Podcasts about st pancras

46 He came again therefore into Cana of Galilee, where he made the water wine. And there was a certain ruler, whose son was sick at Capharnaum.Venit ergo iterum in Cana Galilaeae, ubi fecit aquam vinum. Et erat quidam regulus, cujus filius infirmabatur Capharnaum. 47 He having heard that Jesus was come from Judea into Galilee, went to him, and prayed him to come down, and heal his son; for he was at the point of death.Hic cum audisset quia Jesus adveniret a Judaea in Galilaeam, abiit ad eum, et rogabat eum ut descenderet, et sanaret filium ejus : incipiebat enim mori. 48 Jesus therefore said to him: Unless you see signs and wonders, you believe not.Dixit ergo Jesus ad eum : Nisi signa et prodigia videritis, non creditis. 49 The ruler saith to him: Lord, come down before that my son die.Dicit ad eum regulus : Domine, descende priusquam moriatur filius meus. 50 Jesus saith to him: Go thy way; thy son liveth. The man believed the word which Jesus said to him, and went his way.Dicit ei Jesus : Vade, filius tuus vivit. Credidit homo sermoni quem dixit ei Jesus, et ibat. 51 And as he was going down, his servants met him; and they brought word, saying, that his son lived.Jam autem eo descendente, servi occurrerunt ei, et nuntiaverunt dicentes, quia filius ejus viveret. 52 He asked therefore of them the hour wherein he grew better. And they said to him: Yesterday, at the seventh hour, the fever left him.Interrogabat ergo horam ab eis in qua melius habuerit. Et dixerunt ei : Quia heri hora septima reliquit eum febris. 53 The father therefore knew, that it was at the same hour that Jesus said to him, Thy son liveth; and himself believed, and his whole house.Cognovit ergo pater, quia illa hora erat in qua dixit ei Jesus : Filius tuus vivit; et credidit ipse et domus ejus tota.Nereus and Achilleus were servants of Flavius Domitilla, who was martyred with them A.D. 98. St Pancras was put to death at the age of fourteen. A.D. 304

On todays show: Lockdown, London, Love letters, Love storyThanks to our sponsors Rest at the NestGet in touch; thelauraandbeckyshow@gmail.com We love you! Please become a member here https://plus.acast.com/s/the-laura-becky-show. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Many know St Pancras for the amazing station building that dominated the local skyline, but there is so much more to the area! Join us as we share more with you.....

Well here it is, the second half of our live record evening. We set out to discover the most important/ best/ typically London/ Londitudinal building. Can the champions of Regent St sway the room, to win against The Barbican? Will rock, paper, scissors, finally settle the age old question, is Roman stuff more important than Greenwich? And, critically, is St Pancras railway station better than the Wanstead Tap? Joined once again by Leo Hollis, plus lovely listeners, Dan from the Tap and friend of the pod, Katie Wignall, Alex and I ask you to put on a silly hat, maybe have a glass of something to hand, or even one in both hands, just in case, and brace yourselves for the silliness ahead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mona Siddiqui and guests hear from Rev Denzil Larbi. He reflects on his cousin, Elianne Andam, who was 15 when she was fatally stabbed at a bus stop in Croydon, South London, in September 2023. He discusses their Christmases together and how the family mark Christmas without her.The panel of guests explore the complexities that often come with religious festivals especially those that come with an expectation of jollity. Do religions do enough for those who are grieving or isolated at times of collective merriment? Should religious leaders and communities be more responsible and nuanced in their approach? And, are some religions better at dealing with grief than others?To discuss Mona is joined by Jasvir Singh, from the Department of Theology and Religion at Birmingham University, Chair of City Sikhs, and the founder and Chair of the British Sikh Report, the Revd Lucy Winkett, Rector of St James's, Piccadilly, and Priest-in-Charge of St Pancras's Church, Euston Road, and Remona Aly, British Muslim journalist, commentator and broadcaster with a focus on faith, identity and lifestyle. Producer: Alexa Good Assistant Producer: Linda Walker Editor: Tim Pemberton

Send us a textLee and Simon discuss what it is they are most proud of and the capacity to feel as if terrible events are gifts. Things covered: Not having a kitchen, Wolf ovens, removing fitted carpets from a place, Simon being met by a friend at St Pancras, Lee being proud of still being married to Bob, the challenges of a life, having had a difficult week (tummy anxiety), the feeling of underperforming at work, men being less able to communicate feelings (or not), texting a Jungian analysis, the feeling of a big week when it isn't really that big, how small things accumulate over time, Lee watching and seeing the photographs that Bob is taking while she is away, a period of difficulty as a gift, revisiting (briefly) that moment when Simon and Lee covered Simon's reaction to their first miscarriage (see episode whatever way back when), the capacity to view a difficult thing as a gift, the rhythm of loss, adapting to change in time, coming back to worm carnage, closed captions: unsettling music playing, discordant noise, John Williams and Jaws, being full sensory beasts.Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net. ---The Midlifing logo is adapted from an original image by H.L.I.T: https://www.flickr.com/photos/29311691@N05/8571921679 (CC BY 2.0)

John Van Donk is heading back to the Old World to meet with people interested in Estuary and help launch new groups. 

Greg Nugent was the CMO for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, one of the biggest events ever to take place. The entire world was watching as Greg's work came to life. Before working on the Olympics, Greg oversaw the move of the Eurostar to St Pancras, which included creating the world's longest champagne bar.Timestamps:00:00:00 - Intro00:00:51 - How did Greg get into marketing00:10:02 - Greg's time at Eurostar00:17:47 - The longest champage bar in the world00:22:43 - Becoming the CMO of the London 2012 Olympics00:29:49 - How the team was pivotal for putting on the Olympics00:34:13 - The importance of the legacy of London 201200:37:53 - Why the Paralympics became so prevalent in 201200:45:38 - What happened after London 201200:50:37 - From Olympics to Rising Pheonix01:01:05 - How to execute on big ideas - Magic and Logic01:16:35 - The power of persistence01:23:24 - Telling powerful stories about those with disability

pWotD Episode 2621: Keir Starmer Welcome to Popular Wiki of the Day, spotlighting Wikipedia's most visited pages, giving you a peek into what the world is curious about today.With 1,912,405 views on Friday, 5 July 2024 our article of the day is Keir Starmer.Sir Keir Rodney Starmer ( ; born 2 September 1962) is a British politician and barrister who has served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since 2024, as Leader of the Labour Party since 2020, and as Leader of the Opposition from 2020 to 2024. He has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Holborn and St Pancras since 2015, and previously was Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013.Born in London and raised in Surrey, Starmer attended the selective state Reigate Grammar School, which became a private school while he was a student. He was politically active from an early age and joined the Labour Party Young Socialists at the age of 16. He graduated with a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Leeds in 1985 and gained a postgraduate Bachelor of Civil Law degree at St Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford in 1986. After being called to the bar, Starmer practised predominantly in criminal defence work, specialising in human rights. He served as a human rights adviser to the Northern Ireland Policing Board and was appointed a Queen's Counsel in 2002, later citing his work on policing in Northern Ireland as being a key influence on his decision to pursue a political career. During his time as Director of Public Prosecutions, he dealt with a number of major cases including the Stephen Lawrence murder case. He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to law and criminal justice.Starmer was elected to the House of Commons at the 2015 general election. As a backbencher, he supported the unsuccessful Britain Stronger in Europe campaign in the 2016 European Union membership referendum. He was appointed to Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinet as Shadow Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, and advocated a proposed second referendum on Brexit. Following Corbyn's resignation after Labour's defeat at the 2019 general election, Starmer succeeded him by winning the 2020 leadership election on a left-wing platform. During his tenure as opposition leader, Starmer moved the party back more toward the centre, and emphasised the importance of eliminating antisemitism within the party. Starmer led Labour to victory in the local elections in 2023 and 2024. In 2023, Starmer set out five missions for his government, targeting issues such as economic growth, health, clean energy, crime and education. In July 2024, Starmer led Labour to a landslide victory at the 2024 general election, ending fourteen years of Conservative government with Labour becoming the largest party in the House of Commons. He succeeded Rishi Sunak as prime minister on 5 July 2024, becoming the first Labour prime minister since Gordon Brown in 2010 and the first one to win a general election since Tony Blair at the 2005 general election.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 02:28 UTC on Saturday, 6 July 2024.For the full current version of the article, see Keir Starmer on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm standard Joey.

A cura di Daniele Biacchessi Con 410 seggi su 650,  il Labour ottiene una ampia maggioranza assoluta e Keir Starmer, in quanto leader del partito più votato, diventerà il prossimo primo ministro. Viene confermata la sconfitta schiacciante dei conservatori dell'attuale premier Rishi Sunak, che sono alla guida del Paese da 14 anni. Il segnale più evidente sta nel fatto che molti leader del Tory hanno perso perfino il seggio da deputato, come il ministro della Difesa britannico Grant Shapps battuto dal laburista Andrew Lewin nel collegio elettorale di Welwyn Hatfield, nel sud dell'Inghilterra.  Starmer a Downing Street: “Il Paese vuole il cambiamento” La parola chiave che utilizza il nuovo premier Keir Starmer è "cambiamento", perché così vuole il Paese. La sua non è una svolta radicale di sinistra come qualche analista di tendenza conservatrice intende sottolineare, bensì un'azione politica in continuità con il moderatismo del Labour di Tony Blair e Gordon Brown, prima dei 14 lunghi anni di opposizione.  Starmer ha scelto la sua prima uscita pubblica al collegio londinese di Holborn e St Pancras, dove ha ottenuto 18.000 suffragi, 11.000 voti in più rispetto al secondo candidato. "Io servirò ciascuno di voi, che mi abbiate votato o no", ha detto Starmer aggiungendo che il cambiamento riguarda il rilancio di una politica di servizio pubblico, senza privilegiare interessi di qualcuno.  Le sfide di Starmer  Su temi strategici come sicurezza e commercio, l'esecutivo laburista avvierà un rapporto nuovo con l'Europa. Il titolare designato agli esteri David Lammy  definisce la strategia di Downing Street  “realismo progressivo”: ossia rendersi conto che il mondo e i suoi equilibri di forza sono cambiati e dunque la Gran Bretagna deve perseguire obiettivi realistici ma in linea con i valori democratici. Per il resto, Starmer proseguirà con le scelte precedenti in politica estera come la conferma degli aiuti a Kiev,  la deterrenza contro Putin,  ma anche il rilancio di una visione comune europea contro ogni tipo di populismo. Ed è su questo punto che si misurerà la capacità di Starmer di rientrare nel dibattito europeo.  ___________________________________________________ Ascolta altre produzioni di Giornale Radio sul sito: https://www.giornaleradio.fm oppure scarica la nostra App gratuita: iOS - App Store - https://apple.co/2uW01yA Android - Google Play - http://bit.ly/2vCjiW3 Resta connesso e segui i canali social di Giornale Radio: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/giornaleradio.fm/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/giornale_radio_fm/?hl=it

