historian of modern science and technology
Interesting bellflower seed heads too #wildflowerhour
Lots of FCO files on Hong Kong from 1995 (two years before handover, so a busy time)
But which new file from August-October 2025 looks most curious…?
Also hundreds of MoD local maps of Northern Irish towns and borders, from 1969 onwards.
Plus thousands of born-digital Land Registry docs, including this excitingly self-referential one
Reposted by Margot C. Finn
Here are the overviews followed by a vote for what might be interesting to look at and report…
Reposted by Jon Agar
Credit to all the inspiring work of curators, artists and teams behind #btb25
180 years after Anna Atkins, a link that is implied rather than made explicit
Knife-edges on ledges!
A rave on the ocean wave!
(I still look into ponds quite a lot)
These are from Lancaster printers Standfast and Barracks, mid-1960s
You won’t find us in an ivory tower
Breakaway girls don’t stay home with the chattels
They’ve got Bri-Nylon to win their battles”
(“Bri-Nylon” = British Nylon, another patriotically branded synthetic fibre. This time associated with, um, Norman invasion?)
Here’s Ermen and Roby’s Terylene sewing thread
(Ermen & Roby used to be Ermen & Engels.
Engels as in Friedrich Engels)
Left: infographic ‘Treasure from oil’, ICI Magazine 1957
Right: ICI educational posters, ‘Terylene a great British discovery’ and ‘Britain turns to Terylene’, 1956
New Elizabethan, “defiant modernism”(©️Science Museum) vibes
Here’s Terylene fibre being made, in a glorious expression of modern production at ICI Billingham. (Photo by Walter and Rita Numberg)
It had been a site of 18th/19th innovation, so immediately this discovery is read as resurgent Lancashire industrial invention
“Englands bread hangs by Lancashire thread”
Rex Whinfield and James Tennant Dickson make the first polyester fibres in 1941. Nice to see an early sample, on loan from the Society of Dyers and Colourists
(L) Throup’s worsted wool moulded modular sousaphone case from ‘The funeral of New Orleans’
(R) a shrouded ophicleide, on a monument erected in 1860 by members of the Accrington Brass Band to the memory of one of their musicians, Adam Westwell
think: football casual/Blake’s-7-security-heavy/outdoor-goth-wear
all in a ruined cinema in Burnley
Enjoyably atmospheric and pretentious
Very good.
Here’s a snippet, not the best bit, but gives the gist