Paddington Station (credit: Tehmina Goskar)

Last November I blogged about my experience demonstrating the wonders of history school children at Hallfield Primary School, my first alma mater.

I continued the theme with the local Cub Scouts Group based at another Paddington primary school, St Mary Magdalene (5th Paddington). My tack was slightly different here. The incentive to listen and learn was to earn the Local Knowledge badge. Team competition is also important to the Cubs and while initially they were suspicious of any sit-down activity, when they realised points meant prizes (and these were really good–all my old arcade toy wins). So over two sessions we swotted some Paddington history. I drew up a ‘Top 10 Paddington history facts’ and based a Q&A session around that. Another leader brought in the film The Blue Lamp (1950), largely filmed in Paddington before the A40 Westway–a massive flyover that has forever divided Paddington into an area stark social contrast–was built to demonstrate the idea of change in the built environment. The next week they had to complete the ‘Local Knowledge Quiz’, a series of pub quiz style questions.

Rather than sitting on my computer hard drive I wanted to share these. I found it hard to find a decent source of information on Paddington history, save for the trusty Paddington Wikipedia entry which is of decent quality.

So here you are, reproduced and downloadable, free to use non-commercially, please do give us a mention if you use this material.

10 things you never knew about Paddington…

Download 10 things you never knew about Paddington… (PDF, 34KB)

1. Paddington Green Police Station is the most important high-security police station in the UK. The most dangerous suspects are brought here to be questioned.

2. The Tyburn Gallows were near Marble Arch. Until the late 1700s criminals were brought here to be hanged. London slang, ‘Paddington Fair Day’ meant a public hanging day and ‘To dance the Paddington frisk’ meant ‘to be hanged’.

3. Lord Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouting movement, was born in Paddington on 22 February 1857.

4. Edward Wilson was a scientist and a doctor who worked in Paddington. He was part of the famous expedition of Captain Scott who tried but failed to reach the South Pole in 1912. Everyone died. Edward Wilson school was named in his honour.

5. Paddington Stationis one of London’s most famous railway stations and was designed by a famous engineer called Isambard Kingdom Brunel in 1854. It was one of the destinations of the world’s first underground railway, called the Metropolitan Railway, established in 1863. There is a statue of Brunel at one of the station’s entrances.

6. Paddington Bear is the most famous fictional character from the area. The story begins that the bear was from ‘deepest, darkest Peru’ and arrives at Paddington Station with a note saying ‘Please look after this bear, thank you’.

7. St Mary’s Hospital dates from 1845 and is one of the important places for learning medicine in the world. Part of the hospital used to be multi-story stables for horses that worked for the Great Western Railway. You can still see the ramps for the horses today. Many members of the Royal Family were born at St Mary’s Hospital, including Prince William, and Prince Harry.

8. Before the building of the Grand Junction Canal in 1801 Paddington was just fields. The canal brought goods and people from the countryside to the growing city of London. The canal flowed into Paddington Basin. This area is currently being developed into one of London’s most important business districts.

9. William Whiteley created Whiteley’s [department store, now shopping centre], situated between Queensway and Westbourne Grove in 1867. He was the Lord Alan Sugar of his day and called himself ‘the Universal Provider’ selling everything from ‘a pin to an elephant’. In 1897 a huge fire burnt the store down and flames could be seen from Highgate Hill in north London. The store was completely rebuilt and the building we see today was reopened in 1911.

10. There are two areas called Paddington in Australia, one in Sydney, New South Wales, and another in Brisbane, Queensland. A gold mine in western Australia was named Paddington Gold Mine.

Now take the Paddington Local Knowledge Cub Quiz…

Download Paddington Local Knowledge Cub Quiz (PDF, 6.8MB)

[Answers: Round 1: 1. TR 2. FA 3. FA 4. TR 5. TR Round 2: 1. FACT 2. FICT 3. FACT 4. FACT 5. FICT Round 3: 1. Dome of Whiteley's shopping centre 2. Paddington Bear 3. Paddington Station 4. St Mary's Hospital 5. St Mary Magdalene Church Round 4: 1. marmalade 2. horses 3. Blue 4. canals 5. Metropolitan]

Cornwall has an excellent archaeological community, and I am gradually getting to know fellow archaeologists, and the many archaeology groups in the area. I have had the opportunity to have some splendid walks from Penzance, where within just a few hours it is possible to stroll past 19th century mine workings, early Medieval inscribed stones, Iron Age settlements, and Bronze Age field systems which are still in use, and stone circles. All with some of the most breathtaking views.

