marden: James, welcome to skip the queue. Lovely to have you. James Hobbs: Thanks for having me. Paul Marden: So we always start with some icebreaker questions. So it would be unfair if I didn't inflict the same pain on you. James Hobbs: Go for it. Paul Marden: Let's start with a nice one, I think. What actor would you want to play you in a film about your life? James Hobbs: I mean, instinctively, I'd say someone like Jack Black. Just think he's really funny. A lot more funny than me. I'm not sure how much of a resemblance there is. He's got a much better beard than I do someone. Yeah. If there's gonna be an adaptation, I'd like it to be funny. Paul Marden: I like the idea of that one. I think I'd struggle with that one. I'd struggle to pick. Yeah, you know, it's gotta be an archetypal geek that would play me in the story of my life. I'm not sure who that would be. James Hobbs: Not John Cena or something like that. Paul Marden: So the next one, I'd say this one I found really hard, actually. What was your dream job when you were growing up? James Hobbs: Oh, okay. So I can answer that one easily because my parents still take the Mickey out of me for it. So when I was quite young, I told them very kind of certified. When I grow up, I want to be part time mechanic, part time librarian. Paul Marden: Well, that's an interesting job, shed. James Hobbs: Yeah, it's really random, I think, because I like, I love books. I love reading. Did back then, still do now. I also like dismantling things. I was never very good at putting them back together and then continuing to work. But, yeah, that was my aspiration when I was a kid. Paul Marden: I remember going to careers advisors and just some of the tosh, they would tell you. So everybody was told they could be an undertaker and you got your typical finance jobs. But I really. I desperately wanted to be a pilot. And I was told by the optician I couldn't because of eyesight, which was nonsense. But actually, I couldn't have done the job because I have a zero sense of direction. So later in life, when I trained for my private pilot's license, I got hopelessly lost a couple of times. The RAF are very helpful, though, when that happens. James Hobbs: They come up, fly alongside you and tell you to get out of their airspace. Paul Marden: They don't like people invading the Heathrow airspace. And I was dangerously close to it at the time. James Hobbs: Nice. Paul Marden: That's another story, though. But no, they sent me from my work experience to work in the local council finance department. Department, which I don't think could be more different than being a pilot if you actually tried. James Hobbs: I mean, it's not the most glamorous, I mean, it's important, but, you know, it's not quite Top Gun, is it? Paul Marden: No, no. Exactly. There you go. Tom Cruise. That can. He can play me in the film of my life. James. So we want to talk a little bit about digital sustainability. So I thought it'd be quite nice for you to tell the listeners a little bit about your background in digital and more specifically the stuff that you've been doing more recently in digital sustainability. James Hobbs: Okay, I'll give you the most succinct property history I can. So I guess my background 15, 16 years ago started off as a developer, not a very good one. And since then I've worked for a range of different sorts of organisations. So everything from a local council, national charity, global manufacturing company, and then two digital agencies. For the last ten years or so, I've been more in leadership positions, obviously have to stay close to the technology. And in more recent years, one of the big passions of mine, I suppose, or something I'm really interested is the sustainability side of digital, because I think it's interesting and that we can make a massive impact, which I'm sure we'll talk about at some point. James Hobbs: But my current role is I'm Head of Technology at a creative technology studio called Air Studios, who also share my enthusiasm for sustainability. So I'm excited to do some work there. Paul Marden: Yeah. And my background stalking of you told me that air does some work in the attraction sector as well, doesn't it? So you work with a few attractions? James Hobbs: Yes, that's right. Yeah, we've got a few. Paul Marden: So there's some form here. James Hobbs: Yeah, I would say so. Paul Marden: Cool. One of the things that I know that you've been working with is so we're both. We've spent a lot of time in the Umbraco community, and Embraco is a content management system that a few attractions use not many, but some tend to be larger organisations that use Umbraco typically. But we've both spent time in the Umbraco community going to lots of events and talking to a lot of people. But one of the contributions you've made over the recent period is joining the Umbraco Sustainability Team. What is it, what does it do and who's involved in it? James Hobbs: Okay, so the Umbraco has this concept of community teams, which I think is a, Umbraco is a very unique organisation. Anyway, you know this because you're part of community as well, but they have a very strong connection and link with the community of developers. And not just developers, anyone who has anything to do with Umbraco and works with it. And the sustainability team is one of the several community teams that exist. The idea is that it brings together people from Umbraco's and people from the community who have a shared passion in something relevant to Umbraco to help steer it, share knowledge, and ultimately achieve a goal. And for the sustainability community team, the goal is to, I guess it's multifaceted. Firstly to make Umbraco as a product more sustainable, which is brilliant. James Hobbs: Secondly, to raise awareness of what organisations or individuals need to do to be able to improve the sustainability posture of whatever they're up to, which is brilliant as well. So there's a very umbraco focused side to it, but there's also a wider kind of awareness raising, educational side of it too, because this is a very, its a quite a new, say, it's a relatively new thing. I think digital sustainability as a concept completely hasn't really existed for that long, unfortunately. But now it does. Paul Marden: Yeah, exactly. And theres been some impact as well that the team has had on the product and the direction of the product isn't there. James Hobbs: Yeah. So and again, this is, there's several of us in this community team and I want to make it really clear that like a lot of work's gone on. It's not just me doing it. So we've managed to achieved a few things. So first of all, the Umbraco website, they launched a new website a little while ago. Its sustainability posture wasn't great. So we've worked with them, people that internally built that to improve it, and that's made a massive difference. Paul Marden: Excellent. James Hobbs: It's gone from being dirtier than a large majority of websites to being cleaner than most, which is great. We've pulled together some documentation for covering all sorts of areas from front end, back end development, content editing and so on, to educate people on how to build more sustainable websites. And some of the team members as well have built an Umbraco package, an open source package that you can install into Umbraco, and it will advise you in terms of the pages that you're making, whether they are good from a carbon footprint point of view or not. And we'll give you a rating, which is superb because it brings that whole thing in much closer to the end users who'll be making the pages. So that was a really nice piece of work. And on top of that, we do appear on things like this. Do webinars and talk at conferences and stuff. Paul Marden: Yeah, and I think Andy Evadale from Tangent is one of the members of the team. And honestly it was Andy who totally opened my eyes to this whole subject when I first started seeing him talk about it and giving some stats, and we'll talk a little more about those later on. There's definitely an impact that the team is having and it's really weird, isn't it? I mean, I don't want to geek out too much about Umbraco and the community, but there is something quite special about this commercial organisation that has open source software that gets given away for free, that collaborates with the community to build a product which is easy to use, pretty cool, really effective, but also sustainable as well. There's not many organisations that work in that way. James Hobbs: Yeah, it's unique and I love it. I think it's great. It just shows you it's possible to run a business and make money, but also have a really engaged community of passionate people and work together. I think it's brilliant. Paul Marden: Look, let's just take a step back from geeking out about Umbraco. Then I want to set the scene. Longtime listeners will know that Rubber Cheese run a visitor attraction website survey. We've done it for two years in a row. This year we simplified the survey down to make space for some more questions. And one of the key questions we've talked about is Sustainability. We are still just over the halfway point of the survey period, so there are still lots of responses coming in. But based on the data that we've got so far, we know that 72% of attractions in the current survey have got a sustainability policy, but only 12% of attractions have ever tested the CO2 emissions of their website. And we'll come to in a minute why we think the measurement and focusing on CO2 emissions in digital is important. Paul Marden: But whilst very few are actually testing their site, nearly half of all of the respondents so far have attempted something to reduce the CO2 emissions of their website. So there's clearly action going on, but it's not necessarily driving in a coherent direction because there's no clear benchmarking and target setting and retesting. So I think what I'd like to cover today is for us to understand that a little bit more, get under the skin of it a little bit, and then talk a little bit about how we can actually reduce the CO2 emissions, how can we actually make things different and why we might want to do it. Because it's more than just kind of the ethical, we all should be doing something. There were some real business benefits to it as well. My next question, without stating the bleeding obvious. Paul Marden: Okay, why do you think digital sustainability matters? I mean, the obvious answer is just because it does. But it's important, isn't it, as a contributor to global warming? James Hobbs: Yeah. So, I mean, there's lots of statistics knocking around, one of which I think it shows you the scale of the impact of the digital industry is. I think the total carbon footprint emissions of the digital industry is greater than global air traffic. And if you go and look on something like Flightradar or Skyscanner or whatever, and look at how many planes are in the air at any given moment in time, that's a pretty sobering statistic. There's lots of other ones as well, in terms of the amount of electricity that's being used, and water compared to even small countries like New Zealand. So we are generating a hell of a lot of carbon directly and indirectly, by doing all the things that we do. James Hobbs: And every time you hold up your phone and you load up Instagram or TikTok or download something, there's a massive disconnect cognitively, because it's just there and it just works and it doesn't feel like it's using up electricity and so on, but it is. There's a whole massive supply chain behind all of the lovely things we like to do on our devices that is hungry for electricity and generates pollution and that kind of thing. Paul Marden: Yeah. So my background was at British Airways and I was there for ten years. It really wasn't that hard to spot the fact that environmentally, that we have a challenging problem. Because when you stood on the end of Heathrow Runway, you can see what's coming out the back end of a 747 as it takes off. But I don't think I ever quite understood the impact of what I do now and how that's contributing more to CO2 emissions than what I was doing previously, which. Yeah, I just don't think there's an awareness of that more broadly. James Hobbs: No, yeah, I'd agree. And it's complicated. Paul Marden: In what way? James Hobbs: I guess it's complicated to quantify the carbon impact of the type of work that we do in the digital industry, because I guess there's what we're shipping to end users, which is one thing. But most modern websites and applications and stuff are built on a big tower of cloud services providers, and all of their equipment has to be manufactured which has a carbon impact. And rare earth metals need to be mined out of the grid. All of that stuff. There's a big supply chain backing all this stuff and we can influence some of that directly, but a large chunk of it we can't. So it makes choosing your suppliers quite important. Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So if you're going down the road, if you accept the premise that this is a big contributor and making small gains on any of the stuff that is of interest to us and marketers who are owning websites attractions, I think for me, probably the first step is testing and trying to figure out where you are. Do you think that's a useful first step? Is that important as far as you're concerned, James? James Hobbs: I think it's important because with any sort of improvement, whether it's related to sustainability or not, I think quantifying where you are at the start and having a benchmark allows you to see whether you're going in the right direction or not. And improvement doesn't always go in one direction the whole time. There might be a two steps forward, one step back, depending on what you're doing. But I think without measuring where you are, and ideally regularly measuring your progress, it's hard to say what impact you've had and you might be going in the wrong direction and bumping up the wrong tree or whatever. So I think it's important. Paul Marden: Yeah, it's super important. And is it something that marketers themselves can do, or is this something that only a sustainability consultant can do, or is there somewhere in between? Is it the techy geeks that run the website that do this? Or is it a little bit of all of those things? James Hobbs: Well, that's a really good question. So I think this is still quite a new kind of industry. There are some tools out there that you can use to help you quantify the carbon impact of what you've got out there in the wild now. So the big one that most people talk about is websitecarbon.com, which is the website carbon calculator that was built by, I think a combination of an agency and some other organisations come up with an algorithm. It's obviously not going to be 100% accurate because every single website app, it's slightly different and so on. But as a consistent benchmark for where you are and a starting point for improvement, tools like that are really good. Ecograder is another one. Those offer non technical routes to using them. James Hobbs: So for the website carbon calculator, you just plunk a website address in hit go and it'll run off and tell you that's not very scalable. If you've got a 10,000 page website, or if you've got a large digital estate, there are also API level services that are provided that might make that easier to automate. But again, you then need someone who knows how to do that sort of thing, which raises the barrier to entry. I think what I would like to see is more and more vendors building carbon dashboards into their products and services so that the rest of us don't have to run around and build this stuff from scratch. Azure, for example, Microsoft's cloud platform, has a carbon dashboard that is scoped to your resources. That's really interesting and useful to see. James Hobbs: The stuff I mentioned about what we're doing with Umbraco and building a sustainability package, we're hoping to get that built into the core product. And again, the idea being that if you're a content editor or a marketer, you shouldn't have to know how to wire up APIs and do all this stuff, you should be able to see at a glance. Okay, well, that page I've just built actually is a little bit on the heavy side. Maybe I need to look at that. So I think the way to democratize it is to make it easier to do the right thing. Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So these tools are giving you, they're giving you a grading? Yeah. So some of them are like a to f. I think it is for Website Carbon, Ecograder gives you a score out of 100. I think it is. Are there any advantages to one or the other? Or is it a good idea for people to use both of them and see the differences that the two different tools can give you? James Hobbs: I think it will come down to, well, for me anyway, I think using a tool in the first place is a step forward from what the vast majority of people are doing currently, which are not even thinking about it. So in many ways it doesnt really matter. I think it will depend on what people find easier to use. I think when people start to integrate this sort of sustainability measurements into their build pipelines, for example, release pipelines. That's where you will need to maybe think more carefully about the kind of data that you're interested in and what criteria you want to look at. Because, for example, at the moment, a lot of organisations who write software, hopefully their developers, will be writing some unit tests. And if the tests fail, then you don't deploy the website that should fail the build. James Hobbs: I think it would be good to move to a world where if your sustainability posture regresses and gets worse than similar things. There are other tools outside of those websites that we've been talking about, though. So there's an organisation called the Green Web Foundation, a nonprofit who do a lot of work in this space. And they've created a couple of tools. One's called CO2.js, which you can integrate directly into your website that can actually be a bit more accurate than the carbon stuff. And they've also built a tool called the Grid Intensity CLI. And without going into loads of horrible detail, what that is, essentially it knows when the electricity grid is at its most, what's the right word? At its most pollutant. When it's generating the most carbon. James Hobbs: So you can use that to figure out when to run background jobs or do lots of processing. You can do it when the grid is at its most renewable. So there's things like that as well. There's lots of options out there. You can go deep as you want. Paul Marden: Amazing. One thing that you just mentioned that I thought, oh, that's really interesting. I've never thought of that before, is the idea that you can drop a URL into Website Carbon or Ecograder and it will give you the score of that page. But actually, if you've got lots of pages on your website, you need to be testing across multiple pages. That should never occur to me before. James Hobbs: Yeah, because I think a lot of people plunk the homepage in and go, cool. It's a. I guess it's effort versus reward thing. No one's going, well, hopefully no one's going to spend time manually entering 10,000 website URL's into a tool like that. Not least because it would probably take the tool down. There are probably better ways of doing it than that. And also, homepages are typically quite different to the rest of a website. It serves a different purpose. So I think testing a representative portion of your digital services is probably the way to go. Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. I've been wondering recently whether buyers should be thinking about this as something that's part of the requirements of a new website. So if you're going out to tender and buying a new website, oftentimes you and I will both see requests for proposal that have accessibility requirements in them. But I genuinely don't remember a time that I've ever seen an RFP say, “You must achieve grade c or above on website carbon across the majority of the pages on the site.” And I think when buyers start to do that you'll begin to see agencies doing more of this sort of stuff. I think baking it into contracts will make a big difference. James Hobbs: Yeah, yeah and it's that kind of selective pressure isn't it? Clients start requiring this stuff, then agencies will have to step up. And it's unfortunate that might well be the catalyst but actually I don't care what the catalyst is as long as we're going in the right direction. Its the main thing really, which is lessening our impact. Yeah absolutely. But yeah that whole supply chain thing is huge. That's one way we can make a big impact is by mandating certain things. And there's actually a certification, a green software engineering certification. It's offered for free that developers or technical architects can go through to educate them a bit on green software engineering techniques and things like that. James Hobbs: And that's the kind of thing that hopefully in the future companies who are putting RFPs out might say, “We want your engineering team to be aware of green computing techniques” and so on and be able to prove it. Paul Marden: Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised as well that it gets legislated for as well. So in the same way as you know, public sector bodies have got to meet certain accessibility requirements. I would not be surprised if we enter a world soon where there's a statutory obligation for these things to be done in a sustainable way as well. James Hobbs: Yeah. Paul Marden: So getting your act together now is a really good thing to do because there's going to be less work later on when you've got no choice but to do it. James Hobbs: Exactly. Get ahead of the game now. Paul Marden: So we've made the case, people have bought into it, they're going to go and do some testing and they realise that they've got a smelly, polluting, rich website. What can they do next? How can your average head of marketing, head of digital influence their website to get better? James Hobbs: Yeah. Okay, so this is where I think there's a really nice angle here. We did talk about this earlier on, but there is a fairly close link between the things that will make doing the things that will make your website, your digital services more sustainable and kind of KPI's and metrics that will probably make it more commercially successful as well, depending on what you're doing, with a bunch of caveats that I won't go into. So, for example, sustainable websites are typically lightweight, they're fast, they're optimised for getting the right things in front of the user as quickly as possible, which can include everything from content delivery networks to optimising images to a whole host of stuff. Doing all of those things will also typically positively impact your search engine optimisation, positively impact your conversion. James Hobbs: Because if you look at Google's guidance, Lighthouse guidance, the different things it looks at and so on, it's very clear that fast, relevant websites are what get prioritised and what Google's looking for. Fast, relevant websites that are served from locations close to the user are also likely to be sustainable. So there is a link there. And what that means is there's a built in business case for doing the sustainability stuff. James Hobbs: So if you've got a hard nosed suite of executives who couldn't care less about the planet, not that I'm saying that's what everyone's like, but, you know, the commercial world that we live in, it's a hell of a lot easier to sell this stuff in by saying, “You know what as well, like we can do an MVP or a pilot and we're confident that we might be able to improve conversion by 0.1%, 0.5%”, whatever it might be. It's also typically a good way to save money by being smarter about what you're computing and where and when and using some of those tools that I've talked about, you can save yourself potentially a bunch of money as a business, which again, is a commercial win. James Hobbs: So I think whilst the ethical side of it is really important, and, you know, none of us want to be boiling to death in 50 years time because we've ruined the planet. Making small changes in digital can have a massive impact because the amount of people that are using them. And I think it's easier to sell in because of the commercial. Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm guessing there's stuff that you can do at key stages in the design and development of a site. So what are the things that people should be thinking about during the design of the site that could make it more sustainable? James Hobbs: So, okay, so that's a really good question. So this is a huge topic. So I can give you some examples of the kind of things you should be thinking about. So. And I guess we could divide them up into two sections. So when we're designing a website. There's how it looks and how the user experience work. There's also the technical design. As with anything, the further, the earlier you start thinking about this kind of stuff, the easier it is. Crowbarring in. It's a bit like accessibility, you know this, try and crowbar it in the last week of the project, it's not going to work. So from a design point of view, and some of this stuff is difficult to quantify its impact in detail, but things like not having massive 4k full bleed videos at the top of your webpage. James Hobbs: So being very careful and intelligent use of things like that, because they are large, they have to be transferred from wherever you're serving them from to the user. There's a big energy cost associated with that, not using loads and loads of external dependencies on your web pages. And that could be anything from fonts to JavaScript libraries to the vast myriad of tools that are being used. The more things you're throwing down the pipe to your end user, especially if your hosting infrastructure is not set up in a distributed way, the more energy intensive that thing is. You can even go as far as looking at the color choices that you're using. So certain darker themes are typically less energy intensive. Yeah, because of how OLED screens and modern screens work. Again, very hard to quantify. James Hobbs: And then we go down the rabbit hole of yeah, but where does the electricity that charges my phone come from? And you try and quantify all that stuff, it gets very head explodey. But there are things you can do in that sense. Some of them are easier to quantify than others. The weight of the page is a very easy thing to measure. If you keep that low, it will be easier to cache, it will load quicker for users, it will better for SEO, and faster pages tend to have better conversion. James Hobbs: And that works whether you're selling things from an e commerce point of view or you're trying to register interest, whatever it might be, from a technical angle, I think one of the most impactful things you can do, beyond making sure that your code is optimised and is running at the right times, at the right place, is simply to consider using a Content Delivery Network. And for your listeners who aren't familiar with a content delivery network, a CDN is something that all of us have interacted with at one point or another, probably without realising in the traditional way of serving or having a website, you've got some service somewhere, in a data centre somewhere. When someone types your website address in, it goes and fetches that information from the web server and back comes a web page in the simplest sense. James Hobbs: Now, if your website servers live in Amsterdam and your users on the west coast of America, that's a big old trip for that information to come back and forth. And it's got to go through lots of different hops, uses up lots of energy. A content delivery network is basically lots and lots of servers dotted all over the planet, in all of the major cities and things like that can keep a copy of your website. So that if someone from the west coast of America says, “Oh, I'm really interested in looking at this website,” types the address in, they get the copy from a server that might be 1020, 50 miles away from them, instead of several thousand across an ocean. James Hobbs: So it loads quicker for the user, which is great from a user experience, SEO, all that stuff I talked about, but it's also great from an energy point of view, because it's coming from somewhere nearby and it's not having to bounce around the planet. That's one thing that you could do that will make a massive and immediate impact commercially and from a sustainability point of view. Paul Marden: So you get those kind of performance improvement for the people all the way around the world accessing the site, but it's going to take load off of the server itself, so you might need less powerful servers running. One of the big issues that attraction websites have got is that it's such a cyclical market. The people that, you know,James Hobbs: Spiky.Paul Marden: Exactly when the Christmas meet Santa train is released at an attraction, or the traffic to the website is going to peak. If you can keep some of that traffic off of the web server by using that Content Delivery Network instead, you're going to be able to withstand those really peak times on the website without having to spend lots and lots of money on improving the resilience of the service. So it really is a win win win, isn't it? James Hobbs: I think so. And also it can help potentially avoid things like the dreaded queue where you log on to a website that's busy and it sticks you in a queue and you're 41,317th queue or whatever. Exactly like you say. If you can leverage this tech to take the load off your back end systems and I, you'll be delivering a better user experience. Paul Marden: One of the measures that I know a lot of the algorithms that are assessing CO2 emissions look at is the type of hosting that you use. So they talk about green hosting. What is green hosting? And is all green hosting the same? James Hobbs: No. So yeah, again, this is a big topic. So I guess hosting generally runs the spectrum all the way from kind of one boutique sort of providers who can set up VMS or private servers or whatever all the way through to the big goliaths of the Internet, the AWS and Azure and so on and everything in between. So green hosting is broadly hosting that is carbon neutral, powered by renewables, that sort of thing. So in theory shouldn't be pumping more pollutants into our atmosphere than it's saving. So if we look at the big cloud providers initially, so they've all made some commitments in terms of improving their sustainability posture. And this is really good because when one does it, the other one has to do it too. And obviously there's Google Cloud platform as well and they're doing similar sorts of things. James Hobbs: But it's almost this, I like the competitive angle of this because all it means is the sustainability posture of all of them will get better quicker. So it's good. So for example, I'll try and do this off the top of my head, you should check yourselves. But Azure and AWS and Google all have some pages that talk about their commitments and primarily they're focused on carbon neutrality and using renewable electricity. Aws have done a good job of that. So in certain AWS regions the year before last, they were completely 100% renewable powered, which is brilliant. Paul Marden: Really. James Hobbs: Yes. Not everywhere. Azure are going down a similar path and they've made the same commitment in terms of the year when they're going to hit renewable powered everything. They've also made commitments to water positivity. Enormous amounts of water are used during the operation of data centers and there are a lot of these data centres. So they've made commitments I think by 2035 or 2040 please double check to be net water positive, which is great. And the other thing that people don't think about, and this is I guess the supply chain thing I was talking about earlier, all those servers got rare metals in them. They've got all kinds of stuff in them thats been dug out of the ground, often in areas where there's a lot going on from a human point of view. James Hobbs: So Amazon, AWS, Google, et cetera, they're looking at that angle too. How can they keep servers in commission for longer so they don't need to be replaced as often? Where are they getting their materials from, et cetera, all that kind of stuff, because they're not just a computing company know they're invested in the hardware and getting this stuff out of the ground and manufacturing it and all the rest of it's a very big operation. So that's something we can't influence beyond pressuring them as consumers, but it is something that they're doing something about, which is great. Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. And if we go back to that point I made earlier on, buyers are in control of this. If they are choosing to include that in their contracts to buy new web services, that it needs to be green by offsetting or green by using 100% renewable power, then that drives change, doesn't it? Procurement managers drive change through that kind of thing. James Hobbs: Yeah, absolutely. And just one final point on the greenhosting the Green Web foundation, who I mentioned earlier, the nonprofit who work in this space, they maintain a list of green web hosts. So hosts that are known to be green that you can use without having to worry too much. So it's worth looking at that as well. And it's a kind of impartial list. Paul Marden: Excellent. Do you think this is a story that attraction should be telling? So they're going to be, we're hoping that people are going to become energised by this and they're going to want to go on a digital sustainability journey. Do you think that is that something that they could be shouting about? James Hobbs: I think so, if done in the right way. Obviously, you've got to be careful of the sort of, we planted some trees and now everything's fine, because I don't think that's necessarily the case. But I think talking about it in the right way, which is we know we're not perfect, but we're doing something about it, and this is our plan, and being transparent about it, I think, is a good thing. I think it will also foster competition between different attractions, and everyone's a winner, really, because it will make everyone more sustainable. Paul Marden:  Yeah. James Hobbs: And yeah, I don't see why you shouldn't talk about it. I think its something thats important. And to your point earlier about consumers being able to influence some of this stuff, I really, truly hope that the generation of youngsters that are coming up now are going to be more hyper aware of this sort of thing, and they're going to care a lot more because it's likely to affect them more than it will us. So I would like to think that they will be selecting products, services, attractions, whatever it might be that can demonstrate that they're actually doing something to lessen the impact of their operations. James Hobbs: I've got two relatively young children, and I can already see them asking questions and being interested in this kind of stuff in a way that wouldn't have occurred to me when I was a kid, just didn't think about it. I cant change that. But what we can do is try and improve the world that were going to be leaving to the the youngs.Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So, one last question for you. Is there anything. Is there anything happening in this space that you think is really cool and interesting to think about? James Hobbs: That's a good question. I mean, like, I hope this isn't a non answer. I think the thing. The thing that is exciting me most is that more and more people are talking about this stuff. More and more people are asking questions about this stuff and I've done a lot of talks and webinars and things on this topic and the thing that really makes me feel positive and excited about it is that nearly all of them afterwards, people come up to you, they message you and say, “I just didn't realise.” The fact that we're able to raise awareness is brilliant because we can start to build up a bit of momentum. I think the thing that. I think I mentioned it earlier, products and services, building this sort of stuff into their platforms in terms of helping users use their services more efficiently, I think that's the area that I'm most excited about, because otherwise it's people kind of hacking stuff together. I think it should be a first class part of any solution, really is like, carbon impact of what I'm doing. That's what I'm probably most keen to see more of. Paul Marden: James, thank you. One last thing. We always ask our guests for a book recommendation and you've already said you're an avid reader, so no pressure, but I'm quite excited to hear about this one. James Hobbs: Well, there's two and I thought I'd just make the decision when you asked me the question about which one to recommend. So I'm going to go with my legitimately favourite book, which is the Player of Games by Iain M Banks. It's part of the culture series of novels and I'm a bit upset because Elon Musk has been talking about it. I feel like he's tarnished it slightly. A magnificent series of novels. I remember finishing the 10th one and sadly, the author died a while ago and I genuinely felt slightly bereft that there weren't going to be any more of them. It's a brilliant book. It's exciting. Yeah, it's exciting. It's so creative and inventive. It makes you think differently about things. It's definitely not one for children. James Hobbs: You know, there's a lot of violence and all kinds of other things in there. But it's a fascinating book. All of his books are fascinating. My favourite author. So if you're going to, if you think about getting into his books and specifically the culture novels, that's a great point to jump in at. It's accessible and it's absolutely brilliant. I love it. Paul Marden: That's quite the recommendation. So, listeners, if you want to get into this culture series of books, then when we post the show notice on X, get over there and retweet the message and say, “I want James's book.” And the first person to do that will get that sent to them. James, this has been brilliant. There's a couple of takeaways I want people to go and think about, one from me, which is go and test your site and then jump into the Rubber Cheese website survey. Paul Marden: Go to rubbercheese.com/survey, tell us all about your attractions website and one of those questions will be about have you tested the CO2 emissions of your site and have you done anything about it? The more we understand what the sector is doing, then the more we can understand how we can all help and improve things. Paul Marden: James, you had one idea of a place where people could go and find out more about this sort of stuff. James Hobbs: Yeah, I mean, there's some organisations that I mentioned. So the Green Web Foundation is one that's got lots of interesting material on there, both tools that they've made, but also they fund research in this space, which is really important. It should be treated like a specific discipline. I suppose they're doing some great stuff there. There's the Green Software foundation, which confusingly similar name, doing some good work in this space. There's also lots of interesting groups on discord forums that are out there. I guess my main message would be we're all learning more about this field. No one has all the answers, but there are organisations out there that you can come and speak to that can help you understand where you are currently. James Hobbs: And I definitely encourage you guys to fill in the surveys, Paul said, because the more information that we've got, you know, the better we can understand where things are. Paul Marden: James, this has been a lot of fun and really interesting. Thank you ever so much. Thank you for joining the podcast. James Hobbs: Thanks for having me on. Thanks a lot. Paul Marden: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, SkiptheQueue.fm. The 2024 Visitor Attraction Website Survey is now LIVE! Help the entire sector:Dive into groundbreaking benchmarks for the industryGain a better understanding of how to achieve the highest conversion ratesExplore the "why" behind visitor attraction site performanceLearn the impact of website optimisation and visitor engagement on conversion ratesUncover key steps to enhance user experience for greater conversionsFill in your data now (opens in new tab)