A cura di Daniele Biacchessi Con 410 seggi su 650,  il Labour ottiene una ampia maggioranza assoluta e Keir Starmer, in quanto leader del partito più votato, diventerà il prossimo primo ministro. Viene confermata la sconfitta schiacciante dei conservatori dell'attuale premier Rishi Sunak, che sono alla guida del Paese da 14 anni. Il segnale più evidente sta nel fatto che molti leader del Tory hanno perso perfino il seggio da deputato, come il ministro della Difesa britannico Grant Shapps battuto dal laburista Andrew Lewin nel collegio elettorale di Welwyn Hatfield, nel sud dell'Inghilterra.  Starmer a Downing Street: “Il Paese vuole il cambiamento” La parola chiave che utilizza il nuovo premier Keir Starmer è "cambiamento", perché così vuole il Paese. La sua non è una svolta radicale di sinistra come qualche analista di tendenza conservatrice intende sottolineare, bensì un'azione politica in continuità con il moderatismo del Labour di Tony Blair e Gordon Brown, prima dei 14 lunghi anni di opposizione.  Starmer ha scelto la sua prima uscita pubblica al collegio londinese di Holborn e St Pancras, dove ha ottenuto 18.000 suffragi, 11.000 voti in più rispetto al secondo candidato. "Io servirò ciascuno di voi, che mi abbiate votato o no", ha detto Starmer aggiungendo che il cambiamento riguarda il rilancio di una politica di servizio pubblico, senza privilegiare interessi di qualcuno.  Le sfide di Starmer  Su temi strategici come sicurezza e commercio, l'esecutivo laburista avvierà un rapporto nuovo con l'Europa. Il titolare designato agli esteri David Lammy  definisce la strategia di Downing Street  “realismo progressivo”: ossia rendersi conto che il mondo e i suoi equilibri di forza sono cambiati e dunque la Gran Bretagna deve perseguire obiettivi realistici ma in linea con i valori democratici. Per il resto, Starmer proseguirà con le scelte precedenti in politica estera come la conferma degli aiuti a Kiev,  la deterrenza contro Putin,  ma anche il rilancio di una visione comune europea contro ogni tipo di populismo. Ed è su questo punto che si misurerà la capacità di Starmer di rientrare nel dibattito europeo.  ___________________________________________________ Ascolta altre produzioni di Giornale Radio sul sito: https://www.giornaleradio.fm oppure scarica la nostra App gratuita: iOS - App Store - https://apple.co/2uW01yA Android - Google Play - http://bit.ly/2vCjiW3 Resta connesso e segui i canali social di Giornale Radio: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/giornaleradio.fm/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/giornale_radio_fm/?hl=it

GUEST 1 OVERVIEW: Nick Delves is Candidate for Holborn & St Pancras against Labour Leader Sir Kier Starmer. His Party is the Monster Raving Loony Party.  GUEST 2 OVERVIEW: James Freeman is a TNT presenter, an International Liaison at the World Council for Health, a former Member of European Parliament, and prior to politics was Head of UK Trade and Business Inflation at the Office for National Statistics. James also has a masters degree in Psychology and plans use his unique set of skills to debunk the establishment's narrative and wake-up the masses.

On GBC's ‘The Needle' last night, The Chief Minister said he didn't need a poll to talk about Brexit, it's the elephant in the room. Fabian Picardo said a Brexit treaty would deliver more EU benefits than ever, without compromising sovereignty. Meanwhile in London, The Foreign Secretary has told the European Scrutiny Committee the driving focus of Gibraltar treaty negotiations is to improve fluidity at the border with Spain. Speaking before the Commons Committee, Lord David Cameron said the system at the Gibraltar Airport would work in a similar way to checks carried out by French police at the St Pancras train station before boarding the Eurostar. Jonathan Sacramento spoke to us about the treaty negotiations in greater detail. Action for Housing has called once again on the Government to follow through on its commitment for a halfway house for men. It says following marital breakdowns it is usually men who leave the family home, and are sometimes made homeless. We invited the pressure group's Henry Pinna to the studio.The Government has reached an agreement with Solar Century Africa Limited for the design, construction, operation and maintenance of a new Battery Energy Storage System at the North Mole Power Station. The 16.5 million pound project is expected to make the power system more resilient and reduce the frequency of power cuts. Claire Hernandez told us more.And, GAMPA students have prepared a new play called 'A Monster Calls' - based on the best-selling novel by Patrick Ness - it will be performed later this month at the Inces Hall Theatre. We spoke to director Hannah Mifsud and two of the students involved: Kate Williamson and Nick Federico. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

https://thelondonerd.com/le-tozze-cariatidi-di-st-pancras/

Content advisory for themes of suicide in the extremely long and rather moving Chinese film An Elephant Sitting Still. Rick recommends Ally From China YouTube channel for her analysis of the St Pancras piano incident.

‘Britain isn't a free country'. That's the title of a recent Spectator article by Ed West and we fear he could be onto something. At the very least, it seems that we are no longer as sure of our freedoms as we used to be. All is not lost, though! The FSU's success rate on cases now stands at nearly 75%, proving that it is possible to resist cancel culture and win. Also good to see is that we Brits still bristle when our personal freedoms are overtly threatened, as evidenced by a recent incident involving musician Brendan Kavanagh. At London's St Pancras station, ‘Dr K', as he's called on YouTube, had a run-in with a group of Chinese tourists who claimed their privacy was being infringed by the livestream of his piano playing. But, as listeners may already know, this attempt at suppression led only to a far more viral response. The story was even written up in USA Today and Dr K was invited to discuss it live on TalkTV. At the end of today's episode, we come back to the conversion of Ayaan Hirsi Ali to Christianity and some interesting insight from Professor Richard Dawkins. ‘That's Debatable!' is edited by Jason Clift.

一首新的网络神曲诞生了。 don't touch her 故事要从1月19号说起。 英国有个钢琴师叫Brendan Kavanagh，他在油管（@DrKBoogieWoogie）有241万粉丝。这个人经常在在伦敦国王十字圣潘克拉斯车站（St Pancras railway station）直播钢琴演奏。 19号的时候，他在车站弹奏钢琴，跟多名手拿中国国旗的华人发生争执。根据钢琴家本人在网上贴出的图片，伦敦当局随后在钢琴的周围围上封条，禁止行人使用。 起因是这群华人在火车站拍摄，刚开始的时候还与Brendan交谈，气氛没有紧张。后面华人要求钢琴师不要在视频里录到他们。钢琴师表示不解，车站是公众场所，为什么他不能录？这里是英国，是自由的国家，不是在中国。 接着华人咆哮哥出场了，要求钢琴师不要拍摄到他们。钢琴师用手触动了旁边华人女士（英国籍）手上的国旗，咆哮哥突然抬高了音量，连说了三遍don't touch her，把周围的人吓了一跳。 Brendan把这个事情狠狠地发挥到了极致，密集接受欧美媒体采访，讲述这起事件。 你觉得这起事件，是不同文化背景的冲突？还是双方沟通导致的误会？是钢琴师充满敌意故意设套让对方钻？还是这群华人没有入乡随俗尊重他人？ 你愿意相信哪种解释？

George is a General Partner at Phoenix Court Group, the group of funds home to LocalGlobe in Somers Town, London, building global businesses based on innovative science and technology to have the maximum positive impact on society.LocalGlobe is investing out of their fifth institutional fund, of approx. 150M pounds, with a total AUM of over 1b pounds. Local Globe has an established portfolio of +60 companies and notable investments, including Melio, TravelPerk, Tide, Hibob, Motorway, Wise and Oxford Nanopore, AvantArte, and Sorare.At LocalGlobe, George focuses on Marketplaces, E-commerce 2.0, and SaaS with a particular focus on SMEs across New Palo Alto, a region that encompasses a market of 40 million people and is roughly 4 hours train ride from Phoenix Court's home next to St Pancras, London. George led the investments into Travelperk, Rekki, Taster, and Qogita.Go to eu.vc for our core learnings and the full video interview

In this episode, which is No. 4 in Danny Hurst´s Monopoly podcast series, we reach the square that is Kings Cross Station. He looks at whether this was where Boudica made her last stand and is buried. Danny also reveals why it is built slap bang next to another major station – St Pancras. Of course, he also covers the Harry Potter connection as well as the history of the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel. KEY TAKEAWAYS There is a weird potential connection between Boudica and why JK Rowling chose platform 9 ¾ for her Harry Potter books. Unlike many other areas in London, Kings Cross has only been gentrified once and that did not happen until the beginning of the 21st century. The station sits on the site of a smallpox hospital. Kings Cross has been used in numerous dystopian post-WWII films. The station has been bombed twice, once in 1941 and again in 1973. BEST MOMENTS ‘One-upmanship and money prevailed over common sense. ´ ‘Despite gentrification, these issues have merely been swept under the carpet.' ‘This led to smoking being banned across the London Underground network.' EPISODE RESOURCES Shop for all official versions of Monopoly here - https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/page/785DC233-0A69-4DF8-98E9-4F50CC50A59E HOST BIO Historian, performer, and mentor Danny Hurst has been engaging audiences for many years, whether as a lecturer, stand-up comic or intervention teacher with young offenders and excluded secondary students. Having worked with some of the most difficult people in the UK, he is a natural storyteller and entertainer, whilst purveying the most fascinating information that you didn't know you didn't know. A writer and host of pub quizzes across London, he has travelled extensively and speaks several languages. He has been a consultant for exhibitions at the Imperial War Museum and Natural History Museum in London as well as presenting accelerated learning seminars across the UK. With a wide range of knowledge ranging from motor mechanics to opera to breeding carnivorous plants, he believes learning is the most effective when it's fun. Uniquely delivered, this is history without the boring bits, told the way only Danny Hurst can. CONTACT AND SOCIALS https://instagram.com/dannyjhurstfacebook.com/danny.hurst.9638 https://twitter.com/dannyhurst  https://www.linkedin.com/in/danny-hurst-19574720 Podcast Description "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." James Joyce. That was me at school as well. Ironically, I ended up becoming a historian. The Unusual Histories podcast is all about the history you don't learn at school, nor indeed anywhere else. Discover things that you didn't know that you didn't know; fascinating historical luminaries and their vices and addictions, the other numerous sides of every story. We start with the Monopoly Series, in which we explore how the game came to be, the real-life connection between the cheapest and most expensive properties, the history of each location, how proportionate the values were then and are today, what the hell a "community chest" is and whether free parking really does exist anywhere in London.  If you love history; or indeed if you hate history, this is the podcast for you…

In this discussion, Mark Hillary talks to Christine Heynes, Head of Customer Transformation, and Yvonne Quinn, Head of Customer Relations, at Southeastern Railway in the UK. Southeastern is the public-facing name of SE Trains Ltd - a train operating company that serves the south east area of England.   Southeastern serves the main London stations of Charing Cross, Waterloo East, Cannon Street, London Bridge, St Pancras, Victoria and Blackfriars. The network has route mileage of 540 miles (870 km), with 180 stations.   Christine and Yvonne explore the complexities of managing customer expectations on a major rail network and how to manage daily complaints and refund demands alongside building a CX strategy for the future.   They also explore the importance of finding the right CX partner. They are happy to talk about their relationship with Teleperformance, a contract that has been extended. It's interesting to note how they see Teleperformance as a CX expert that can guide the rail company, rather just just a supplier of customer service solutions. This collaboration recently won an award (best cross functional collaboration) at the ECCCSAs 2023.   In the interview, Yvonne answers the first question - Christine joins from the second question.   https://www.southeasternrailway.co.uk/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/christine-heynes-40233a104/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/yvonne-quinn-18366a297/ https://www.ecccsa.com/2023-finalists/    

What we can learn about customer service and being more human from the fire service?On this episode, I'm speaking with David Wales, who used to work in the fire and rescue service and has now switched to focus on product design and customer service.In his role in the fire and rescue service, David wanted to understand why people didn't always do the things that they were told. For example, rushing into dangerous situations to rescue pets or laptops. What this reinforced is something that we all intuitively know; there's a gap between the theory of what people should do and the realities of what they actually do. That means the advice people receive is often not helpful for the realities they're facing. What makes sense to the fire service, in theory, might not match the realities of people's personal experiences. That led him to a career in looking at customer experience, where the human touch is equally important.On the episode, we explore:David's career from being a firefighter to understanding the human touch in product design and customer service;how human behaviour plays a vital role in crisis situations and the importance of tailoring safety messages to individual circumstances;risk communication and the importance of personalisation in organisations;how emotions significantly influence customer experiences and the challenges in achieving customer-centricity;the difficulties faced by organisations in achieving customer-centricity;how companies often choose solutions for us, not with us, creating an impersonal system, and how a change of focus could lead to a more pleasant customer experience.Links to topics we discussed:The Edelmann Trust Barometer: https://www.edelman.com/trust/trust-barometer Elton John's donation of a piano to St Pancras Station in London: https://stpancras.com/news-events/sir-elton-john-s-piano John Legend playing the piano at St Pancras: https://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/celebrity-news/john-legend-surprises-londoners-with-impromptu-performance-at-st-pancras-a3501956.html Find David on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidatsharedaim/Shared Aim, David's company: https://www.sharedaim.co.uk/

W/C 4th September 2023There is something about the songs of Richard Hawley that make them perfect as an audio signature for a hotel like the Renaissance at St Pancras.So I am going to take the opportunity to bang on about him again, because I think everybody deserves a bit of RH in there lives and if you haven't discovered him yet then I commend him to you.As it happens he has announced a career retrospective this week entitled Now Then, and though I haven't seen the track listing it is sure to be of interest.But before you investigate that, check out his two mercury nominated efforts Coles Corner & Trueloves Gutter and let me know what you think.Stay safe.Hotel Room - Ricard HawleyAngry - The Rolling StonesTherapy For Me (or TFM as I now refer to it) is a bit of an audio curiosity. It started out as a mechanism for me to clear my head, with the hope that by saying stuff out loud it would act as a little bit of self-help. It's remains loose in style, fluid in terms of content and raw - it's a one take, press record and see what happens, affair.If you want to keep in touch with TFM and the other stuff I do then please follow me on Facebook, Insta, Twitter or Patreon. Thanks for getting this far.