We are also very lucky to have an independent library in Penzance, the Morrab Library, of which I am a great fan. It is an incredible resource for west Cornwall, and I look forward to doing plenty of research of my own, and possibly even some fieldwork!

So, I will leave you with a photo of the enigmatic Mên-an-Tol (whose purpose remains unknown), from a recent stroll along the moorland paths to give you a taste of west Cornwall’s amazing archaeology. So, expect a bit more from me soon…

Men an Tol - the 'Holed Stone'

Cornish Fabada

Within ‘the heritage sector’ we compartmentalise its different aspects. Museums, libraries, archives as guardians and interpreters of collections. The historic environment sector as recorders of the built environment and historic landscapes. Archaeologists who excavate, record and analyse material remains. Then there’s natural heritage, everything about our world that isn’t human made. The subject divisions proliferate the idea of heritage further, science heritage, art heritage, industrial heritage etc; as does scale: family, house, community, society, region, country, and the ever increasing interest in global heritage.

This bowl of stew was just as powerful as some exhibitions are in evoking a sense of place and its culture.

So what has all this to do with a bowl of stew? Cornish Fabada is a gastronomic pun or perhaps homage to the better known Fabada Asturiana, a simple but delicious stew made in the Asturias, the most westerly region in Spain, indeed Spain’s Cornwall perhaps. Yet another ‘Celtic fringe’. I was emailed a couple of weeks ago about a video project that seeks to showcase the best of Asturian culture and heritage called Where is Asturias. So far seven videos on Vimeo immerse you in carnivals, dramatic landscapes and food.

The two food videos about Tapas and Pinchos and Fabada Asturiana (white beans, pimentón or paprika, olive oil, mineral water, morcilla (blood sausage), chorizo and belly pork slow cooked to a rich heavenly stew–with variations depending on recipe) immediately stood out. Their stories immediately drew me into Asturian culture and heritage. Regional food traditions are a living heritage. They encapsulate and nurture a region or nation’s distinctiveness just as much as their material culture, language, rituals and festivals. But food is not often thought of as heritage, nor is it used as a gateway to interpreting a region’s character, at least not in Britain. Many of the values of good local produce and good cooking are shared by those engaged in promoting and safeguarding other aspects of the heritage of place: sustaining tradition, sharing it, communicating distinctiveness, making comparisons. But we don’t really use food as a vehicle for communication.

Restaurants, cafes and chefs often promote the historic setting of the diner, not least here in Cornwall, but this is all about the building, not about the food, which often comprises ingredients and techniques that have grown up in a region over time and are as much part of the fabric of the place as the old abbey or bakehouse or flour mill or whichever beautifully restored dramatic old building you find yourself in. I’d quite like a line or two on my menu about my John Dory or Skate and how long people have been fishing them and how they do it (and why)–not just that it was sustainably and locally caught.

It seems to me that the instinct of the Where is Asturias team to use food in videos promoting their region was right. This isn’t just about promoting travel and tourism to the area (where good food and ingredients are often used to lure in the lustful traveller) but about appreciating food as an integral part of a living heritage of a region, both tangible and intangible–two concepts that have aroused a lot of debate since UNESCO began to record non-material or intangible heritage on the World Heritage list.

So well done to Where is Asturias. These videos inspired me to cook up my own version with ingredients I could get hold of. Okay, hardly authentic but I remained true to the cooking method which was something I hadn’t tried before, like a slow confit in olive oil, water and spicy smoked pimentón). I speciously called it Cornish Fabada but the point is that by cooking this up I gained an understanding of ingredients and cooking methods that are enshrined in the cultural DNA of the Asturias and so I feel as though I have gained a feeling for this region’s heritage, and more importantly it has persuaded me to want to know more. This bowl of stew was just as powerful as some exhibitions are in evoking a sense of place and its culture, in some ways perhaps more so.