This episode, hosted by Dr Ellie Woodacre, features another roundtable with members of the Henry on Tour project team--we discuss the progresses of Henry VIII and the big themes of the project including kingship & queenship, logistics, legacy and performance.About the project: This exciting three-year venture brings together a cross-disciplinary team of scholars and technical specialists from both the academic and heritage sectors to explore, evaluate and reconceptualise Henry VIII's progresses. Led by Historic Royal Palaces in collaboration with the Universities of York and Newcastle, the main research focus will be on the logistics of Henry's journeys around his realm and their performance as a spectacle, their significance in demonstrating kingship and queenship, and their legacy for the study and interpretation of the Tudors in schools and at heritage sites. The project will map Henry VIII's complete itinerary for the first time and the associated landscapes, the routes taken, the venues visited and the palaces, country houses and ecclesiastical institutions that accommodated the royal household. Henry VIII on Tour will thus be presenting new stories, posing and answering innovative research questions, and hopefully inspiring greater curiosity about local places and heritage sites. As well as contributing to our understanding of Henry VIII, his wives and court and the relationship with his people in historical terms, the project will be reflecting on what monarchy and visibility means to us in the 21st century.Check out their upcoming project events HERE.Guest Bios:Anthony Musson Project lead / Theme lead: logisticsHistoric Royal PalacesProfessor Anthony Musson joined Historic Royal Palaces in 2018 to lead and foster a distinctive vision for the charity's research into historic palaces, diverse communities, landscapes and collections. He is editor with JPD Cooper of Royal Journeys in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 2022).Kate Giles Theme lead: legacyUniversity of YorkKate is a building historian and archaeologist with a particular interest in the study of late medieval and early modern communal and public buildings. As Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Christianity & Culture, Kate works with national, regional and local organisations to find creative ways of sustaining and sharing their heritage with others.Kirsty Wright Post-Doctoral Research AssistantHistoric Royal PalacesMy research focuses on early modern architecture, politics and government. I completed my PhD at the University of York on the Exchequer of Receipt in the Palace of Westminster, which explored the relationship between institutional development and the architecture of the palace. Toby WardEnsemble Pro VictoriaFounded at Cambridge in 2015, EPV is a pioneer in combining high-level performance with the latest research. Under their director Toby Ward, EPV won joint-first prize at the London International Festival of Early Music Young Ensemble Competition (2020).  Their Gramophone award-nominated debut recording, Robert Fayrfax: Music for Tudor Kings and Queens, was released by Delphian in 2021. Their second album, Tudor Music Afterlives (Delphian, 2022) includes new polyphonic reconstructions. 

