HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2026-03-19T18:27:20.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: History's most notorious crime scenes: from Lizzie Borden's lair to HH Holmes's 'murder castle'
items: Life in the workhouse: everything you wanted to know
items: The rise and fall of the workhouse
items: The evolution of the British home: from the Georgian era to the present day
items: Jane Austen’s tips for “health and happiness”
items: 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Charles Dickens and his family home
items: Inside Osborne: Queen Victoria and Prince Albert's island residence
items: David Olusoga on house histories: "Our homes are often the sites of great dramas and tragedies"
items: The house that Bess built: the secrets of Hardwick Hall
items: A history of homelessness

History's most notorious crime scenes: from Lizzie Borden's lair to HH Holmes's 'murder castle'
type: item
date: 2026-03-22T15:30:10.000Z
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Burial
subject: Death
subject: Housing
subject: Murder
subject: The Romanovs
subject: Victorian crime and punishment
description: What is it about places marked by murder and violence that continue to pique our interest, long after the crimes have been committed? Caitlin Blackwell Baines uncovers the history behind some of the world's most morbid locations – from a crumbling Slovakian castle to Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel
encoded: 1. Canterbury Cathedral, Kent, United Kingdom Founded in AD 597, Canterbury Cathedral is Britain’s oldest and most important religious complex: the ‘mother church’ of the Anglican faith and seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury. With its soaring 250-foot central tower and 13,000 square feet of stained-glass windows, the cathedral draws more than a million visitors each year – some who come to worship, others simply to marvel at its serene majesty. Such a setting would seem an unlikely place for a murder, but, ironically, that murder has been a big part of the pull for the past 850 or so years. The victim was Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, who, on the night of 29 December 1170, was hacked to death in the cathedral’s northwest transept. Once a royal favourite – Henry II’s chancellor and closest confidant – Becket ran afoul of the monarch soon after being ordained in 1162. By refusing to uphold the king’s authority over that of the church in the following years, the archbishop effectively sealed his fate. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/1-GettyImages-2188130261-ad7bb3e-e1773932992660.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A medieval illuminated manuscript shows three armored knights striking a kneeling, haloed cleric at an altar. The cleric prays as blood streams from his head. A chalice and open book sit on the altar, and the background is filled with ornate red and gold patterns" title="A medieval manuscript illumination depicts Thomas Becket’s gruesome demise. The archbishop was brutally killed in Canterbury Cathedral, turning a place of worship into a crime scene" /> “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Henry is reported to have ranted to his courtiers. Interpreting this as a kind of kingly hit order, four of his knights stole away under the cover of night, travelling in secret from Normandy to Canterbury, where they accosted Becket as he entered the cathedral. At first, the knights attempted to arrest t…

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Life in the workhouse: everything you wanted to know
type: item
date: 2021-04-25T11:33:30.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
subject: Housing
subject: Life in Victorian Britain
description: From daily routines to whether inmates really ate gruel, Peter Higginbotham responds to listener questions about the workhouse
encoded: What was the daily routine in a British workhouse? Who would end up there? How accurate was Charles Dickens’ depiction of workhouse life? And did the inmates really eat gruel? In the latest in our series exploring history’s biggest topics, Peter Higginbotham responds to listener questions and popular internet search queries about the workhouse. Peter Higginbotham is the author of Life in a Victorian Workhouse (Pitkin, 2014). Buy now on Amazon He is also the author of The Workhouse Cookbook (The History Press, 2008). Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones Buy now on Bookshop.org