My school history kit

I did what all good historians do and gathered together my sources. In the process of moving, I have had occasion to go through a lot of old stuff. It’s amazing what I have kept, or not thrown out. Perhaps more amazing what my parents have kept, or not (yet) thrown out. If I was going to help inspire these foundlings with history I needed not to give them a career lesson (and I would not exactly be a great exemplar) but just to understand the satisfaction that understanding the past can bring. So where better than to start with self, family and locality.

‘A little bit of TRUE information can be used to make people believe something which is UNTRUE’

My bag of sources contained:

• A newspaper article from about 1984 headlined ‘And they spoke with many tongues’, probably from the Sunday Express no less, about the school and the 32 languages spoken by its pupils, ‘a modern day tower Tower of Babel’. Our headmistress was an early exponent of the school’s cosmopolitanism but stressed how a few weeks at the school got everyone speaking and reading a good standard of English.
• My first junior school report (handwritten).
• A selection of photographs, of family, school outings and assemblies and friends, including one of my father as a little boy who had also attended the school.
• My grandfather’s standard issue heliograph.
• My first swimming certificate (which one pupil mistook for an ‘achievement award’).
• A letter of thanks from the Queen for a poem I wrote for her 60th birthday.
• The programme from my final year school play, signed by our teachers.
• Some badges relating to notable local places that exist or no longer exist (e.g. the long lamented London Toy and Model Museum).
• My first story book from the equivalent of Reception/Year 1 (age 5-6).
• My handwriting book. I was banking on them still having a handwriting book as an example of things that don’t change.
• The school’s first ever computer-based project, undertaken by a friend and me in our final year (equivalent of year 6) in 1989. Print-outs of pie-charts and summary reports were mounted on what was once purple sugar paper. It is now faded and torn but one of the most interesting personal and social documents I have. It was based on a survey made of computer use by girls and boys in our year. If ever I can pinpoint my attitude towards history and historians it is the conclusion we wrote, clearly with a little help from our teacher: ‘A little bit of TRUE information can be used to make people believe something which is UNTRUE’.
• A copy of a book I wrote on medieval food and feasting.
• A book on the local area.
• Postcards of Edwardian images of people who worked in the local area.

I think it is fair to say that this would rival any loan box the school could have got hold of and yet all the items are relatively mundane, relatively for someone to procure. Without my museum or archive hat on I could also let them touch the things, although I was careful to guide them to the notion that old things are more fragile and therefore need a little more care. My intention was simple. By relating my own life and that of my family to both the school and locality and then to these documents and objects I wanted to show how studying history was as much finding out who we are and the truth of our past as it was to know what the Romans ate for breakfast.

Both classes I took part in had just done the Romans and had some rudiments of local history. A pupil in the first glass greeted me with an in-character Roman Centurion soliloquy. I was seriously impressed. After a brief introduction as to who I was, my connection with the school, and why I love history started the many and several questions. ‘How old are you?’, ‘do you know what carpe diem means?’ [yes really], ‘how old was Claudius when he invaded Britain?’ [gulp], ‘why did you want to become a historician?’ and ‘when did William the Conqueror burst?’ [excuse me?]. Following these and several more, they were split into groups to come in turn to my history table.

The groups in the first class were most curious about my story book and handwriting book. Others pored over the photographs, particularly impressed with our school outing to Buckingham Palace and the photography of one of my school assemblies. One pupil thought it looked exactly the same, the other thought it was totally different. Go figure how differently we interpret the same sources. The first ever school computer project was however beyond them, perhaps more of interest to the teachers. They were not familiar with pie charts and they couldn’t quite understand why it was such a big deal, ‘I have a computer at home’. Quite so. A photograph of my great-grandmother, grand mothers and mother caught their eye, particularly when I explained that I had been named after my great-grandmother. One girl piped up that she was named after her grandmother and a light switched on. I asked them to read the date on the letter from the Queen and work out how many years ago it was. 1986 to 2011 presented them a problem.