In this new five-part series, Historic Royal Palaces Curator Charles Farris leads us into the stormy world of the Wars of the Roses.   We aim to reveal how and why such a turbulent period of conflict occurred in the 15th century, and ultimately how it ushered in a new dynasty with the Tudors.  Charles will be joined by expert historians and Curators from Historic Royal Palaces, to help unpack what has made the Wars of the Roses so legendary.   Join us next Thursday, for the first episode on the context behind the Wars of the Roses. 

Rerun: Fugitive Thomas Blood sneaked his way into the Tower of London's jewel room on 9th May, 1671 - bludgeoning the 77 year-old Keeper of the Jewels, Talbot Edwards, in the process.  Disguised as a parson, the Irish adventurer had cat-fished Edwards in an audacious and complex heist that involved multiple pairs of white gloves, a fake nephew and stuffing an orb down his trousers. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly explain how Blood failed to steal the jewels, but got away with a Royal pardon from Charles II; recall his earlier escapades as a fake doctor and a mock executioner; and ask why, after all that planning, the criminal gang didn't BRING A BIGGER BAG…  Further Reading: • ‘Attempt to steal the Crown Jewels' (The National Archives): https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/significant-events/attempt-to-steal-the-crown-jewels/  • ‘Thomas Blood and the Theft of the Crown Jewels' (Historia Magazine, 2017): https://www.historiamag.com/thomas-blood/ • ‘The Crown Jewels Thief - Colonel Blood' (Historic Royal Palaces, 2021): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRmBE6B8F7I ‘Why am I hearing a rerun?' Every Thursday is 'Throwback Thursday' on Today in History with the Retrospectors: running one repeat per week means we can keep up the quality of our independent podcast. Daily shows like this require a lot of work! But as ever we'll have something new for you tomorrow, so follow us wherever you get your podcasts: podfollow.com/Retrospectors Love the show? Join 

