The Little Book of Crime and Punishment is a repository of fascinating, obscure, strange and entertaining facts and trivia about the history of the British criminal justice system. Learn of the days when...

'By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show.' - Samuel JohnsonFrom Chaucer's pilgrims meeting in a Southwark inn to the Hogwarts Express leaving from King's Cross, London has...

'An extraordinary history' PETER ACKROYD, The Times'A lively account of (Bazalgette's) magnificent achievements. . . graphically illustrated' HERMIONE HOBHOUSE'Halliday is good on sanitary engineering...

Why did London have to wait so long for a main-line railway beneath its streets? For a few years in the mid-nineteenth century, Isambard Kingdom Brunel's broad-gauge Great Western trains ran from Reading...

There have been more prisons in London than in any other European city. Of these, Newgate was the largest, most notorious and worst. Built during the twelfth century, it became a legendary place - the...

Victorian Britain was the world's industrial powerhouse. Its factories, mills and foundries supplied a global demand for manufactured goods. As Britain changed from an agricultural to an industrial ecomony,...

London is a city of markets: markets in meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, money, insurance, shipping and, occasionally, in stolen goods. As both a major port and the nation's capital, it was almost inevitable...

For millennia the normal, natural and pleasurable activity of eating has been surrounded by fear and anxiety. Religious traditions have long decreed what foods are right for their followers to eat, but...

London's Underground is one of the best-known and most distinctive aspects of the city. Since Victorian times, this remarkable feat of engineering has made an extraordinary contribution to the economy...