At an age when we all remember the almost interminable summer holidays, working out how many years ago that was was something mind-blowing. One of them eventually got to 25 years but the appreciation of the passing of time was clearly still not there. It was all I could do to get them to figure out that I was four times their age. This made me appreciate most acutely how hard it is to teach chronology and the scale of time to people who have existed for such a short time. I could only convey distance in time by emphasising the number ‘fifty years ago!’ ‘three HUNDRED years ago’ ‘I’m not that old’.

A better appreciation of the passage of time came with discussing what in the local area had changed and what hadn’t. The big shopping centre that was closed for most of my early life, previously a department store (that took some explaining), reopening on my last day at the school (and here is the badge we were given), the toy museum that is now no longer next to the school (alas from all of us), the library which they all still go to, that I also went to, the swimming pool we learnt to swim in, the carnival we went to. For some of them it may take many years for the ideas to be absorbed. This was history but it wasn’t the kind of history they knew or would even recognise.

The second class’s personalities were completely different. They were most interested in my book and generally about food, and of course, the Romans. ‘Did you know that July is named after Julius Caesar?’, ‘Did all Romans wear togas?’, ‘how old are you?’, ‘when was paper invented?’ Showing the group my photographs I asked how long they thought there had been cameras and photographs. Estimates included 5000 years, 2000 years, 10 years and 2 years until a small voice hesitantly hazarded 100 years. Ok, let’s not quibble about 50 years. What got them all singing was the shock that medieval Europeans did not eat crisps, chocolate, tomatoes or sweetcorn. A veritable travesty they thought. An appalling affront to their sensibilities. When asked where they thought the potato came from, keen responses included ‘England’, ‘Asia’, ‘Pakistan’, ‘Australia’ and finally ‘America’. Finally they had a flavour of when the Middle Ages were and largely what it was lacking. They also correctly identified the epoch as being after the Romans.

Class 2′s group work was not dissimilar to the first. They were enthralled by my exercise books and complemented me like the previous class had on my handwriting. Even the teacher said that she couldn’t believe how high the standards were. I didn’t want to enquire further. This group were more interested in the objects, the badges and heliograph. One of their fathers was in the army and they understood the concept of morse even though they hadn’t yet been taught it. One pupil was so enamoured with the badges that she scooped them up and admired them livingly on her jumper before asking where each came from. Another one asked if I drew all the pictures in my book on medieval food. I thought it beyond the pale to explain manuscript illumination in such a short space of time so just relented and said someone else did them.

Most of all both classes were pleased at being able to identify me in the Tower of Babel newspaper article. One of them even said I looked nice in the picture. Historians in the making?

I cannot predict what the learning outcomes for these children will be. There is no instant result in this kind of learning. It is what it is. I remember certain episodes in my primary school education that had a definite effect on me and my choices but I didn’t know it then.

Mike Pitts has the full details, or jump in and subscribe now for £15.95 (yearly) or £4.99 (quarterley).

Day of Archaeology logo by Glenn Hustler

Friday 29th July 2011 was the Day of Archaeology, an international online event organised by a group of like-minded archaeologists, as part of the Council for British Archaeology’s Festival of British Archaeology.

The idea behind the event was to showcase the sheer variety of work that archaeologists do in their jobs, to help highlight how interesting, important and relevant archaeology can be to everyone. We would gather as many archaeologists as possible from around the world to submit a journal entry detailing what they were doing on the 29th, and publish them via our website.

Calls for participation were circulated a few months before the event, and contributors were accepted right up until the day itself. Four hundred and thirty eight archaeologists signed up to document their day. At the time of writing, we have four hundred and twenty posts on the website. Nearly seven thousand people have visited the website since the Day itself.

The team of seven, Lorna Richardson, Matthew Law, Dan Pett, Tom Goskar, Stuart Eve, Jess Ogden and Andrew Dufton, organised the Day of Archaeology via social networking websites, email, and live video conferencing via Google Plus, and plan to run the event again in 2012.

The sheer diversity of entries was incredible, making a summary of them impossible. Explore them for yourself on the Day of Archaeology website, or read my entry on the site “Archaeology on the Web“, which was written at about 6pm on the Day itself.