Lady Jane Grey - Queen of England for just nine days - was executed at the Tower of London on 12th February, 1554. Edward VI, who had died aged 15, named the teenager as his successor in his will, even though Henry VIII's daughters Mary and Elizabeth had a more direct connection to the throne. The protestant Jane fainted upon hearing she had been made monarch, and declared that Mary was the rightful heir. When the privy council changed their mind and declared Mary (despite her Catholicism) to be Queen anyway, Jane was sent to the Tower. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly explain why it was Jane's own father - not ‘Bloody' Mary herself - who was ultimately responsible for Jane's beheading; reveal how even in the last moments of her life Mary conspired to get Jane converted to Catholicism; and discover that it's *never* a good idea to put on a blindfold before you put your head on the chopping block…  Further Reading: • ‘Lady Jane Grey: Tower of London' (Historic Royal Palaces): https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/lady-jane-grey/#gs.og751i • ‘Lady Jane Grey: Facts About The Nine-Day Queen's Life & Execution' (HistoryExtra, 2021): https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/who-was-lady-jane-grey-facts-about-nine-day-queen-execution-death/ • ‘Lady Jane Grey, The Teenager Who Ruled England For Nine Days' (Weird History, 2022): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaKjBiG0e6E This episode first premiered in 2022, for members of

Sir Nicholas is Chair / former Chair of Historic Royal Palaces, Victoria & Albert Museum, British Fashion Council, Professional Publishers Association, Condé Nast Britain and Provost-Designate at Eton College. Tune in to hear his answers to: As a Chair, where have you been most and least effective leading through difficult times? (1:25); How did you know you could handle rapid expansion at Conde Nast? (8:14); When you were Chair of Conde Nast International, how did the board think about cost-cutting? (16:33); What do you think about voluntary redundancy, and how do you balance the welfare of those staying with that of those going? (23:50); What is  your approach to fundraising? (27:49); To what extent do boards have an obligation to hold their organisations to account for their history? (33:58) and⚡The Lightning Round ⚡(41:34) Show notes and transcript available at https://www.nurole.com/news-and-guides