Natalie Bennett, Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle, is a politician and journalist. She had a working-class background and was the first in her family to attend university. Bennett received her education at MLC School, an independent day school for girls in Burwood, New South Wales, and went on to earn a Bachelor of Agricultural Science, a Bachelor of Arts in Asian Studies, and a Master of Arts in Mass Communication.Bennett began her career in journalism in Australia, working for regional newspapers such as the Northern Daily Leader in Tamworth. In 1995, she moved to Thailand, where she worked for Australian Volunteers International and the Bangkok Post newspaper. In 1999, she settled in the United Kingdom and started contributing to various publications, including The Guardian, The Independent, and The Times. Bennett served as the deputy editor and later editor of The Guardian Weekly from 2007 to 2012.In January 2006, Bennett joined the Green Party of England and Wales. She ran for various positions, including the Camden Council election and the London Assembly elections, but was not elected. In September 2012, she was elected as the leader of the Green Party, succeeding Caroline Lucas. During her leadership, the party saw an increase in support, and Bennett played a significant role in raising its profile. She also stood as the Green Party candidate in the 2015 general election for the Holborn and St Pancras constituency.After serving two terms as leader, Bennett did not seek re-election in 2016. However, she continued to be involved in politics and was selected to contest the Sheffield Central constituency in the 2017 UK general election. Although the Green Party experienced a decrease in vote share in her constituency, Bennett remained an active member and advocate for the party's policies.In September 2019, Bennett was nominated for a life peerage and became Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle in October 2019. She joined the House of Lords as the second Green Party member alongside Jenny Jones, Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb. Throughout her political career, Bennett has been known for her advocacy of feminist causes, environmental issues, and the Green Party's policies. She has also expressed support for a cultural and economic boycott of Israel, the abolition of the monarchy, and polyamorous relationships. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today poem is from Sir John Betjeman CBE (/ˈbɛtʃəmən/; 28 August 1906 – 19 May 1984), an English poet, writer, and broadcaster. He was Poet Laureate from 1972 until his death. He was a founding member of The Victorian Society and a passionate defender of Victorian architecture, helping to save St Pancras railway station from demolition. He began his career as a journalist and ended it as one of the most popular British Poets Laureate and a much-loved figure on British television.Bio via Wikipedia Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

We celebrate our 150th podcast at London's St Pancras station with highlights (and some lowlights) from our previous editions. On the agenda: crossing strange borders, psychogeography, Pyrenean slip-ups and strange brews.

Welcome to the London History podcast, where we explore and celebrate the history of our beloved city. This episode is about one of London's most iconic landmarks - St. Pancras Station. This station is one of the major railway stations in England, located in central London. It has been an integral part of the transportation system since 1868, when it was built by William Barlow as part of the Midland Railway. Join tour guides Hazel Baker and Ian McDiarmid from London Guided Walks as they discuss St Pancras Station. Let us know if there's a particular person, event or place you want to know more about in our podcast: londonguidedwalks.co.uk/podcast ⁠Send a voice message --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/londonguidedwalks/message

In episode 31 of the UK Travel Planning Podcast learn about 9 of London's main train stations including Kings Cross, Euston and Paddington!If you are planning train travel from London but are not familiar with the city it can be confusing to navigate its major London train stations.Whether you plan to journey from London for a day trip by train to one of the popular cities or attractions nearby or for a longer rail adventure around the UK these are the train stations you will be using. It is also worth considering when planning your accommodation in London so you are not spending too much time crossing the city to access train services.In this podcast learn aboutEach of the principal train stations you may use if you are travelling from London to other destinations in the UK including Kings Cross, St Pancras and Liverpool Street StationsThe locations of each of the train stationsWhich train stations connect to which London airports (for your arrival or departure) Which areas of the country each station servesExamples of travel times to popular UK destinations Answers to commonly asked questions about rail travel in the UKFor further information and the full show notes for this episode visit UKTravelPlanning.com/episode-31>> Visit our shop for guides and resources to help plan your trip including our popular UK Train Travel ebook.Support the show

In Berlin gibt es ein Museum, ein Haus der Zukunft, das Futurium. Ich halte es für eine hervorragende Idee einen Raum zu schaffen, in dem über die Zukunft (beziehungsweise Zukünfte) diskutiert wird, vor allem auch darum, weil sich dieses Museum auch stark an Kinder, beziehungsweise junge Menschen wendet. Es hat mich folglich sehr gefreut, dass die Leiterin der Ausstellung, Frau Fr. Dr. Zipf sich zu einem Gespräch bereiterklärt und mich ins Futurium eingeladen hat.  Im Gespräch stelle ich die Frage, warum Zukunft im Plural, also Zukünfte verwendet wird: Ziel ist das Aufzeigen von Möglichkeiten. Aber wie weit ist Zukunft gestaltbar, von wem, welche Rolle spielt das Individuum? Wie kann der Versuch, Zukunft vorstellbar machen funktionieren? Dr. Zipf ist Archäologin und da stellt sich naturgemäß die Frage: wie passt die Archäologie zur Beschäftigung mit der »Zukunft«? Gibt es eine Herangehensweise an »Zeit«? Kann man möglicherweise Prinzipien aus der Geschichte ableiten? »Die Geschichte wiederholt sich nicht« Und dennoch ist, wie sich im Gespräch zeigt, die Beschäftigung mit der Vergangenheit von Wert, wenn man in die Zukunft blicken möchte. So  diskutieren wir die Notwendigkeit eines inter- und intradisziplinären, also eines multiperspektivischen Blicks. Was ist die Rolle von Generalisten versus Spezialistentum, der Philosophie? Das Futurium selbst besteht aus vier verschiedene Ebenen: Ausstellung Lab Veranstaltungen Digitales Futurium Kann ein Haus, beziehungsweise ein Projekt wie das Futurium eine vermittelnde, eine Generalisten-Rolle einnehmen? Wie versucht das Futurium die »futures literacy« zu verbessern — also pädagogische Ansätze zu entwickeln um auch junge Menschen eine kritische aber konstruktive Perspektive der Zukunft anschaulich zu machen? Was ist von Zukunftsforschung zu halten (jenseits von Individuen die sich breit inszenieren, deren Vorhersagen aber selten zutreffen?)? Was sagen die Bilder, die wir uns von der Zukunft machen über uns aus? Dann diskutieren wir die sehr prinzipelle Frage, was ist eigentlich eine gute Zukunft? Das führt uns das zur Frage des Fortschrittes: »Wir verwechseln systematisch Fortschritt mit Innovation.«, Harald Welzer Apropos Innovation: Erleben wir wirklich eine solche Beschleunigung, wie das gängige Narrativ suggeriert, oder eher eine Stagnation? Was wir heute als Zukunft diskutieren, haben wir schon vor 30 Jahren diskutiert — vielleicht sogar noch früher. »Überhaupt hat der Fortschritt das an sich, daß er viel größer ausschaut, als er wirklich ist.«, Johann Nestroy Helfen Dystopien, die Menschen zu bewegen, oder ist das zwar ein narrativ einfacher, aber letzlich wenig hilfeicher Pfad? Wie kommen wir von den Dystopien und einfachen Klischees/Stereotypen hin zu einer konstruktiven und sinnvollen Diskussion der Zukunft? Wie können wir mit den Herausforderungen der Gegenwart und Zukunft umgehen: wieweit hilft Innovation? Wie kommen wir zu einer gemeinsamen Sicht auf Fortschritt? Wollen wir radikalen Wandel (siehe etwa die Vorstellungen Le Corbusiers, wie Paris umzugestalten wäre), Transformation, evolutionäre Veränderung? Gibt es Kipp-Punkte in der Technik und Gesellschaft, die dazu führen können, dass eine an sich bekannte Technik (endlich) den Durchbruch schafft (siehe auch das Beispiel der Elektro LKWs in London 1917)? Die Geschichte lehrt und jedenfalls eines: dass das, was aktuelle Generationen für richtig halten, nicht immer den Test der Zeit besteht. Was können und sollen wir tun um einerseit in unserer Zeit zu handeln, andererseits aber Handlungsspielraum für zukünftige Generationen zu erhalten? Referenzen Andere Episoden Episode 15: Innovation oder Fortschritt? Episode 17: Kooperation Episode 23: Frozen Accidents Episode 28: Jochen Hörisch — Für eine (denk)anstössige Universität! Episode 37: Probleme und Lösungen Episode 44: Was ist Fortschritt? Ein Gespräch mit Philipp Blom Episode 45: Mit Reboot oder Rebellion aus der Krise? Episode 50: Die Geburt der Gegenwart und die Entdeckung der Zukunft — ein Gespräch mit Prof. Achim Landwehr Episode 59, 60: Wissenschaft und Umwelt Futurium Dr. Gabriele Zipf Futurium Berlin Fachliche Referenzen Toronto wants to kill the smart city forever, MIT Technology Review (2022) Frank Schirrmacher, Neil Armstrongs Epoche: Das Drama einer Enttäuschung, FAZ Feuilleton (2012) Lorries being refuelled at St Pancras goods depot, London, 11 July 1917 Frozen Accidents: Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn, Penguin Books (1995) Why Architect Le Corbusier Wanted To Demolish Downtown Paris, Business Insider (2013) David Graeber, Bürokratie, Die Utopie der Regeln, Goldmann (2017) Attila Hörbiger, Johann Nestroy, Lumpazivagabundus  

"you do realise that October 1st is Railway Station Day in London"

Carsten Janiec und Eugen Nachtigall sprechen über den historischen Brand im Bahnhof King's Cross St. Pancras 1987

We know, it's short notice! We have been working on individual projects and life got in the way. Nonetheless, we are so happy to announce our first live show on the 17th of September at St Pancras Room! Click the link below to buy a ticket now: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/comedy/dont-alert-the-stans-podcast/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/datspodcast/message

Ok, the title of this recording is a little misleading. This is the sound of the tube from Stockwell to St Pancras. The person I was travelling with asked why the tube made this horrible wailing sound, and I replied 'It's the sound of dead commuters screaming'. It was kind of off the cuff, but the sound does make me think of wailing souls.