(this post was originally written by me for the IfA’s Members’ Bulletin, and is reproduced here, with a few minor edits, for posterity)

It is a summary of the work I have been doing on scaling virtual Polynomial Texture Mapping techniques up to allow us to examine whole landscapes in new ways through interactive lighting. The analytical tools used to analyse and interpret the surface or patina of an artefact using Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) tools can be applied at a landscape level, making it an ideal tool for earthwork studies and landscape archaeology in general. Paul and I hope to take the technique further, and now that others know about it, we look forward to seeing how it is developed by others.

Head over to the RSPSoc Archaeology SIG and download the PDF. Read a previous post on Interactive Landscape Relighting.

It seems that blogging has been quietly gathering momentum in archaeology since I first started noticing blogs in 2004, and blogging myself in 2005. For a while, Twitter stole my blogging enthusiasm, and I posted very little here. Also, when you spend your days running a website, your enthusiasm to run your own can sometimes wear a little thin.

But gradually, as the network of archaeologists grew, more of us came to know each other via Twitter and the internet. We got to know about each other’s blogs, and after a few hops along the various degrees of separation, there is now a growing network of archaeology bloggers across the world.

For me, the thing that was stealing my attention away from blogging (Twitter) has now re-fired my enthusiasm for it by connecting me to other people in my field. That’s exactly how social media should work.

There’s a lot going on in the archaeology blogosphere (do people still use that word?) right now. Although time didn’t allow me to participate beyond reading and the occasional comment, Colleen Morgan‘s Blogging Archaeology carnival was an interesting event, and one that has given me much food for thought.

I hope that my little list can help people to find something new and interesting to read. If you know of a blog that isn’t in the list, do let me know, and I’ll add it in.

And, as an aside, if there ever was an award for the most stalwart and prolific of more-often-than-not archaeology bloggers, then it should go to Alun Salt. If you haven’t read his blog before, I urge you to!

Footnote
Past Thinking started life in 2005 as an all-purpose personal blog with a general archaeology and technology theme. Over the years, I’ve started to put non-heritage items onto my personal blog, to keep Past Thinking firmly focussed on archaeology and heritage. I have yet to find the energy to move those old non-archaeology posts, so they’re still here, complete with broken images, if you go back far enough. You will also find Tehmina Goskar blogging here as well.

Dave Batchelor from English Heritage describes the project in a short video:

I and many colleagues have wanted this kind of record of Stonehenge to be captured for many years now, so I am pleased that EH have been able to assign resources to undertake the survey. It is excellent that this is also encompassing the ground in the immediate and surrounding areas too. 3D data of the topography will allow for very fine-grained analysis to take place. It will help spot earthworks and subtle changes in the ground that may help in our understanding, and indeed conservation, of this world-famous monument.

I was fortunate enough to have been involved with a laser scanning project at Stonehenge, back in 2002. Myself and colleagues from Wessex Archaeology worked with Archaeoptics to scan and analyse sections of three stones containing rock art at sub-millimetre resolution. Archaeoptics provided the scanner and registered the data, and we worked together to analyse it. Just as today’s work made the BBC news website, so did ours. It took time to develop techniques to enhance the carvings, but through these methods we discovered previously unknown carvings on Stone 53, one of the most studied stones at Stonehenge. We proved that there is a likelihood that Stonehenge still has a lot of secrets to give up.

Rendered view of the carvings on stone 53 at Stonehenge, June 2002. Render by Tom Goskar, Wessex Archaeology. Data © and processed by Archaeoptics Ltd. Access to Stonehenge courtesy English Heritage.

As quoted on the BBC news website, I said at the time (2003) – and this is the first time I’ve ever quoted myself:

“The laser scanning has opened up a whole new way of seeing Stonehenge,” said Tom Goskar of Wessex Archaeology.

“With more time we could uncover many more and make plainer the outline of some known carvings that are difficult to see.

“This would give us a much better idea of the extent of the carvings and help us achieve a greater understanding of the monument.”