Queen Victoria was Britain's longest reigning monarch until Queen Elizabeth II - her great great granddaughter. Born fifth in line to the throne, at a time when the Royal Family's popularity was at an all time low, Victoria went on to be one of Britain's most beloved monarchs. Today, she's associated with an empire on which the sun never set, an overpowering love for her husband, and her crippling grief. But who was the real Victoria? What was it like for a young woman to hold so much power in a man's world? Can she be credited with the developments of her age, or was she merely a figurehead? And how should we remember her today? This is a Short History Of Queen Victoria. Written by Nicole Edmunds. With thanks to Tracy Borman, historian, author of ‘Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth I: The Mother and Daughter Who Changed History', and joint curator for Historic Royal Palaces. Get every episode of Short History Of a week early with Noiser+. You'll also get ad-free listening, bonus material, and early access to shows across the Noiser network. Click the Noiser+ banner to get started. Or, if you're on Spotify or Android, go to noiser.com/subscriptions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dressing for the Tudor Court was no simple matter, with rules around who could wear what, the challenge and expense of obtaining fabrics and jewels, and the fine line between being a glittering appendage to the court or a treasonous upstart! Eleri Lynn, Fashion Historian and author of a number of books on Tudor Fashion and Textiles, joined me to talk about the clothes of the Tudors and how they were as central to their world as politics and religion. Eleri Lynn, a fashion and textiles curator, author and historian, specialising in the Tudor period She gained her experience as an Assistant Curator within the Furniture, Textiles and Fashion Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum before becoming Curator of the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection at Historic Royal Palaces. She has appeared on many TV documentaries including BBC2's ‘Art That Made Us' and BBC1's ‘Elizabeth: Fashioning a Monarch'. Eleri is the author of several monographs: Fashion in Detail: Underwear (V&A Publications, 2010), Tudor Textiles (Yale University Press, 2020), and Tudor Fashion (Yale University Press, 2017) - on which this interview is based. Eleri has curated several major fashion and textiles exhibitions including Diana: Her Fashion Story (Kensington Palace, 2017) and The Lost Dress of Elizabeth I (Hampton Court Palace, 2019).Most recently she was Head of Exhibitions at National Museum Wales and is a Trustee of the Royal School of Needlework, based at Hampton Court Palace. She is currently working   researching and writing a new book on the history of fashion. Get full access to British History at philippab.substack.com/subscribe

Ep 189 is loose! And we're heading to the Elizabethan era to look into the mystery death of Amy Robsart, love rival to the Queen herself...Why did the Elizabethans love true crime? Did Amy fall, jump or was she pushed? And should any of us be on a horse?The secret ingredient is...a staircaseGet cocktails and historic true crime tales every week with The Poisoners' Cabinet. Listen to the Podcast on iTunes, Spotify and find us on Acast: https://shows.acast.com/thepoisonerscabinet Join us Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thepoisonerscabinet Find us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thepoisonerscabinet Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thepoisonerscabinet/ Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ThePoisonersCabinet Sources this week include Charles Nicholl's writings and the London Review of Books, Mortal Monarchs by Dr Suzie Edge, English Heritage, Historic Royal Palaces, History.com, the National Library of Medicine, Jessica Jewett, Tudor Society, Royal Museums Greenwich, Artnet Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the next few episodes, we're going to be following some of the people who work in our palaces today. We'll be exploring how these jobs have a historic context to them, and how surprisingly, there are similarities in the work they do now, from the work that was done in the past.  Today we meet Erin, Historic Royal Palaces' Wardrobe Manager. We step into the treasure trove that is the costume store and contemplate how Erin's job may have existed in the past. To help contextualise this, Curator Charles Farris will then explore the Medieval world of wardrobe management.  To find out more about the forgotten stories of those who worked at the royal palaces over 300 years ago, a new exhibition is opening at Kensington Palace.  https://www.hrp.org.uk/kensington-palace/whats-on/untold-lives/  

A very merry royal Christmas to you all, dear listeners! We're bringing you a very festive episode thanks to our lovely and über- knowledgeable guest, historian, author and Joint Chief Curator of HRP, Tracy Borman, who discusses royal Christmas traditions past and present (plus the best palace decor!). And wait: There's more! A fun flashback to when someone leaked the Queen's Christmas speech in advance, plus Meghan's new acting stint, Kate's upcoming education choice for Prince George, a legal win for Harry and some new royal podcast competition in 2024. Grab some spiked apple cider and tune in!Presented by PureWow and Gallery Media Group. Follow all the royal news at purewow.com/royals. Follow us on Instagram at @RoyallyObsessedPodcast.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Here's a romp of an episode:  Amelia and Keenan's UK travel itineraries overlapped a couple of months ago, and they're here to regale you with tales of filming locations seen (Bridgerton! Sense and Sensibility! Fleabag! Persuasion!), royalty glimpsed, corsets admired, fancy trains ridden, hallowed literary ground "hot pessed" upon, rakes booed at the Jane Austen Centre, correspondences from Dame Emma Thompson worshiped, cathedral bells rung, and more. (Once again: Historic Royal Palaces: call us!) Yours ever, most ardently, Keenan and Amelia

Here's a romp of an episode:  Amelia and Keenan's UK travel itineraries overlapped a couple of months ago, and they're here to regale you with tales of filming locations seen (Bridgerton! Sense and Sensibility! Fleabag! Persuasion!), royalty glimpsed, corsets admired, fancy trains ridden, hallowed literary ground "hot pessed" upon, rakes booed at the Jane Austen Centre, correspondences from Dame Emma Thompson worshiped, cathedral bells rung, and more. (Once again: Historic Royal Palaces: call us!) Yours ever, most ardently, Keenan and Amelia

Before Lucy Worsley became a fixture on our TV screens as a trusted architectural and social historian she wanted to be either a spy, a witch or a nun. But her father was a geologist and he wanted Lucy to be a scientist, so when she switched from the sciences to the humanities he was unimpressed and told her she'd never earn a living with a history degree! It was a visit to Mompesson House, a National Trust property in Salisbury, when she was 18 that made her realise that keeping a historical place going was an actual job and one that spoke to her - she's now Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces with an office in Hampton Court Palace. So who, what and when will her Inheritance Tracks come from?Inherited: Mozart Piano Sonata No. 16 in C Major played by Maria João Pires Passed on: Magnificat and Nunc dimittis: The Seventh Service sung by The Choir of HM Chapel RoyalProducer: Ben Mitchell

King Henry VIII's third wife, Queen Consort Jane Seymour, died aged just 29 on 24th October, 1537 - 12 days after giving birth to their son, future King Edward VI. Her death was attributed to complications following a prolonged and challenging labour, though recently it has been speculated it was in fact a pulmonary embolism.  Despite her limited education, Jane's gentle nature and domestic skills appealed to Henry, who was, perhaps, looking for a more ‘girl next door'-type following his disastrous marriage to Anne Boleyn, whom he had beheaded just ten days before marrying Jane.  In this episode, Arion, Olly and Rebecca weigh up Jane's plain reputation with her latent plucky side and glitzy jewellery; consider Jane's role in reconciling Henry with his daughter Mary, who had been declared a bastard; and delight in the discovery of black wax in Henry's mourning court… Further Reading: • ‘Jane Seymour | Hampton Court Palace' (Historic Royal Palaces): https://www.hrp.org.uk/hampton-court-palace/history-and-stories/jane-seymour/#gs.71s7lp • ‘Jane Seymour | Queen, Henry VIII's Third Wife, Facts & Death' (HistoryExtra, 2021): https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/kings-and-queens-in-profile-jane-seymour/ • ‘The HORRIFIC Death Of Jane Seymour - Henry VIII's Third Wife' (Her Remarkable History, 2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3wckPOvxVY Love the show? Join