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The rise and fall of the workhouse
type: item
date: 2021-04-25T08:02:42.000Z
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Housing
subject: Life in Victorian Britain
description: Charlotte Hodgman talks to Peter Higginbotham about British workhouses, and visits ten locations linked with the provision of relief to Britain's poor...
encoded: For many, the word ‘workhouse’ conjures up the image of an orphaned Oliver Twist begging for food from a cruel master. The reality, however, was somewhat different, and Britain’s system of poor relief arguably saved thousands of people from starvation over the course of its 300-year history. The provision of state-provided poor relief was crystallised in the 1601 Poor Relief Act, which gave parish officials the legal ability to collect money from rate payers to spend on poor relief for the sick, elderly and infirm – the ‘deserving’ poor. Labelled ‘out relief’, handouts usually took the form of bread, clothing, fuel or money. Though they were termed ‘workhouses’ from the 1620s, the early institutions that provided poor relief were, more often than not, non-residential, offering handouts in return for work. Much like today’s taxpayers, those funding poor relief were anxious to see their money well spent, wishing to deter those capable of working from claiming assistance. By the end of the 17th century, providing care under one roof was widely regarded as the most effective way of saving money and, as a result, the early 1700s saw a flurry of workhouses opening. Yet workhouses only really became part of Britain’s social landscape after 1723, when Sir Edward Knatchbull’s Workhouse Test Act won parliamentary approval. The act embodied the principle that the prospect of the workhouse should act as a deterrent and that relief should only be available to those desperate enough to accept its regime. Its impact on the provision of poor relief was dramatic: by the 1770s the number of parish workhouses in England and Wales had soared to around 2,000. Conditions during the early 19th century, though, meant the government was forced to reassess the way it helped the most impoverished members of society. The return of unemployed or injured servicemen from the Napoleonic Wars saw the national poor relief bill quadruple between 1795 and 1815, rising from £2 million to £8 million. To…

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The evolution of the British home: from the Georgian era to the present day
type: item
date: 2020-05-26T15:30:56.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: 21st Century
subject: General Modern
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Housing
description: How much have British homes changed since the Georgian era? Ahead of the return of A House Through Time on BBC Two, house historian Melanie Backe-Hansen explores the evolution of housing in Britain over the past 300 years
encoded: House historian Melanie Backe-Hansen explores the huge changes in Britain’s homes – from Georgian townhouses to post-war suburbia Early to mid Georgian (1714-1800) The early Georgian period saw the country transform from a rural economy to the beginnings of an industrial one. After the 1666 Great Fire of London, a number of building acts introduced guidelines on the use of materials, room sizes and height, along with four grades of house – and so the ubiquitous Georgian terraced house with sash windows was born. The late 18th century would also see the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and the associated mass migration to large cities had an impact on the number of houses available. In a large terraced house, the basement was used for the kitchen and scullery, while on the ground floor was the dining room and other private family rooms. The principal rooms could be found on the first floor, with taller windows and higher ceilings – known as the piano nobile ('noble floor'). These were intended to be shown off to guests, so they would be finely decorated. In smaller urban homes, the main rooms were entered on the ground floor, with a parlour at the front and a kitchen and scullery at the rear. There were no internal toilets or bathroom – the privy was sited in the yard. Top architectural points to look out for... Built predominately in the Classical style, inspired by the ancient Roman world, centred on simplicity, symmetry, and precise proportions. Early in the period, houses were largely plain brick or stone with sash windows, but later stucco began to appear along the ground floor exterior. Later in the 18th century, more decoration began to appear, including fanlights over the front door, pilasters along the façade, as well as decorative mouldings. Professor David Olusoga: “Any home can offer up a micro-version of british history” The presenter of A House Through Time shares his thoughts on the series When people set out to discover the histories of their o…

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Jane Austen’s tips for “health and happiness”
type: item
date: 2020-03-20T09:53:28.000Z
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Housing
description: Descriptions of health, says author Bryan Kozlowski, run throughout the work of famed novelist Jane Austen – from the character of Mr Woodhouse in Emma to the health resort setting of her unfinished Sanditon. Writing for History Extra, Kozlowski shares four tips that can be found in the Regency-era writer’s classic novels, and what they tell us about contemporary attitudes towards healthy figures, women’s exercise and more…
encoded: While most of us have focused on the heart of Jane Austen’s novels or its portrayal of the society of the period, Austen herself was equally fascinated by something rather more functional: health. For some time now, I’ve been following the Jane Austen diet. Yes, you did read that correctly. To quote the character Mr Collins in the author's Pride and Prejudice, “do not make yourself uneasy”. Because not only is the diet real, it’s been hiding right under our literary noses for more than two centuries. It is incorporated into nearly everything Austen wrote, as this quote from Emma (1816) shows: “Where health is at stake, nothing else should be considered.” Themes of health are woven into her earliest stories; they continue strongly throughout Emma and Persuasion (1817); and are centre-stage in her last, unfinished novel Sanditon (set in a seaside health resort). Ironically, as Austen’s own health was fading [she died at the age of 41 after becoming ill with what is today thought to have been Addison's disease], she wrote about cherishing true health even more. In fact, look closer at her fiction and you’ll find that “improvement of health” has always been a part of Austen’s happily-ever-after package, freely bestowed on her most worthy characters, from Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility (1811) to Anne Elliot in Persuasion, who begins her own story a bit “faded” in the physical department. Yet to gradually regain one’s natural “bloom” is the birthright of Austen’s great and good. Even the word “health” itself pops up more than one hundred times in her six novels. Yet if Austen’s passion for doling out “secure and permanent health” is news to you, join the club; I only recently discovered it myself. Though interested in Jane Austen since adolescence it wasn’t until I neared my 30th birthday that I noticed something remarkable. What Austen had to say about health more than 200 years ago, and what science says today, is astonishingly similar. A day in the life of …

