Museum blog

We all have traditions around Christmas time and for many this will include a flaming Christmas pudding triumphantly brought to the dinner table, presented to both family and friends. Not all of us though, like a slice of Christmas pudding to round off our Christmas meal. I have heard it described as "the dessert from the depths of hell itself", "a flaming delight; a feast for the eyes and mouth"; Both descriptions reminded me of a quote from Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol and made me wonder about the origins of the Christmas pudding.

If we were able to return to Victorian London and head down to the banks of the Thames at low tide, we could observe silent human figures aged from childhood upwards, bent over, wading (sometimes waist-high) in the wet mud

Discover the Tudor origins of some of today's well-known Christmas traditions including tales of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I at Greenwich.

Researchers working under the explorer William Parry in the far North sought to uncover the mysteries of the Arctic, but extreme cold and bizarre magnetic effects interfered in their research more than they had anticipated.

In what is often considered one of the most extreme environments on Earth, harsh conditions made work difficult not only for the scientists, but also for their instruments.

Hercules Linton was the man who designed Cutty Sark.

One of my recent cataloguing projects has been a collection of business records relating to Sir William Fraser, principal managing owner of several vessels in the service of the East India Company at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. The catalogued items all have the prefix FRS in the Archive Catalogue.