Today we have a fifth special for you from our place as podcasters in residence at the Gloucester History Festival, and joining Paul today is Author, Tudor Historian, Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces, and Chancellor of Bishop Grossteste University, Tracy Borman. Tracy has come to rage that ELIZABETH I CARED A LOT FOR ANNE BOELYN.We hear about the influence that Anne Boelyn had on forming the character and upbringing of Elizabeth, despite having been executed when Elizabeth was not yet 3. We'll hear about how her actions during her reign show that she is much more Anne's daughter than Henry's.You can, and should, read Tracy's book on this subject and this is available in the History Rage Bookshop and you can follow Tracy on Twitter @tracybormanIf you've not managed to make it this year then the festival returns twice in 2024, those dates are 12th April to 14th April and 7th September to 22nd September 2024.You can sign up to the Festival Mailing List at gloucesterhistoryfestival.co.uk and follow them on Twitter @gloshistfestYou can follow History Rage on Twitter @HistoryRage and let us know what you wish people would just stop believing using the Hashtag #HistoryRage. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Send us a Text Message.It's May 1536. Anne Boleyn has just been beheaded at the tower of London. The crowd falls silent. Onlookers are shocked. Some didn't believe it would really happen. There's some hesitant cheering, some applauding. The queens ladies in waiting scream, wail, fall to the ground. One rushes forward and gathers Anne's head in a white cloth. Others drag her body from the stage. Somewhere a cannon fires. Anne is carted away. She'll be buried in a shallow, unmarked grave. Meanwhile, as the cannonfire fades away, Henry VIII hops on a barge. His wife's decapitated body is still warm and yet, he moved on long ago. He has his sights set on another woman, Jane Seymour. By the end of the month, he'll make her his third wife. Sources:Tudor Times "Why Did Jane Seymour Die In Childbed?"The Tudor Society "Christina of Denmark"Local Histories "Women in the 16th Century"Historic Royal Palaces "Thomas Cromwell"Historic Royal Palaces "Catherine Howard"English History "Queen Catherine Howard to Master Thomas Culpepper"Smithsonian Magazine "The Myth of Bloody Mary"Royal Museums Greenwich "Why is Mary I Known as Bloody Mary?"Encyclopedia Britannica "Elizabeth I Achievements"History Extra podcast series "Six Wives"Support the show! Buy Me a CoffeeVenmo @Shea-LaFountaine

Send us a Text Message.Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. Henry VIII went down in history, not so much for what he accomplished as king of England but for one tantalizing fact - he had six wives. Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, Katherine Parr - these six women are often defined by their association with Henry VIII, she was wife number 2, she was number 5, she was number 6, their very humanity reduced to a number. Not Catherine, not Anne, not Jane, just “Henry VIII's wife.” But these women were more than just wives, they were individuals, each with their own story, all of them overshadowed by the desperation of a man determined to continue his legacy. But did you know, in his absurd quest for a male heir, Henry VIII ripped his country apart, changing the religion of the entire nation, executing his closest advisors, tormenting his wives, and ultimately failing miserably? Let's fix that. Historic UK "Henry VII"National Library of Medicine "The English Sweating Sickness"Historic Royal Palaces "Life at the Tudor Court"The Tudor Society "The Pregnancies of Katherine of Aragon"The Freelance History Writer "Catherine of Aragon's Speech at Blackfriars"Short History of podcast episode "Henry VIII"History Extra podcast series "Six Wives"Support the show! Buy Me a CoffeeVenmo @Shea-LaFountaine

Rerun. Queen Victoria moved from her birthplace, Kensington Palace, and decreed Buckingham Palace her official residence on 13th July, 1837. She was 18, newly-crowned – and until then had shared a bedroom with her mother. Built in 1703 for the Duke of Buckingham, the Palace had never previously permanently housed anyone, and was reportedly drafty, dirty, and staffed by ‘slovenly' servants. But, you know, she made do. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly examine the escapades of ‘the boy Jones' – a teenage stalker of the young Victoria; pore through the pages of the young monarch's diaries; and reveal which celebrities claim to have got down and dirty in the Queen's official residence… Further Reading: • Profile of Queen Victoria from Historic Royal Palaces: https://www.hrp.org.uk/kensington-palace/history-and-stories/queen-victoria/#gs.59mhsd • Buckingham Palace page at the Royal Collection Trust: https://www.rct.uk/visit/buckingham-palace/who-built-buckingham-palace#/ • ‘Victoria's Palace' documentary (ITV, 2019): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUn63ZIELxU&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Ftheretrospectors.com%2F&source_ve_path=MjM4NTE&feature=emb_title Love the show? Join

In our final episode in our queenship series, Dr. Johanna Strong is joined by Holly Marsden, Amy-Jane Humphries, and Dr Gabrielle Storey to talk about the Team Queens collective and global queenship. Holly is currently completing her PhD through the AHRC's Collaborative Doctoral Partnership scheme at the University of Winchester and Historic Royal Palaces, in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery and Royal Museums Greenwich. Her thesis looks at Mary II in the context of queenship, culture, and politics in the seventeenth century. Amy is currently working on her PhD at the University of Liverpool, researching royal women of the early Georgian court in Britain. She is also the People Administrator for the Hampshire Cultural Trust. Last but not least we have Gabby, who is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Winchester. Her research focuses on twelfth- and thirteenth-century queenship, examining co-rulership, queenship, gender, sexuality, and perceptions of power. She is the founder of the Team Queens collective, of which Holly, Amy, and I were a part. -- Credits: Host: Dr Johanna Strong Guests: ⁠Holly Marsden, Amy Humphries, Dr Gabrielle Storey Editing: Rebecca Larson Episode Music: Tavern Loop One by Alexander Nakarada, Free download: ⁠https://filmmusic.io/song/6282-tavern-loop-one,⁠ License (CC BY 4.0): ⁠https://filmmusic.io/standard-license,⁠ Artist website: ⁠https://www.serpentsoundstudios.com/⁠ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rebecca-larson/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rebecca-larson/support

Take a fascinating journey back in time to visit a few British royal rulers with an intimate look at their reigns as well as at their majestic coronations.  British author and historian Tracy Borman joins The Gilded Gentleman for this unique look at history based on her book "Crown & Sceptre: A New History of the British Monarchy from William the Conqueror to King Charles III". In this second part of our coronation celebration, historian and author Tracy Borman, joint Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces, takes us into the world of  the Tudors to discuss just what Henry VIII and his chief minister Thomas Cromwell were really like.  We move on to the glorious rule of Elizabeth I whom Tracy says "makes us fall in love with queens".  Entering the 19th century, we look at the world of Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales who became Edward VII.  Tracy gives us a look at each of these monarch's coronations and surprisingly how they compare to that of King Charles III. If you are a royal watcher or lover of British history, don't miss this show - we end the episode with a discussion of just how the current monarchy fits into the long line of history.  