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7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Charles Dickens and his family home
type: item
date: 2019-06-09T05:05:00.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Housing
description: Charles Dickens (1812–70) was a famed writer of Victorian literature, whose most famous works include Oliver Twist and Great Expectations. Often considered to be one of the greatest writers of the 19th century, his writing is famous for its social commentary and observation of Victorian society. Louisa Price, curator of the Charles Dickens Museum at 48 Doughty Street in London, shares seven lesser-known facts about Charles Dickens and the family home in which he wrote many of his famed novels
encoded: Charles Dickens loved decorating his home Dickens cared a great deal about how his home looked. Here at the Charles Dickens Museum we hold letters in our archive detailing requests to the landlord for painting and cleaning at 48 Doughty Street (a Georgian townhouse in Bloomsbury that Catherine and Charles Dickens called home from 1837–39). Dickens made various changes to the property, particularly the drawing room. He removed the unfashionable dado rail [a decorative waist-high moulding round the wall of a room], hung wallpaper, and installed a fitted carpet and a veined marble hearth stone. Decorative items in our collection such as ostentatious gilt candlesticks illustrate Dickens’ preferred style. My history hero: Charles Dickens (exclusive to The Library) Did Charles Dickens invent Christmas as we know it today? At Doughty Street and in subsequent homes, Catherine participated in decision-making about decorating, but she still had to contend with Dickens’ strong opinions on the matter. While travelling in northern Italy in 1844, Dickens wrote home to Catherine, urging her not to rearrange furniture in his absence: “Keep things in their places. I can’t bear to picture them otherwise.” Charles Dickens worked from home For the first half of his career Dickens worked from a study inside his family home, which would have been alive with the noise and bustle of young children, servants and visiting family members. At 48 Doughty Street, Dickens’ study was situated on the first floor, with a door leading into the drawing room. By the time he and Catherine left in 1839 they had three children under the age of three (Charley, Mamie and Katey), and employed four servants. Dickens tended to keep to a strict routine of working in the morning without disturbance. There were, of course, exceptions to the rules: one day at Doughty Street, hearing the hilarity in the drawing room, Dickens left his study and joined his family, bringing with him his portable writing desk, ink pot,…

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Inside Osborne: Queen Victoria and Prince Albert's island residence
type: item
date: 2019-04-21T19:20:00.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: British queens
subject: Housing
description: Osborne House on the Isle of Wight was Prince Albert’s pet project and he was heavily involved with its design from the outset. By 1846, when the royal family began visiting Osborne, Queen Victoria had already given birth to five children in six years, and the rapidly expanding royal nursery needed somewhere where it could be a family. Professor Jane Ridley and Charlotte Hodgman visit the former royal residence that offers a fascinating insight into the private lives of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert...
encoded: “It is impossible to imagine a prettier spot,” said Queen Victoria of Osborne, the palatial family home where she and Prince Albert chose to periodically retreat from the public eye to spend quality time together, and raise their children. Tucked away on the Isle of Wight, just an hour’s ferry journey from Southampton, Osborne commands impressive panoramic views of the Solent, a prospect that is said to have reminded Albert of the Bay of Naples. The sprawling 342-acre site was purchased in 1845, with building contractor Thomas Cubitt commissioned to create a family home that could function at both a domestic and court level. By 1851, most of the house had been completed, with a central pavilion block housing the royal family’s private apartments (completed in 1846). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/IMG_1241-a40e1f0.jpg" width="5136" height="3424" alt="The central block of Osborne – known as the Pavilion – housed the royal family's private apartments and was the first part of the house to be built. It was completed in 1846. Prince Albert was heavily involved in the landscaping of Osborne's grounds and would direct gardeners from the top of the tower shown to the right of this picture. (© English Heritage)" title="Summer 2014" /> “Osborne was very much Albert’s pet project,” says Jane Ridley, professor of modern history at the University of Buckingham, “and he was heavily involved with its design from the outset. By 1846, when the family began visiting Osborne, Victoria had already given birth to five children in six years. This rapidly expanding royal nursery needed somewhere it could, albeit rather self-consciously, come and be a family.” A queen on show While Osborne’s exterior, built in an Italian ‘palazzo’ style, cannot fail to impress, it is the interior of the house that reveals the most about the tastes and relationship of the royal couple – from the way the house was run, to the image they wished to convey to the wi…

