Around with William Parsons

This is a guest post by Dr David Beckingham, Associate Professor in Cultural and Historical Geography at the University of Nottingham and curator of the exhibition ‘Last Orders: stories of alcohol and abstinence in the East Midlands’. The task of putting together this exhibition was enabled by the cataloguing work of colleagues and volunteers at …

Dog Island

This is a guest post by Geography PhD student placement Robert Frost. My placement started in October 2019 with the aim of looking at the Engineers’ Files of the water drainage records in the University’s Manuscripts and Special Collections (MSC). These covered the predecessor bodies of the Severn Trent Water Authority, including the Trent Catchment …

“Macaroni looks like serpents”: A Victorian arm-chair traveller’s guide to Europe

“Superficial, incomplete, trifling! Such is the true character of this book. Inaccurate we hope it is not…the world, old as she is, would not sit still for her picture.” So begins the 1849 book ‘Near Home, or The Countries of Europe Described’ by Favell Lee Mortimer, nee Bevan (1802-1878). Now almost forgotten, Mortimer wrote 16 …