Virgin Atlantic has promised to open up at least 12 award seats on every flight. This has led to unprecedented award availability. Here's how to make the most of it. 1:27:00 Giant Mailbag: How to log into hotel wi-fi with a Chromebook 4:44:00 3 Cards 3 Continents 3 Updates Stephen cashes out 50K Membership Rewards Greg exchanges 40K ThankYou points for 56K Avios Nick needs to cancel his first booking 14:59:28 Mattress Running the Numbers: Biltmore Arizona 18:35:00 Awards we booked this week (St Pancras, London) 23:07:15 Main Event: Virgin Atlantic releases award floodgates 45:53:00 Question of the week: Are Marriott SNAs worth anything anymore?

Listen in to learn about the heroic courage of a 14-year old boy who gave his life for Christ.

The latest episode of the podcast which asks; if Steve Miller is in a consensual relationship, and keeps away from certain designated areas, and he's not just doing it to show off in front of his mates, is it acceptable in today's society to reach out and grab her?This episode, Pop-Crazed Youngsters, sees your panel – who are currently toting huge consignments of heroin around Leeds, swiftly climbing up the class system of Coventry and still getting over the terror of finding someone's undergarments in a sex-grafitti'd public toilet in St Pancras station – on the horns of a dilemma; on one hand, a premium-strength episode of Yellow Hurll-era TOTP. On the other, a World Cup semi-final. The latter doesn't kick off until we're 30 minutes into this episode, but at what point do our heroes break and succumb to the boot-on-ball surrender? And will Al have to watch all of this on a black-and-white portable with a coat hanger for an ariel, or will his Dad slink off to the pub and let him watch it downstairs?Musicwise, it's a game of two halves, with two landmark events occurring and a blizzard of Huge Eighties Things being introduced to us for the first time ever. Imagination are at the top of their flouncy, slinky game. Bruno's Dad lamps someone for ripping a speaker off his cab. Jeffrey Daniel reprises the Starman Moment of the Eighties and makes the Weetabix throw their Doc Martens in a skip. AC/DC get their cannons muffled. But just when you think this could be greatest TOTP episode ever, Jonathan King crashes in like Toni Schumacher on Patrick Battiston in order to curl off another dollop of rubbish American rammel (although he introduces the UK to Mr T. And Deeleyboppers).But then! Out of nowhere come the Good Germans – Trio – who produce one of the greatest TOTP performances ever, followed by Odyssey slamming home one of the greatest singles ever, and all is well. But oh dear, that ‘3' button is about to take a hammering as Bananarama pitch up in big nappies, Bucks Fizz take time out from bombing the Ruhr to cheat on each other, Captain Sensible ducks out of the pub to pretend to be the bastard son Worzel Gummidge and Toyah, and some magicians do their underwhelming pieces to the Steve Miller Band. Everything astoundingly life-affirmingly right and groin-punchingly wrong about early-Eighties TOTP is here, and it gets picked over in the usual manner.Rock Expert David Stubbs and Neil Kulkarni join Al Needham for a dance on the car roof of 1982, veering off on such tangents as being nestled against Mr C's packet, the Line-dancing community of Birmingham, being at a loss about what to say to Jimi Hendrix, wondering what ‘Eagle Farm Today' actually means, and Top Of The Pops getting Bobby Gee to fight some swans in a cage in a desperate attempt to keep watching BBC1. And all that lovely swearing, too! Video Playlist | Subscribe | Facebook | Twitter | The Chart Music Wiki | Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

“I think gender and identity are different things. My identity is not related to my gender.” CHARLOTTE HARKER is an artist, writer and performer. She wrote A Species of Trees; collaborated with Tamar Yoseloff with Nowheres; has written The Wear and Tear of Conversation; The Poetry of Lost Landscapes. She is currently completing The Novel and Other Incidents this will be published in the autumn. Charlotte's style of artwork is wide ranging and includes giclee and dry point, to studies of both trees and buildings. She has recently been experimenting with collage. Charlotte has been involved in a number of art residencies across London, the most recent being at the Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner. She will also be involved in an exhibition at St Pancras' Churchyard in central London in the Autumn - the result of a creative collaboration – she will be posting more information on her social media sites check these out below. To learn more about Charlotte Harker go to: charlotteharker.wordpress.com Email Charlotte at: charker2001@hotmail.com Charlotte is on Instagram @charker2001 Charlotte is on Facebook @CharlotteHarker Charlote is also on www.charlotteharker.net “Writing and making art, That's the most important thing. The question of my identity is not, That comes deeply from within me." To find out about your podcast host EMMA you can go to https://www.travellingthrough.co.uk/ A big thanks to MARISKA Martina at https://www.mariskamartina.com/ for creating our wonderful podcast jingle!

This week we're going skiing to La Plagne and letting the train take the strain. Travelski is a brand new charter that takes snow lovers from St Pancras in central London to Moûtiers and Bourg St Maurice in the French Alps. Music © Barney & Izzi Hardy 