And now it looks like archaeologists are going to get just that chance. The results of this new survey will, I am sure, lead to an amazing new understanding of the monument as a whole. For instance, it’s quite possible that by the middle Bronze Age that certain stones Stonehenge were covered in axe carvings, and there may be other shapes out there waiting to be discovered.

The techniques that we developed to identify and enhance the rock art are ready and waiting, and I have a few new ideas too. It would be very exciting indeed to be able to apply them to parts of this new dataset. Hopefully the data will be available for study. I can’t wait to be able to continue studying the surfaces of those stones.

The results of our 2002 work were published in 2003 in British Archaeology magazine as “The Stonehenge Laser Show“, and on the Stonehenge Laser Scan website. The media attention was huge, and our website fell victim to the  ‘Slashdot Effect‘. It was certainly a high point for my career. Our previous work hasn’t been mentioned in any of the articles that I’ve seen on the EH website or the BBC, but these are popular pieces and don’t go into in-depth detail.

Good luck to the team at Greenhatch et al with finishing the survey and processing the data. It’s a huge undertaking, but I can recommend listening to plenty of Hawkwind as you work into the small hours. It worked for us!

So, just for posterity, here’s the Wessex team at Stonehenge all looking rather young in June 2002. Time flies.

Paul Cripps, the back of Alistair Carty, Tom Goskar and Chris Brayne at Stonehenge 2002. Photo by Dave Vickers, Archaeoptics.

We deeply regret the British Academy decision to cut funding to the CBA, particularly as this decision was not forced by reductions in its own grant from Government, but was a strategic choice by the Academy in spite of their praise for the continuing high standard of our work. (source)

This is bad news for archaeology in the UK. The CBA are a highly active, highly relevant organisation, who work hard to increase the accessibility and relevance of archaeology to everyone. From running the Young Archaeologists Club to campaigning for changes to legislation in Parliament, as well as publishing the excellent archaeology magazine British Archaeology, the list of their objectives goes on and on.

Obviously, any form of financial cuts will mean that the CBA will have to look very closely about the scope of what they do, staff, administration, etc. New ways will have to be found to make up the shortfall, and this will take time. I wish them all the luck in doing this.

There are hard times for all who work in heritage. I am worried about the perceived relevance of heritage by those in positions of power. That the CBA’s cuts were “..a strategic choice by the Academy in spite of their praise for the continuing high standard of our [the CBA's] work” is particularly worrying. When asked, most people seem to love heritage, but when it comes to financial backing, suddenly it’s not quite so important.

When I look back at things like the failure of the Heritage Protection Bill to be passed, and the difficulties in approving the new facilities for a major heritage attraction such as Stonehenge, the current rounds of cuts to English Heritage (32%), museums and county archaeology services, I can’t but help think that something isn’t quite right.

We have a lot of work to do in archaeology and the heritage sector in general. I’ve touched on the subject of value in the last two talks that I have given, and I feel that the only way forward is for a joined-up concerted effort to make our work more relevant, and more accessible. Only when we are genuinely valued by more people, will we stand a chance to receive proper funding to do more and better work. The CBA are champions of our message, which makes their budget cuts even more unfortunate for heritage in general.

Thinking about all this, I find the remarks made by Prime Minister David Cameron in August 2010 even more galling:

Mr Cameron said tourism should focus more on national parks, seaside towns, heritage sites such as castles and country houses, museums, galleries, theatres and festivals.

He told an audience of industry experts at the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens: “We should be proud of our potential because we are proud of our country and what it has to offer. I love going on holiday in Britain.” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-10950167)

According to the BBC article, tourism brings in £115 billion a year to the UK economy, and our heritage is one of the major draws for visitors. If the government want to increase the level of tourism, they’ve got a funny way of going about it.

So, good luck to the CBA in finding a way to make up the shortfall, and to all who work in heritage, it’s time we think long and hard about how to make ourselves more relevant, more visible, and more valued.

I’ll expand further on my ideas of value in a following blog post, so in the meantime, visit the Council for British Archaeology’s website, become a member, subscribe to their excellent magazine, British Archaeology, and let’s start thinking of the future and how we can change things for the better.