In 2018 the people of Ireland voted to repeal the 8th amendment and grant women access to safe and free abortions up to 12 weeks into pregnancy. Ireland was promised ‘excellent' abortion services but what is the reality 5 years on? Yesterday an independent review of abortion services was released that proposed 10 major changes to legislation. Dr Deirdre Duffy, a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University talks to Anita about the review. As the nation prepares for the coronation, Anita Rani considers the issue of gender and sovereignty. The British people have only experienced Queenship so whilst the coronation of Charles III marks a return to the more traditional role of kingship, it's a big shift for the public. She'll be joined by Tracy Borman the author of numerous books and co-curator of Historic Royal Palaces and Professor Anna Whitehorn from City, University of London and Director of the Centre for the Study of Modern Monarchy. The former President of the United States, Donald Trump, is facing a trial over an allegation that he raped an advice columnist nearly three decades ago. Jean Carroll, who is 79, is suing Mr Trump for allegedly assaulting her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s, a charge the former president has denied. The civil trial, which started yesterday, is expected to last two weeks. Amanda Taub from the New York Times joins Anita to talk about how this historical case can be brought after several decades. Under Pressure is an occasional series which looks at the stress put on relationships when life happens. Carla and Brendon met at school, their lives looked to be on one track and then things changed. Jo Morris went to meet them and Carla shared her personal experience about when her fibromyalgia, a long-term condition which can cause widespread, persistent pain, first began. Presenter: Anita Rani Producer: Rebecca Myatt Studio manager: Andrew Garrett

This week on Passport to Everywhere, Melissa Biggs Bradley explores the iconic Claridge's hotel in London, often called the "annex of Buckingham Palace." Since opening its doors in 1854, Claridge's has welcomed dozens of beloved royals, foreign dignitaries, and Hollywood stars, earning a reputation as one of the most star-studded hotels in the world.  Melissa sits down with Claridge's archivist Kate Hudson and lead butler Michael Lynch, who have intimate knowledge of the hotel's rich history and its legendary guests. From the French Empress Eugenie entertaining Queen Victoria to Hollywood Golden Age actors like Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Yul Brynner, and Spencer Tracy, who famously said he'd rather go to Claridge's than heaven when he dies. Claridge's has undergone numerous renovations over its 169-year history, most recently a first-of-its-kind renovation from 2016 to 2021, chronicled in the BBC documentary series, The Mayfair Hotel Megabuild. Despite the extensive renovation, Claridge's miraculously stayed open throughout the entire process, a testament to their commitment to providing high-quality luxury service. Today, Claridge's is part of the Maybourne Hotel Group, which runs two of Melissa's other favorite hotels in London as well: The Berkeley and The Connaught.  Leading up to King Charles' coronation, Andrew Jackson, Director of Historic Royal Palaces and the Governor of the Tower of London, joins Melissa to share his insights on how to best enjoy the royal palaces in the U.K. and what to expect from the lavish coronation ceremony.

Join us for a whistle-stop tour of the History of Coronations. Curators Charles Farris, Alden Gregory and Lee Prosser will lead you on a merry dance through time, from medieval pre-coronation baths, to a man rolling down the steps at Queen Victoria's coronation. There's never a dull moment!  To find out more about the history of coronations, and how Historic Royal Palaces are celebrating visit:  https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/coronations-past-and-present/ https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/whats-on/coronation-bench-trail/ For the Crown Jewels go to: https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/the-crown-jewels/ 

Today Tony has followed his nose and chosen a topic which is often overlooked: what did the past smell like? Was it bad? Are we loosing smells to history? Tony doesn't have a brilliant sense of smell so his two guests: smell historian William Tullett, and smell designer Tasha Marks, are on hand to help him out. Hosted by Tony Robinson @Tony_Robinson With Tasha Marks / Twitter @avmcuriosities / Instagram @avmcuriosities / www.avmcuriosities.com Award-winning artist, food historian and founder of AVM Curiosities®, a creative practice that explores the relationship between art and the senses, championing the use of food and fragrance as artistic mediums. Tasha's projects range from olfactory curation and scented installations to interactive lectures and limited-edition fragrances for institutions including the Royal Academy of Arts, Victoria & Albert Museum, The National Gallery, The British Museum and Historic Royal Palaces. She has developed a diverse portfolio from recreating an Ancient Egyptian Beer, to manufacturing the scent of human breastmilk. William Tullett / Twitter @WillTullett / Instagram @williamtullett / www.williamtullett.com Dr William Tullett is Associate Professor of Sensory History at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge and is currently part of the Odeuropa project. His first book Smell in Eighteenth-Century England is in paperback with Oxford University Press and his latest book, Smell and the Past, can be downloaded for free from Bloomsbury here. He is currently working on a big, bold, new history of smells from antiquity to the present for a wider audience.CREDITS: Series Producer: Melissa FitzGerald @melissafitzgExec Producer: Dominic de TervilleCover Art: The Brightside A Zinc Media Group productionFollow:Twitter: @cunningcastpodInstagram: @cunningcastpodYouTube If you enjoyed my podcast, please leave us a rating or review.Thank you, Love Tony x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Jewish medieval history of the Tower of London remains relatively unknown to our everyday visitors, and yet it is foundational to the first 200-years of the life of the fortress, as well as medieval England itself.   In this episode Curator Charles Farris is joined by Dr Rory MacLellan and Professor Miri Rubin, to reflect on how new research at Historic Royal Palaces has helped give a more nuanced picture of life for the Medieval Jewish community in England.   For more on this subject go to:  https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/jewish-medieval-history-at-the-tower-of-london/   For Dr Rory MacLellan's exploration of the Jewish prisoners, sanctuary-seekers, and staff of the medieval Tower, including access to his research findings, go to:  https://www.hrp.org.uk/about-us/research/the-jewish-history-of-the-medieval-tower-of-london/ 

This week is the penultimate episode in our six-part mini-series and today we are in for a treat! Curatorial placement student Cara Gathern takes us into one of the most exciting but hidden spaces at Hampton Court Palace, Henry VIII's bedroom. It may not look like a royal Tudor bedroom today, but Cara will reveal how this space has transported her to the past, and particularly to the medicinal practices of the health-obsessed Tudor king.  To find out more about this subject go to: https://www.hrp.org.uk/blog/henry-viii-medicines To find out more about opportunities and further education at Historic Royal Palaces go to:  https://www.hrp.org.uk/about-us/research/ma-in-heritage-management   https://www.hrp.org.uk/about-us/work-for-us/apprenticeships  

The Field of Cloth of Gold was a summit and celebration that was held to start what was hoped to be a long-term alliance between France and England. And it required a lot of fancy footwork to keep two monarchs appeased.  Research: Richardson, Glenn. “The Field of Cloth of Gold.” Yale University Press. 2020. “Henry VIII's foot combat armour.” Royal Armouries. https://royalarmouries.org/stories/object-of-the-month/object-of-the-month-for-april-henry-viiis-foot-combat-armour/ Solly, Meilan. “When Henry VIII and Francis I Spent $19 Million on an 18-Day Party.” Smithsonian. June 23, 2020. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/five-hundred-years-ago-henry-viii-and-francis-i-spent-19-million-18-day-party-180975116/ “The Field of Cloth of Gold.” Historic Royal Palaces. https://www.hrp.org.uk/hampton-court-palace/history-and-stories/the-field-of-cloth-of-gold/#gs.9xj1t7 Lay, Paul. “Wolsey's Own Accord.” History Today. Volume 68, Issue 10. October 2018. https://www.historytoday.com/archive/editor/wolsey%E2%80%99s-own-accord Watts, Karen. “Tournaments at the Court of King Henry VIII.” From “Henry VIII in Twenty-First Century Popular Culture.” Lexington Books. 2017. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Historian Tracy Borman answers listener questions about the history of British royal residences, from imposing castles to decadent palaces. She speaks to Rachel Dinning about secret rooms, spooky hauntings, and her work as Joint Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.