We've all heard the story of "Frankenstein's Monster." A bat shit crazy scientist wants to reanimate dead tissue and basically create a fucking zombie baby… BECAUSE THAT'S HOW YOU GET FUCKING ZOMBIES! Anyway, Dr. Frankenstein and his trusty assistant, Igor, set off to bring a bunch of random, dead body parts together, throw some lightning on the bugger and bring this new, puzzle piece of a quasi-human back to "life." At first, the reanimated corpse seems somewhat ordinary, but then flips his shit and starts terrorizing and doing what I can only imagine REANIMATED ZOMBIES FUCKING DO!    Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in Somers Town, London, in 1797. She was the second child of the feminist philosopher, educator, and writer Mary Wollstonecraft and the first child of the philosopher, novelist, and journalist William Godwin.  So, she was brought into this world by some smart fucking people. Mary's mother died of puerperal fever shortly after Mary was born. Puerperal fever is an infectious, sometimes fatal, disease of childbirth; until the mid-19th century, this dreaded, then-mysterious illness could sweep through a hospital maternity ward and kill most new mothers. Today strict aseptic hospital techniques have made the condition uncommon in most parts of the world, except in unusual circumstances such as illegally induced abortion. Her father, William, was left to bring up Mary and her older half-sister, Fanny Imlay, Mary's mother's child by the American speculator Gilbert Imlay. A year after her mother's death, Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which he intended as a sincere and compassionate tribute. However, the Memoirs revealed Mary's mother's affairs and her illegitimate child. In that period, they were seen as shocking. Mary read these memoirs and her mother's books and was brought up to cherish her mother's memory. Mary's earliest years were happy, judging from the letters of William's housekeeper and nurse, Louisa Jones. But Godwin was often deeply in debt; feeling that he could not raise Mary and Fanny himself, he looked for a second wife. In December 1801, he married Mary Jane Clairmont, a well-educated woman with two young children—Charles and Claire SO MANY MARY'S! Sorry folks. Most of her father's friends disliked his new wife, describing her as a straight fucking bitch. Ok, not really, but they didn't like her. However, William was devoted to her, and the marriage worked. Mary, however, came to hate that bitch. William's 19th-century biographer Charles Kegan Paul later suggested that Mrs. Godwin had favored her own children over Williams. So, how awesome is it that he had a biographer? That's so badass.  Together, Mary's father and his new bride started a publishing firm called M. J. Godwin, which sold children's books and stationery, maps, and games. However, the business wasn't making any loot, and her father was forced to borrow butt loads of money to keep it going. He kept borrowing money to pay off earlier loans, just adding to his problems. By 1809, William's business was close to closing up shop, and he was "near to despair." Mary's father was saved from debtor's prison by devotees such as Francis Place, who lent him additional money. So, debtor's prison is pretty much EXACTLY what it sounds like. If you couldn't pay your debts, they threw your ass in jail. Unlike today where they just FUCK UP YOUR CREDIT! THANKS, COLUMBIA HOUSE!!!  Though Mary received little education, her father tutored her in many subjects. He often took the children on educational trips. They had access to his library and the many intelligent mofos who visited him, including the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the former vice-president of the United States Aaron Burr. You know, that dude that shot and killed his POLITICAL opponent, Alexander Hamilton, in a fucking duel! Ah… I was born in the wrong century.   Mary's father admitted he was not educating the children according to Mary's mother's philosophy as outlined in works such as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. However, Mary still received an unusual and advanced education for a girl of the time. She had a governess, a daily tutor, and read many of her father's children's Roman and Greek history books. For six months in 1811, she also attended a boarding school in Ramsgate, England. Her father described her at age 15 as "singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible." My father didn't know how to spell my name until I was twelve.  In June of 1812, Mary's father sent her to stay with the family of the radical William Baxter, near Dundee, Scotland. In a letter to Baxter, he wrote, "I am anxious that she should be brought up ... like a philosopher, even like a cynic." Scholars have speculated that she may have been sent away for her health, remove her from the seamy side of the business, or introduce her to radical politics. However, Mary loved the spacious surroundings of Baxter's house and with his four daughters, and she returned north in the summer of 1813 to hang out for 10 months. In the 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, she recalled: "I wrote then—but in a most common-place style. It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered."   Mary Godwin may have first met the radical poet-philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley in between her two stays in Scotland. When she returned home for a second time on 30 March 1814, Percy Shelley became estranged from his wife and regularly visited Mary's father, William Godwin, whom he had agreed to bail out of debt. Percy Shelley's radicalism, particularly his economic views, alienated him from his wealthy aristocratic family. They wanted him to be a high, upstanding snoot and follow traditional models of the landed aristocracy. He tried to donate large amounts of the family's money to projects meant to help the poor and disadvantaged. Percy Shelley, therefore, had a problem gaining access to capital until he inherited his estate because his family did not want him wasting it on projects of "political justice." After several months of promises, Shelley announced that he could not or would not pay off all of Godwin's debts. Godwin was angry and felt betrayed and whooped his fuckin ass! Yeah! Ok, not really. He was just super pissed. Mary and Percy began hookin' up on the down-low at her mother Mary Wollstonecraft's grave in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church, and they fell in love—she was 16, and he was 21. Creepy and super fucking gross.   On 26 June 1814, Shelley and Godwin declared their love for one another as Shelley announced he could not hide his "ardent passion,." This led her in a "sublime and rapturous moment" to say she felt the same way; on either that day or the next, Godwin lost her virginity to Shelley, which tradition claims happened in the churchyard. So, the grown-ass 21-year-old man statutorily raped the 16-year-old daughter of the man he idolized and dicked over. In a graveyard. My god, how things have changed...GROSS! Godwin described herself as attracted to Shelley's "wild, intellectual, unearthly looks." Smart but ugly. Got it. To Mary's dismay, her father disapproved and tried to thwart the relationship and salvage his daughter's "spotless fame." No! You don't say! Dad wasn't into his TEENAGE DAUGHTER BANGING A MAN IN THE GRAVEYARD!?! Mary's father learned of Shelley's inability to pay off the father's debts at about the same time. Oof. He found out after he diddled her. Mary, who later wrote of "my excessive and romantic attachment to my father," was confused. Um… what? She saw Percy Shelley as an embodiment of her parents' liberal and reformist ideas of the 1790s, particularly Godwin's view that marriage was a repressive monopoly, which he had argued in his 1793 edition of Political Justice but later retracted. On 28 July 1814, the couple eloped and secretly left for France, taking Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, with them.  After convincing Mary's mother, who took off after them to Calais, that they did not wish to return, the trio traveled to Paris, and then, by donkey, mule, carriage, and foot, through France, recently ravaged by war, all the way to Switzerland. "It was acting in a novel, being an incarnate romance," Mary Shelley recalled in 1826. Godwin wrote about France in 1814: "The distress of the inhabitants, whose houses had been burned, their cattle killed and all their wealth destroyed, has given a sting to my detestation of war...". As they traveled, Mary and Percy read works by Mary Wollstonecraft and others, kept a joint journal, and continued their own writing. Finally, at Lucerne, lack of money forced the three to turn back. Instead, they traveled down the Rhine and by land to the Dutch port of Maassluis, arriving at Gravesend, Kent, on 13 September 1814. The situation awaiting Mary Godwin in England was packed with bullshit, some of which she had not expected. Either before or during their journey, she had become pregnant. She and Percy now found themselves penniless, and, to Mary's stupid ass surprise, her father refused to have anything to do with her. The couple moved with Claire into lodgings at Somers Town, and later, Nelson Square. They kept doing their thing, reading, and writing and entertained Percy Shelley's friends. Percy Shelley would often leave home for short periods to dodge bill collectors, and the couple's heartbroken letters would reveal their pain while he was away. Pregnant and often sick, Mary Godwin had to hear of Percy's joy at the birth of his son by Harriet Shelley in late 1814 due to his constant escapades with Claire Clairmont. Supposedly, Shelley and Clairmont were almost certainly lovers, which caused Mary to be rightfully jealous. And yes, Claire was Mary's cousin. Percy was a friggin' creep. Percy pissed off Mary when he suggested that they both take the plunge into a stream naked during a walk in the French countryside. This offended her due to her principles, and she was like, "Oh, hell nah, sahn!" and started taking off her earrings in a rage. Or something like that. She was partly consoled by the visits of Hogg, whom she disliked at first but soon considered a close friend. Percy Shelley seems to have wanted Mary and Hogg to become lovers; Mary did not dismiss the idea since she believed in free love in principle. She was a hippie before being a hippie was cool. Percy probably just wanted to not feel guilty for hooking up with her cousin. Creep. In reality, however, she loved only Percy and seemed to have gone no further than flirting with Hogg. On 22 February 1815, she gave birth to a two-months premature baby girl, who was not expected to survive. On 6 March, she wrote to Hogg: "My dearest Hogg, my baby is dead—will you come to see me as soon as you can. I wish to see you—It was perfectly well when I went to bed—I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not awake it. It was dead then, but we did not find that out till morning—from its appearance it evidently died of convulsions—Will you come—you are so calm a creature & Shelley (Percy) is afraid of a fever from the milk—for I am no longer a mother now." The loss of her child brought about acute depression in Mary. She was haunted by visions of the baby, but she conceived again and had recovered by the summer. With a revival in Percy's finances after the death of his grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, the couple holidayed in Torquay and then rented a two-story cottage at Bishopsgate, on the edge of Windsor Great Park. Unfortunately, little is known about this period in Mary Godwin's life since her journal from May 1815 to July 1816 was lost. At Bishopsgate, Percy wrote his poem Alastor or The Spirit of Solitude; and on 24 January 1816, Mary gave birth to a second child, William, named after her father and soon nicknamed "Willmouse." In her novel The Last Man, she later imagined Windsor as a Garden of Eden. In May 1816, Mary, Percy, and their son traveled to Geneva with Claire Clairmont. They planned to spend the summer with the poet Lord Byron, whose recent affair with Claire had left her pregnant. Claire sounds like a bit of a trollop. No judging, just making an observation. The party arrived in Geneva on 14 May 1816, where Mary called herself "Mrs Shelley." Byron joined them on 25 May with his young physician, John William Polidori, and rented the Villa Diodati, close to Lake Geneva at the village of Cologny; Percy rented a smaller building called Maison Chapuis on the waterfront nearby. They spent their time writing, boating on the lake, and talking late into the night. "It proved a wet, ungenial summer," Mary Shelley remembered in 1831, "and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house." Sitting around a log fire at Byron's villa, the company amused themselves with German ghost stories called Fantasmagoriana, which prompted Byron to propose that they "each write a ghost story." Unable to think up an account, young Mary became flustered: "Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative." Finally, one mid-June evening, the discussions turned to the principle of life. "Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated," Mary noted, "galvanism had given token of such things." Galvanism is a term invented by the late 18th-century physicist and chemist Alessandro Volta to refer to the generation of electric current by chemical action. The word also came to refer to the discoveries of its namesake, Luigi Galvani, specifically the generation of electric current within biological organisms and the contraction/convulsion of natural muscle tissue upon contact with electric current. While Volta theorized and later demonstrated the phenomenon of his "Galvanism" to be replicable with otherwise inert materials, Galvani thought his discovery to confirm the existence of "animal electricity," a vital force that gave life to organic matter. We'll talk a little more about Galvani and a murderer named George Foster toward the end of the episode. It was after midnight before they retired, and she was unable to sleep, mainly because she became overwhelmed by her imagination as she kept thinking about the grim terrors of her "waking dream," her ghost story: "I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world." She began writing what she assumed would be a short, profound story. With Percy Shelley's encouragement, she turned her little idea into her first novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818. She later described that time in Switzerland as "when I first stepped out from childhood into life." The story of the writing of Frankenstein has been fictionalized repeatedly, and it helped form the basis for several films. Here's a cool little side note: In September 2011, the astronomer Donald Olson, after a visit to the Lake Geneva villa the previous year and inspecting data about the motion of the moon and stars, concluded that her waking dream took place "between 2 am and 3 am" 16 June 1816, several days after the initial idea by Lord Byron that they each write their ghost stories. Shelley and her husband collaborated on the story, but the extent of Percy's contribution to the novel is unknown and has been argued over by readers and critics forever. There are differences in the 1818, 1823, and 1831 versions. Mary Shelley wrote, "I certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to my husband, and yet but for his incitement, it would never have taken the form in which it was presented to the world." She wrote that the preface to the first edition was her husband's work "as far as I can recollect." James Rieger concluded Percy's "assistance at every point in the book's manufacture was so extensive that one hardly knows whether to regard him as editor or minor collaborator." At the same time, Anne K. Mellor later argued Percy only "made many technical corrections and several times clarified the narrative and thematic continuity of the text." Charles E. Robinson, the editor of a facsimile edition of the Frankenstein manuscripts, concluded that Percy's contributions to the book "were no more than what most publishers' editors have provided new (or old) authors or, in fact, what colleagues have provided to each other after reading each other's works in progress." So, eat one, Percy! Just kidding. In 1840 and 1842, Mary and her son traveled together all over the continent. Mary recorded these trips in Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843. In 1844, Sir Timothy Shelley finally died at the age of ninety, "falling from the stalk like an overblown flower," Mary put it. For the first time in her life, she and her son were financially independent, though the remaining estate wasn't worth as much as they had thought. In the mid-1840s, Mary Shelley found herself in the crosshairs of three separate blackmailing sons of bitches. First, in 1845, an Italian political exile called Gatteschi, whom she had met in Paris, threatened to publish letters she had sent him. Scandalous! However, a friend of her son's bribed a police chief into seizing Gatteschi's papers, including the letters, which were then destroyed. Vaffanculo, Gatteschi! Shortly afterward, Mary Shelley bought some letters written by herself and Percy Shelley from a man calling himself G. Byron and posing as the illegitimate son of the late Lord Byron. Also, in 1845, Percy Shelley's cousin Thomas Medwin approached her, claiming to have written a damaging biography of Percy Shelley. He said he would suppress it in return for £250, but Mary told him to eat a big ole bag of dicks and jog on! In 1848, Percy Florence married Jane Gibson St John. The marriage proved a happy one, and Mary liked Jane. Mary lived with her son and daughter-in-law at Field Place, Sussex, the Shelleys' ancestral home, and at Chester Square, London, and vacationed with them, as well. Mary's last years were blighted by illness. From 1839, she suffered from headaches and bouts of paralysis in parts of her body, which sometimes prevented her from reading and writing, obviously two of her favorite things. Then, on 1 February 1851, at Chester Square, Mary Shelly died at fifty-three from what her doctor suspected was a brain tumor. According to Jane Shelley, Mary had asked to be buried with her mother and father. Still, looking at the graveyard at St Pancras and calling it "dreadful," Percy and Jane chose to bury her instead at St Peter's Church in Bournemouth, near their new home at Boscombe. On the first anniversary of Mary's death, the Shelleys opened her box-desk. Inside they found locks of her dead children's hair, a notebook she had shared with Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a copy of his poem Adonaïs with one page folded round a silk parcel containing some of his ashes and the remains of his heart. Romantic or disturbing? Maybe a bit of both. Mary Shelley remained a stout political radical throughout her life. Mary's works often suggested that cooperation and sympathy, mainly as practiced by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view directly challenged the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and Enlightenment political theories. She wrote seven novels / Two travel narrations / Twenty three short stories / Three books of children's literature, and many articles. Mary Shelley left her mark on the literary world, and her name will be forever etched in the catacombs of horror for generations to come. When it comes to reanimation, there's someone else we need to talk about. George Forster (or Foster) was found guilty of murdering his wife and child by drowning them in Paddington Canal, London. He was hanged at Newgate on 18 January 1803, after which his body was taken to a nearby house where it was used in an experiment by Italian scientist Giovanni Aldini. At his trial, the events were reconstructed. Forster's mother-in-law recounted that her daughter and grandchild had left her house to see Forster at 4 pm on Saturday, 4 December 1802. In whose house Forster lodged, Joseph Bradfield reported that they had stayed together that night and gone out at 10 am on Sunday morning. He also stated that Forster and his wife had not been on good terms because she wished to live with him. On Sunday, various witnesses saw Forster with his wife and child in public houses near Paddington Canal. The body of his child was found on Monday morning; after the canal was dragged for three days, his wife's body was also found. Forster claimed that upon leaving The Mitre, he set out alone for Barnet to see his other two children in the workhouse there, though he was forced to turn back at Whetstone due to the failing light. This was contradicted by a waiter at The Mitre who said the three left the inn together. Skepticism was also expressed that he could have walked to Whetstone when he claimed. Nevertheless, the jury found him guilty. He was sentenced to death and also to be dissected after that. This sentence was designed to provide medicine with corpses on which to experiment and ensure that the condemned could not rise on Judgement Day, their bodies having been cut into pieces and selectively discarded. Forster was hanged on 18 January, shortly before he made a full confession. He said he had come to hate his wife and had twice before taken his wife to the canal, but his nerve had both times failed him. A recent BBC Knowledge documentary (Real Horror: Frankenstein) questions the fairness of the trial. It notes that friends of George Forster's wife later claimed that she was highly suicidal and had often talked about killing herself and her daughter. According to this documentary, Forster attempted suicide by stabbing himself with a crudely fashioned knife. This was to avoid awakening during the dissection of his body, should he not have died when hanged. This was a real possibility owing to the crude methods of execution at the time. The same reference suggests that his 'confession' was obtained under duress. In fact, it alleges that Pass, a Beadle or an official of a church or synagogue on Aldini's payroll, fast-tracked the whole trial and legal procedure to obtain the freshest corpse possible for his benefactor. After the execution, Forster's body was given to Giovanni Aldini for experimentation. Aldini was the nephew of fellow scientist Luigi Galvani and an enthusiastic proponent of his uncle's method of stimulating muscles with electric current, known as Galvanism. The experiment he performed on Forster's body demonstrated this technique. The Newgate Calendar (a record of executions at Newgate) reports that "On the first application of the process to the face, the jaws of the deceased criminal began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion."  Several people present believed that Forster was being brought back to life (The Newgate Calendar reports that even if this had been so, he would have been re-executed since his sentence was to "hang until he be dead"). One man, Mr. Pass, the beadle of the Surgeons' Company, was so shocked that he died shortly after leaving. The hanged man was undoubtedly dead since his blood had been drained and his spinal cord severed after the execution.   Top Ten Frankenstein Movies https://screenrant.com/best-frankenstein-movies-ranked-imdb/

Strolling along Camden High Street today, it is hard to imagine a time when it was rural. A time where witches inhabited what are now our local haunts (literally). If you've never picked up a ouija board during a drag show, then look no further... join us in the iconic Black Cap pub! References: Walters, Ben. “LGBTQ Spaces.” Urban Claims and the Right to the City: Grassroots Perspectives from Salvador Da Bahia and London, edited by Julian Walker et al., by Angus Stewart, UCL Press, London, 2020, pp. 80–85. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv13xprh7.22. Accessed 31 Mar. 2021. Whitehead, A. (2015). The story of burlesque at the Black Cap. Available: https://www.kentishtowner.co.uk/2015/09/30/story-burlesque-black-cap/. Last accessed 30th November 2021. Camden New Journal. (2018). Black Cap Foundation speak at Camden Council meeting. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmqfb6UaVFE&ab_channel=CamdenNewJournal. Last accessed 30th November 2021. ​​Castleton, D. (2021). Mother Damnable – the Wicked Witch of Camden Town Tube Station. Available: https://www.davidcastleton.net/mother-damnable-witch-camden-town-london-mother-red-cap-black-cap/. Last accessed 30th November 2021. Palmer, S (1870). St Pancras. London: Kessinger Publishing Giardina, H. (2021). Into. Available: https://www.intomore.com/culture/black-cap-one-londons-oldest-gay-bars-get-second-act/. Last accessed 30th November 2021. Honey and the Hex is a sister duo exploring the origins, traditions and intersections of folklore and where they lie today. Through a progressive lens they delve into myths, magick and mystery in English and Scottish folklore. Journey through the British Isles in search of gremlins, goblins, fairies, banshees, witches and vampires.

My guest today is Wendy Spinks, Wendy is the Commercial Director for High Speed 1, who own and operate the UK's first section of high-speed rail, as well as the stations along the route: including St Pancras International, that connects London to Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam In the podcast, we discuss how the volume around compassion in the workplace is being turned up, how the Me-Too campaign was a catalyst for this shift and how Wendy uses gardening to help her work life balance.We talk about how the pandemic has impacted HS1, the difficult conversations held with stakeholders, and Wendy's views on the future challenges for hybrid working. Wendy believes transparency is increasing in business and we discuss why that's a good thing and how having more balanced boards in the future will give businesses a different dynamic.As my previous landlord Wendy was a great supporter of Prime Burger an independent business that I owned and operated at St Pancras for many years, it was a pleasure to meet up again and have a conversation about compassion in business. Enjoy the show. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's the BBC's 99th birthday! Well it was on the day this episode landed. So for episode 37, here's the podcast's story so far...   Between season 2 (covering the BBC in 1922) and season 3 (the BBC in 1923), we're on a run of specials. So here we summarise EVERYTHING we've learned so far. 36 episodes condensed into one.   Condensed, yet also extended - because we recorded a shorter version of this episode for The History of England Podcast. So to lure in folks who've heard that already, I've added a ton of new stuff, including some brand new bits. By which I mean, very old bits. As well as hearing the voices of: First teenager to listen to the radio in his bedroom GuglielmoMarconi First major broadcast engineer Captain HJ Round First voice of the BBC Arthur Burrows First regular broadcaster Peter Eckersley First slightly terrifying boss John Reith …You'll now also hear from: First broadcast singer Winifred Sayer First BBC pianist Maurice Cole (the most wonderful accent, “off" = "orff") First BBC singer Leonard Hawke (although WE know from episode 28 that the Birmingham and Manchester stations broadcast music the day before - but the BBC didn't know that) That's a lot of firsts. Plus more recent voices - hear from these marvellous experts: Professor Gabriele Balbi of USI Switzerland Marconi historian Tim Wander (buy his book From Marconi to Melba) Radio historian Gordon Bathgate (buy his book Radio Broadcasting: A History of the Airwaves)   SHOWNOTES: This podcast is NOTHING to do with the present-day BBC - it's entirely run, researched, presented and dogsbodied by Paul Kerensa You can email me to add something to the show. eg. Send your ‘Firsthand Memories' - in text form, a time you've seen radio or TV being broadcast before your eyes: a studio, an outside broadcast - what were your behind-the-scenes insights? Or record your ‘Airwave Memories' (AM) - a voice memo of 1-2mins of your earliest memories hearing/seeing radio/TV. Be on the podcast! My new one-man play The First Broadcast is now booking for dates in 2022. Got a venue? Book me for your place. Here's one - The Museum of Comedy. Join me, in April or in November on the very date of the BBC's 100th birthday! Thanks for joining us on Patreon if you do - or if you might! It supports the show, keeps it running, keeps me in books, which I then devour and add it all to the mixing-pot of research for this podcast. In return, I give you video, audio, advance writings, an occasional reading from C.A. Lewis' 1924 book Broadcasting From Within etc. Thanks if you've ever bought me a coffee at ko-fi.com/paulkerensa. Again, it all helps keep us afloat. Like our British Broadcasting Facebook page, or better still, join our British Broadcasting Century Facebook group where you can share your favourite old broadcasting things. Follow us on Twitter  if you're on the ol' Twits. I have another podcast of interviews, A Paul Kerensa Podcast, inc Miranda Hart, Tim Vine, Rev Richard Coles and many more. Give us a listen! Please rate and review this podcast where you found it... and keep liking/sharing/commenting on what we do online. It all helps others find us.  My mailing list is here - sign up for updates on all I do, writing, teaching writing, stand-up, radio etc. My books are available here or orderable from bookshops, inc Hark! The Biography of Christmas. Coming in 2022: a novel on all this radio malarkey. Archive clips are either public domain or used with kind permission from the BBC, copyright content reproduced courtesy of the British Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved. Oh yes they are. Next time: What Marconi Thought of Broadcasting - plus 1920s adverts, voiced by listeners...       APPROX TRANSCRIPT:   Marconi himself appeared on the BBC in 1936, playing himself in a reconstruction of when he first sent Morse code across the Atlantic in 1901...   Those are Marconi's last recorded words before he died, there with his assistants Pagett and Kemp, though Kemp was played by an actor. They're recreating the moment when they sent Morse Code from Poldhu in Cornwall to Newfoundland, 2000+ miles away. Prior to that 255 miles was the wireless record.   Marconi was always outdoing himself. As a teenager he'd sent radiowaves across his bedroom – a transmitter and receiver ringing a bell. Then outside, asking his assistant across a field to fire a gunshot if the wireless signal reached him. Then over water. Then... in 1896 the 21yr old Marconi came to England. The Italian army weren't interested in his new invention, so he thought he'd try the influential engineers of London. I think it's that decision that set London and the BBC as the beating heart of broadcasting a couple of decades later.   There was a magical moment where Marconi strode into Toynbee Hall in East London, with two boxes. They communicated, wirelessly, and he simply said: “My name is Gooly-elmo Marconi, and I have just invented wireless.” That's a drop mic moment. If they had a mic to drop.   Others played with this technology. In December 1906, Canadian inventor Reginald Fessenden managed to make a very faint speech broadcast for ships near Brant Rock Massachusetts – making the first entertainment show for radio. He played a record, Handel's Largo, played O Holy Night on violin, and read from Luke's gospel, chapter 2. Well it was Christmas Eve.   This was actually my way in to this whole radio story. I wrote a book on the history of Christmas, called Hark! The b of C. So I researched Fesseden's Christmas entertainment first... and also the first BBC Christmas of 1922. When I read that the Beeb had 35,000 listeners at that point, but 4 employees, I had to know who these 4 employees were! I started digging. When I discovered that 2 of those people had an on-air feud, one of them was John Reith, an arguably immoral moralist, and the 4th was soon sacked by him... I thought, there's a book in this. So as I research and write that, I'm podcasting as I go on the BBCentury. I love that this medium of podcasting owes so much to those early pioneers... and I'm no engineer. For me, it's all about the characters. We'll get to the BBC pioneers soon enough, but Marconi, he was one of those characters.   Through the 1910s, business was booming for Marconi, but he still saw radio as a two-way thing – we ‘radio' for help. Marconi took the credit for radio's use in catching criminals – Dr Crippen, who'd escaped on a ship across the ocean. And saving lives, onboard Titanic. Soon every major vessel carried radios and a Marconi operator – for a fee of course. He made his money in sending messages, the world over, between two people. The broadcast aspect was an accident – a pitfall of radio being too ‘leaky'. So the first listeners were actually called ‘listeners-in' – the messages weren't intended for them.   So it was at a more amateur level – the radio hams – who'd be experimenting with ‘broadcasting'. Britain's first DJ, technically, was a woman called Gertrude Donisthorpe in WWI. Her husband Horace was the eager experimenter, an army wireless trainer by day, and at night the couple would cycle to a field near Worcester, he'd set up one side, her on the other, and she'd play records and recite rhymes just for her audience of 1 – her husband, to see if it worked. She'd cycle across the field to see if it had, often finding he'd cycled off to tell her via a different route. As they progressed, they started transmitting limited wireless concerts for some local troops. And they were popular. Radio amateurs enjoyed what they heard, when they could hear it. There was demand for wireless entertainment... just not much supply.   But the engineers like those at the Marconi Company, were continually strengthening and improving the technology. Marconi's right-hand man Captain Round for example...   No fan of red tape... this Churchill lookalike, round face, cigars and no-nonsense... joined 1902, genius... designed radios... especially for aircraft... Jutland direction-finding... But Captain Round is a name to watch.   After the war, 1919, just months from the birth of broadcasting, The Marconi Company still had no real interest in radio as an artform or entertainment or anything other than point to point messaging. Apart from one person, their Head of Publicity, Arthur Burrows...   In 1918 Burrows wrote: “There appears to be no serious reason why, before we are many years older, politicians speaking, say, in Parliament, should not be heard simultaneously by wireless in the reporting room of every newspaper office in the United Kingdom. . . . The field of wireless telephone, however, is by no means restricted to newspaper work. The same idea might be extended to make possible the correct reproduction in all private residences of Albert Hall or Queen's Hall concerts or the important recitals at the lesser rendezvous of the musical world. . . . There would be no technical difficulty in the way of an enterprising advertisement agency arranging for the interval in the musical programme to be filled with audible advertisements, pathetic or forcible appeals—in appropriate tones—on behalf of somebody's soap or tomato ketchup.” We'll come back to Arthur Burrows.   Around the same time in America, future radio mogul David Sarnoff sent a memo referring to a “radio music box”, that could “listeners-in” could have in their homes, playing the music broadcast by wireless stations, that were cropping up, especially in America, and a steadily increasing rate.   In Britain, Captain Round of the Marconi Company continued to experiment. Rightly medalled after the war, he switched his attention from using radio to find enemy ships, to using radio to transmit the human voice further and stronger than ever before. This meant tests.   Now the nature of radio, the quirk of it, is that it's not private. You can't experiment without anyone with a set listening in – and since the war there were more and more ex wireless operators and amateur radio “hams”. So as Round experimented, in Chelmsford at the end of 1919, with his assistant William Ditcham, across Britain and even into Europe, people heard him. Ditcham had to read out something into his microphone – just the candlestick part of an old telephone. Ditcham would begin by addressing those listening – the ‘leaky' nature of these radio experiments meant the engineers actually used those cheekly listening in to find their range and signal strength. So Ditcham would begin: “MZX calling, MZX calling! This is the Marconi valve transmitter in Chelmsford, England, testing on a wavelength of 2750metres. How are our signals coming in today? Can you hear us clearly? I will now recite to you my usual collection of British railway stations for test purposes... ...The Great Northern Railway starts Kings cross, London, and the North Western Railway starts from Euston. The Midland railway starts from St Pancras. The Great Western Railway starts from...”   Railway timetables! And they were a hit. Mr Ditcham became an expert is this new art of broadcasting, before the word was even invented. He noted: “Distinct enunciation is essential and it's desirable to speak in as loud a tone as possible!”   Word spread. Letters to newspapers said how much radio amateurs were enjoying Ditcham and Round's wireless experiments... but the content could do with being a bit more exciting. How about a newspaper?   So in January 1920, William Ditcham became our first broadcast newsreader, literally reading the news, from a paper he'd bought that morning. Well, he'd sit on it a day, and read yesterday's paper... The press might have a problem with their copyrighted news being given away for free. And thus begins the rocky relp between broadcasters and the press. It's worth keeping them on side...   In Jan 1920, there are 2 weeks of ‘Ditcham's News Service' – that's Britain's first programme title. That gains over 200 reports from listeners-in, as far as Spain, Portgula, Norway... up to 1500 mi away. So the transmitter is replaced, from 6kw to 15kw. Ditcham ups his game too. Throws in a gramophone record or two. 15mins of news, 15mins of music. A half hour in total – that seems a good length for a programme – really it was what the licence allowed, but it's clearly stuck – at least till Netflix and the like mean programme length has becoame a little more variable, a century later.   Then in Feb, there's live music – just a few fellow staff at the Marconi Works in Chelmsford, including Mr White on piano, Mr Beeton on oboe and Mr Higby on woodwind.   At Marconi HQ, Arthur Burrows, that publicity director who wrote of possible wireless concerts and ketchup sponsors, he gets behind this in a big way. He heads to Chelmsford, supports Ditcham and Round, and even joins the band. And you know who else joins the band...   ...from the neighbouring works building – Hoffman's Ball Bearings - a singer, Miss Winifred Sayer. Now as she's not a Marconi employee, she needs to be paid... so she's radio's first professional   Previous broadcasts had been a little luck of the draw, but this one, well it would be nice to tell people it's going to happen. So Captain Round sends out the first listings – the pre Radio Times, radio... times... you can hear Winifred Sayer and the band: 11am and 8pm, Feb 23rd till March 6th That memo goes out to all the Marconi land stations and ships at sea. The first song Winifred sang was called Absent – she later called it a “punch and judy show”, and enjoyed her ten shillings a show. As she left, the MD of Marconi's said to her: “You've just made history.”   So, we have radio, right? Not so fast! The fun is just beginning...   The press, you see, were worth keeping on side. The Daily Mail got wind of this. Arthur Burrows, that publicity chap and radio prophet, he became friends in the war with Tom Clarke, now editor of the Daily Mail. And the Mail loved a novelty. They'd sponsor air races and car dashes and design-a-top-hat competitions. Radio was right up their fleet street.   But they'd need a bigger singer than Winifred Sayer from Hoffman's Ball Bearings. They wanted to see how big an audience there'd be for broadcasting – a word just coming into use, a farming term, about how you spread seed, far and wide, scattershot, never quite knowing how far it reaches, and whether it will be well received and grow into something. So the Daily Mail fund one of the world's biggest singers: Dame Nellie Melba – of Peach Melba fame. She was over in England at the Albert Hall doing some shows, so for a thousand pounds – enough to buy a house – she came to Chelmsford. Outside broadcasts didn't exist at the time, given the size of the kit. Ditcham and Round prepared the Chelmsford Works building, although that involved a small fire, a carpet Melba rolled away as soon as she saw it, and a microphone made from an old cigar box and a hat rack. Arthur Burrows gave Madame Melba a tour when they weren't quite ready... She took one look at the 450ft radio mast and said “Young man if you think I'm going to climb up there, you are greatly mistaken.”   She broadcasts on June 15th 1920, and it's a huge hit, despite a shutdown just before finishing her last song. Captain Round makes her do it again, without telling her of the shutdown, by simply asking for an encore.   Arthur Burrows gives the opening and closing announcements, instead of William Ditcham, because this has been Burrows' dream. Broadcast radio concerts. So what next? It spanned Britain, reached Madrid, parts of the Middle East...   But it's too successful. The Air Ministry finds planes couldn't land during the concert. It dominated the airwaves. So despite a few extra professional concerts from Chelmsford that summer – opera stars like Lauritz Melchior, and Dame Clara Butt – the govt step in and shut all radio experiments down.   Arthur Burrows finds himself at sea, literally, that summer, demonstrating radio to the press on the way to an interionational press event... but without govt backing, journalists now see radio as maybe a means to communicate newsroom to newsroom. Ditcham's news and Melba's music seem to be all that broadcasting amounted to.   For 18 months, nothing. Radio amateurs, and indeed Arthur Burrows at Marconi, petition the PostmasterGeneral to reconsider. And finally... it worked.   Because while the ether had fallen silent in Britain, it continued in Holland, a bit in France, and in America radio is booming. Not wanting to be left behind, the British govt say ok, you can have one radio station. The Marconi Company is granted a permit. But much to Burrows dismay... the job lands on the desk of another person I want to introduce you to... Peter Eckersley   Eckersley was with the Designs Dept of the Aircraft Section of Marconi's. His team had helped create air traffic control; Eckersley had been there in the war for the first ground to air wireless communication, and now in their spare team, his team in a muddy field in the village of Writtle in Essex, not far from Chelmsford, would have to fit this broadcasting malarkey in in their spare time, for an extra pound a show, not much.   It was odd. Radio amateurs wanted it. Burrows the Marconi publicity guy wanted it. Eckersley and his team couldn't give two hoots about it – in fact they celebrated when the govt banned radio 18 months earlier, as finally the airwaves were clear for them and their serious work, instead of constant blinking opera from Chelmsford.   But it's Eckersley's job, to start Britain's first regular radio station: 2MT Writtle. And from Feb 14th 1920, for the first few weeks it sounds pretty normal. They play gramophone records, chosen by Arthur Burrows at head office. Burrows has arranged a sponsorship deal – not with ketchup with a gramophone company, who provide a player so long as it's mentioned on air. Peter Eckersley's team of boffins break the gramophone player. There was a live singer – the first song on the first regular broadcast radio show was the Floral Dance, though the Times called it only “faintly audible”. It is not a hit. For 5 weeks this continues, bland introductions to records, a live singer or two. And Peter Eckersley, the man in charge, goes home each night to hear the show his crew put out on the wireless. Until week 6, when he stays, for a pre-show gin and fish and chips and more gin at the pub. Then he... runs down the lane to the hut and reaches the microphone first! And he starts talking......   Eckersley talks and talks and mimics and carouses... He plays the fool, plays the gramophone records, off-centre, or covered in jam...   ...the strict licence meant closing down for 3mins in every 10, to listen for govt messages, in case they have to stop broadcasting. Eckersley doesn't shut down for 3mins. The licence limited them to half an hour. Not Eckersley. Over an hour later, he stops. And sleeps it off. Next day, his team gather round and tell him what he said.   Our man Arthur Burrows gets in touch. A stern admonishment! Burrows' dream of broadcasting, had been dashed on the rocks by Eckersley, a man drinking, on the rocks. But accompanying Burrows' angry missive came a postbag of listener fanmail. “We loved it” they said. “Do it again.” Burrows was a lone voice against Eckersley's antics, so the following Tuesday, and every Tuesday in 1922, Peter Eckersley seized the mic again and again.   Demand for radio sets boomed. Ports stopped receiving ships when Peter Eckersley was on. Parliament even closed their sessions early to hear him. He was our first radio star. And he helped spawn an industry.   Burrows is still fuming, but there is no greater demand for radio. So he applies for a 2nd licence, for a London station – let's do this radio thing properly. 2LO in London is granted that licence, and Burrows isn't taking any chances – HE will be the primary broadcaster.   Poetry readings, sports commentary, opening night boxing match. Later in the summer, garden party concerts. And as Burrows is a publicity and demonstration man, many of these broadcast concerts are for private institutions, charity events, a chance to show what broadcasting can do.   Other wireless manufacturers other than Marconi's express an interest, they ask the PMG for a licence to broadcast too. MetroVick in Manchester, they want in, so the PMG says fine. Kenneth Wright is the engineer at MetroVick who gets the job of launching in Manchester.   Wright continues in Manchester... Eck continues in Writtle in Essex... Burrows continues in London...   But Eckersley mocks Burrows. In fact people write to Arthur Burrows saying how much they enjoy his broadcasts on 2LO London, but could he stop broadcasting every Tuesday evening for the half hour Eckersley's on, cos listeners want to hear Eckersley lampoon Burrows. For instance, Burrows played the Westminster chimes in the studio – this is 18mths before Big Ben's chimes would be heard on the BBC. So Eckersley outdoes Burrows by finding all the pots, pans, bottles and scrap metal he can, and bashing it all with sticks. Messy chaos! He loved it.   He's another, retold by Eckersley and Burrows themselves, some 20 years apart... You see, both would close their broadcasts with a poem.   All through the spring and summer of 1922, each broadcast is still experimental. Official broadcasting hasn't quite yet begun – because no one knows if there's a future in this. In fact the Marconi Company largely thought all this was one big advert to show consumers how easy wireless communication is, and how they should all pay Marconi's to help them send point-to-point messages.   But the bug grows. The press want in. The Daily Mail apply for a licence for to set up a radio station. They're turned down – it would be too powerful for a a newspaper to have a radio station. It only took Times Radio 100 years...   In Westminster, the PostGen is inundated by applications for pop-up radio stations. He can't just keep licensing all of them. What is this, America?! Arthur Burrows...   In May 1922, the PostGen says to the wireless manufacturers, look. I can't have all of you setting up rival radio stations. But I will licence one or maybe two of you. Get together, chat it through, work out how you can work together.   For a while, it looks like there will be two british Broadcasting companies – a north and a south. Kenneth Wright...   ...but after weeks, even months of meetings, primareily with the big 6 wireless firms, an agreement is struck.   ...You may wonder where Reith is in all this. Wasn't he meant to be the fella who started the thing!? He arrives when the BBC is one month old. For now, he's leaving a factory management job in Scotland, settling down with his new wife, having moved on from a possibly gay affair with his best friend Charlie... and he's about to try a career in politics. He's never heard of broadcasting at this stage. But for those who have, in the summer of 1922, Parliament announces there will be one broadcasting company, funded by a licence fee.....   One British Broadcasting Company. Marconi, MetroVick, Western Electric, General Electric and so on... each will have one representative on the board of this BBC, and then broadcasting can continue, they'll all sell wireless radio sets, and to fund the operation, there'll be a licence fee.   The name ‘BBCo' is coined by one of the wireless manufacturer bosses in one of those meetings, Frank Gill, who notes in a memo before the name ‘broadcasting company', the word ‘British'. A few lines down, he's the first to write the word ‘pirates' regarding those broadcasting without a licence.   But there's one more hurdle to conquer – news. That takes some time to iron out with the press, and finally it's agreed that us broadcasters will lease the news from them, for a fee, and no daytime news, to ensure readers still bought papers.   The press and the broadcasters still have an uneasy relationship, so whenever you see the newspapers having a pop at the BBC, know that the Daily Mail sponsored the first ever broadcast with Dame Melba, they were turned down for a radio station when they applied, and for years they were annoyed this radio upstart was trying to steal their readers.   With the starting pistol sounded, Arthur Burrows gets his dream: he's convinced his employer, the Marconi Company that radio isn't just about sending messages to individuals, it's about reaching many listeners... or better still, it's still about reaching individuals, just lots of them. Flash forward to Terry Wogan's sad goodbye from his Radio 2 Breakfast Show. “Thank you for being my friend.” Singular. Radio – even podcasts like this – still speak to one listener at a time. I make a connection with you. Arthur Burrows and Peter Eckersley, were among the first to realise that.   But which of them would launch or join the BBC? The wild unpredictable Eckersley, who created demand for radio, and was still mocking Burrows in his field hut in an Essex village? Or the straight-laced Arthur Burrows, who's prophesied broadcasting for years?   I think we know the answer to that. Playing it safe, The Marconi Company kept 2LO as part of this new British Broadcasting Company, as well as 2ZY Manchester under MetroVick, and a new station in Birmingham, 5IT, run by Western Electric. Marconi's would also build new stations, in Newcastle, Cardiff, Glasgow, and more, growing in reach and ambition.   But it starts in London, on November 14th 1922, with a souped-up transmitter, rebuilt by good old Captain Round, the Marconi whizz who helped start it all. Arthur Burrows is before the mic, achieving his dream, to see broadcasting come to fruition. There are no recordings of that first broadcast, but we recreated it...   The next day, the Birmingham station 5IT launches – they quickly bring in the first regular children's presenters, Uncle Edgar and Uncle Tom. An hour after they launch, Manchester 2ZY starts under the BBC banner, with more children's programming there, plus an early home for an in-house BBC orchestra.   When the jobs go out for the this new BBC, bizarrely after it's actually launched, there are just 4 employees hired before the end of the year, and Burrows is first, a shoo-in for Director of Programmes. John Reith applies for General Managership, having tried a bit of politics, but been pointed towards the BBC advert by his MP boss. On arriving, one of the first things he says is: ‘So what is broadcasting?'   As for Peter Eckersley, he continues at 2MT Writtle, every Tuesday evening into January 1923. The only non-BBC station to share the airwaves till commercial, pirate or... well there's Radio Luxembourg but that's for a future episode. But Eckersley too is ultimately convinced to join the good ship BBC. And all it takes is an opera, broadcast live from the Royal Opera House in January 1923 – one of the first outside broadcasts.   A penny drops for Eckersley, and he realises the power and potential of this broadcasting lark. Reith convinces him to stop his frivolous Tuesday show in Essex, and offers him a job as the BBC's first Chief Engineer. And here Eckersley prospers, giving us new technology, nationwide broadcasting, the world's first high-power long-wave transmitter at Daventry, he brings choice to the airwaves, with a regional and national scheme. Without Burrows, without Eckersley, without Reith, British broadcasting would look very different.   There's one other name, among many, I'm particularly enthusiastic about: Hilda Matheson. An ex-spy who becomes the first Director of Talks, who reinvents talk radio and gives us the basis for Radio 4 and speech radio and indeed podcasting, you could argue, as we know it. She's a fascinating character – part of a gay love triangle with the poet Vita Sackville West and Virginia Woolf. She's the only BBC employee allowed to bring a dog to work.   And so much more, we'll unpack on the British Broadcasting Century podcast, plus the Pips, the Proms, the Radio Times, and everything else you know and love, tolerate or loathe about British broadcasting today.  

Doctor K c'est un homme qui passe ses journées à la gare de St Pancras à Londres pour jouer au piano avec les gens qui jouent sur le piano de la gare

St Pancras Old Churchyard has a turbulent past, from body snatching to an unexpected walrus. Memorials in the churchyard recall the invasion of the railway, which gave the writer Thomas Hardy one of his earliest, and most gruesome jobs. A viewpoint originally made for Placecloud. Address: St Pancras Old Church, Pancras Rd, Camden Town NW1 1UL

www.loulabellesfrancofiles.comMy belle amie Karen has travelled numerous times to France (quite a lot avec moi!) and has twice stayed in the Champagne region.  I'm so jealous as unfortunately a trip planned for my old school friends and I was called off in 2020 in the week we were supposed to depart. We're all getting used to that in the time of COVID but hopefully we'll get there eventually!Karen is the best researcher I know when it comes to travel! When I was planning the ill-fated 2020 shenanigans and was going to the Champagne Region, Karen was my first contact to find out all her brilliant tips for a stay in that spot. I love the Madame Bollinger quote about champagne…She was asked when do you drink champagne?"I drink it when I am sad. Sometimes I drink it when I am alone. When I have company I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it when I'm not hungry. I drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it, unless I am thirsty…"I also love what Madame de Pompadour is supposed to have said that “Champagne is the only drink that leaves a woman still beautiful after drinking it”. Now that's good enough for me!The champagne region is the place that conjures images of the bubbles that accompany many of our celebrations. Karen and I had a gorgeous weekend “sweetie darling” in Paris a couple of years ago in 2018 where we worked through a wonderful list of all the places she had researched that we could drink champagne in Paris. So we went to traditional bars, amazing little holes in the walls, pop up restaurants, cafes by the river, and all the time we never more than a glow of wonderfulness, such is the amazing quality of champagne!Recently I have re-watched the wonderful little doco with Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley from Ab Fab called Absolutely Champers. They start in London, in the champagne bar at the TGV station at St Pancras which has 120 Varieties of champagne and is the longest champagne bar in Europe. Karen and I have never started a trip there, we've always started in Paris together, so I think we will definitely start there some day in the future. Hear all our tips for staying in the Champagne region as well as some fascinating history, plus some recommendations for docos too. So pour a glass of bubbly, or un coupe de champagne and come and escape with us to France! 

This week Michael speaks with music artist RIOPY. RIOPY is a pianist with a passion for meditation and using binaural beats to heal the brain. In this episode he talks about his creative process for writing music, how music and meditation are more than passions - they are necessities for him and help him to feel safe, and shares his knowledge about how and why binaural beats are healing. Tune in to learn more about the power of music and how it heals the mind. RIOPY was born and raised in the French countryside and at an early age he began to teach himself the piano when he discovered an abandoned instrument. He didn't have access to printed scores, so he began to compose music in his head. At 21 he moved to London and this is when his international career began. His unique, rhythmically-driven approach to performing his own compositions soon got him noticed. He has performed at the Royal Opera House, Steinway Hall as well as a unique performance from inside the clock tower in St Pancras, London. His music has been featured in film trailers for the Oscar winning The Shape of Water and The Danish Girl amongst others. His piano works have also been heard in documentaries broadcast on the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, as well as in advertising campaigns for many household companies. RIOPY was looking for ways to support his own mental health and developed an interest in neurosciences - especially how brainwaves are believed to represent the full spectrum of human consciousness. Through this he discovered the benefits of meditation, and has been meditating twice a day ever since as it helps him to get more easily to a state of calmness and happiness. He creates binaural beats which sync the brainwave with the beats, guiding you into a state of relaxation and healing. You can learn more about RIOPY on his website https://www.riopymusic.com/, follow him on Instagram @riopymusic and Facebook here, watch videos on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/Riopyjp, and listen to his music including his latest release Bliss on Spotify here or where ever you go for music. For more conversations like this and to join our community visit justbreatheproject.com and follow us on instagram @justbreathe. If you haven't already downloaded our recently re-launched app, you can click here for iPhone and here for Android. As listeners of The Quiet Life, use the code thequietlife to receive a 30 day all access trial. You can enter the code here and find directions on how to use the unique code you receive to start using the app. Happy meditating!

Daniel John Martin is a name synonamous with parisian jazz and jazz manouche. Daniel plays with many of the top guitarists on the scene and is an amazing musician. Anyone who has spent time checking out any of the gypsy jazz coming from paris will have seen videos of Daniels regular gig and jam session at Aux Petit Joueurs, it boasts some of the top players in the world making a regular appearance to play with Daniel. We hooked up at St Pancras station in London while Danile had an hour to spare between the Eurostar and his train to Liverpool. Daniel was very enjoyable to interview and we covered many bases. Check it out...   The music at the beginning is 'Martinique' by Didier Lockwood from Daniels upcmoming album with Romane The outro music is Benny Golsons 'Whisper Not' recorded by me and my band Latchepen

The Rough Guide to Everywhere podcast is back! Today we are delighted to launch Series Two of the Rough Guide to Everywhere, with this special recording taken in front of a live audience at the London Podcast Festival on Thursday 14th September 2017. In previous episodes of the podcast we have travelled all around the world, from Patagonia to the Ukraine, via North Dakota and the Scottish Highlands. But in this live episode, recorded in Kings Cross, it felt fitting to focus our conversation on London town. Host Greg Dickinson sits down with three born n' bred Londoners: TimeOut London's news and events editor Sonya Barber, spoken-word poet Jeremiah "Sugar J" Brown, and the Pearly Queen of St Pancras herself. In the discussion we hear their thoughts on community spirit, the impacts of gentrification, and what they consider to be "quintessentially London" (pie 'n mash, the Thames, and escalators...). Subscribe to the podcast now to make sure you don't miss an episode. In future instalments we will travel to North Korea, discover a forgotten civilization in the Bolivian Amazon, and witness the silence of Antarctica.

New film The Birth of a Nation takes the title from DW Griffith's 1915 silent film but not much else. Directed by and starring Nate Parker, it tells the true story of an 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia. Ashley Clarke reviews.Poet Ruth Padel discusses her latest book Tidings, a narrative Christmas poem about a little girl, a homeless man and a fox. It takes the reader all around the world, from St Pancras churchyard in London to Bethlehem, Australia and New York. Joan Eardley's painting career lasted only 15 years but, at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, her work gets more requests than Picasso. The gallery's curator Patrick Elliott discusses a new exhibition of her work alongside composer Helen Grime, whose composition Snow is inspired by Eardley's paintings. In the spring of 1995, actor Mark Lockyer was playing Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet for the Royal Shakespeare Company when he was overcome with anxiety, fear and paranoia. It was the start of a bipolar attack. Now he has turned that experience into a one man show called Living With The Lights On at the Young Vic in London.Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Angie Nehring.

Betjeman Poetry Prize 2016 with Joanna Lumley on Radio Gorgeous Josephine went along to record the Betjeman Poetry Prize at St Pancras station next to the life size bronze of Britain's most loved poet, Sir John Betjeman. This competition was founded ten years ago by his daughter Candida Lycett-Green. It supports and encourages poetry for the young, aged 10 - 13. Listen to the winner and the runners up recite their original poems and meet Joanna Lumley Patron talking about her love of poetry. For more details about how to enter next year's competition and to read the winner's poem, visit the website below. www.betjemanpoetryprize.co.uk @Betjemanprize Love writing? Never miss a podcast. Sign up to www.radiogorgeous.com #poetry #joannalumley #betjeman

Billy Grant from Beesotted spoke on The Phil Williams show on BBC Radio 5 Live on Monday night about the trouble in Marseille and his fears for the forthcoming England game in against Wales in Lens along with UK security advisor Chris Phillips and Dan Roan from the BBC. Russia will be playing Slovakia in Lille the day before the England match (Wednesday) and tens of thousands of England fans will be staying in Lille on Wednesday and Thursday as accommodation in Lens is sparse. As you will hear, Chris Philips - former head of UK Counter Terrorisom Security Office (who has advised the UK Government on dealing with crowds) - agreed wholeheartedly with Billy Grant's points who re-iterated a statement he made on BBC Rado 5 earlier that went somewhat unbelieved - that England fans had been targeted from day one by French hooligans. Since then, Russian thugs had stepped onto the scene. He also pointed out that it was footage released by Beesotted showing French hooligans attacking English fans - which has since gone viral - that has gone some was to educating the press (and the world) on what was really going on in Marseille. http://bit.ly/1UHTeuu Billy revealed that he was told by British police on his return to the UK who met fans off the train at St Pancras (cue “Informer" music for regular podcast listeners) that French police had refused advice from the UK police force on how to police this tournament. Chris Phillips confirmed this was the case. Billy also referred to the mini documentary he shot a few months ago interviewing Ultras in Marseille who predicted the chaos of Euro 2016, stating “The French Police are Incompetent” and would struggle to handle large crowds of football fans based on their tactic of simply banning away fans from travelling for teams with large away support like PSG and Olympic Marseille. MiniDoc: Marseille Ultras say “French Police are incompetent": http://bit.ly/1YcU7yd Minidoc: Marseille Ultras interviewed about England's return to Marseille since 1998: http://bit.ly/1YcU7yd Beesotted at the Euros Post Russia Match Podcast from a Marseilles Pub: http://bit.ly/24JFsKF Beesotted will be posting their next videos from Euro 2016 here on YouTube. http://bit.ly/1UDaBws This clip is taken from The Phil Williams Show on BBC Radio 5 Live. You can hear the FULL show by clicking here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07fdtbx #euro2016 #marseille #russia #england #eng #rus #hooligans #trouble #violence #football #belgium #italy #eden #hazard #uefa #northern #ireland #northernireland #wales #wal #soccer #spain #lille #lens #fanpark #terrorism