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David Olusoga on house histories: "Our homes are often the sites of great dramas and tragedies"
type: item
date: 2019-03-21T07:35:51.000Z
creator: David Olusoga
subject: 20th Century
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Second World War
subject: Victorian
subject: Period
subject: Housing
description: The first series of BBC Two's A House Through Time turned an unheralded Liverpool townhouse into a media sensation. Now, fresh from filming a second series, David Olusoga reveals why Britons are finding the history of their homes so captivating. Accompanies the four-part BBC Two series A House Through Time
encoded: What are the first things we do when we move into a new house? We immediately set about stamping on to it our tastes and our identity. We redecorate, organise the furniture and methodically arrange our books – the carefully collected volumes that we hope say something about us and our lives. This, and the frenzy of cleaning and scrubbing that precedes it, is about much more than personal taste and domestic hygiene. It is also an attempt to exorcise from our new private space the lingering presence of its past residents. In order to make the empty frame of an old house into a new home, we attempt to disguise an unavoidable truth: that until recently it was the home of other people, and before them yet more people, a line of strangers stretching back decades and sometimes centuries. Our homes – the most private and intimate spaces in our lives, and the most expensive material objects we ever purchase – are, in some ways, things we can never truly own. Because, whatever it might say on the deeds, there’s no escaping the reality that we are merely the latest characters to appear on stage for an inevitably short cameo. People live for decades. Houses last for centuries. We are just passing through, and no matter how many layers of paint we slap on, or how many changes and alterations we make, we can never quite succeed in wiping away the traces of the lives that have been lived before us. Some people find it unsettling to think too deeply about this, but there are others who have no desire to exorcise their home of its former owners and tenants and instead seek to commune with them. The television series A House Through Time, which I present on BBC Two, has tapped into that phenomenon, and perhaps played a small part in accelerating it. What the series demonstrates is that, for some homes, it is possible to excavate from the archives a full genealogy, a list stretching back in time of everyone who has ever lived there. The team behind the series uses deeds, land registry…

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The house that Bess built: the secrets of Hardwick Hall
type: item
date: 2018-12-20T16:47:18.000Z
subject: Elizabethan
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Housing
subject: Where history happened
description: Which historical sites in Britain have played an important role in our history? This is the question BBC History Magazine's David Musgrove put to British historians while researching his book 100 Places That Made Britain (2011). Here, in an extract from the book, Musgrove visits Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, which was built by the "fantastically wealthy" Bess of Hardwick in the 16th century...
encoded: It’s hard to know which way to look when you get to Hardwick Hall. As you step around the corner from the car park, the National Trust signs point to a sizeable window-filled wonder of a building to your left, yet plainly in front of you to your right is an equally large, and patently historic, ruin. Two grand houses shoulder to shoulder, but it’s not like they are tight on space – they are surrounded by acres of beautiful gardens within rolling Derbyshire countryside. The house that’s still intact is probably the best place to start. This is Hardwick Hall, as opposed to the ruined Hardwick Old Hall. By far the most striking aspect of its exterior is the glut of windows it boasts. ‘Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall’ is how the old ditty goes. Built at a time when glass was expensive, it was a clear indication of the wealth and status of its builder. Read more: Bess of Hardwick: schemer, social climber, scourge of Elizabeth I The dark side of Elizabethan England (exclusive to The Library) <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/07/1161832_crop-e351890.jpg" width="2765" height="1761" alt="A 16th-century portrait of Bess of Hardwick. Bess's talent, ambition and eye for a well-connected husband elevated her to dizzying levels of wealth and power in Tudor England. (Photo by Bridgeman Art Library)" title="A 16th-century portrait of Bess of Hardwick. Bess's talent, ambition and eye for a well-connected husband elevated her to dizzying levels of wealth and power in Tudor England. (Photo by Bridgeman Art Library)" /> In what we might consider today as something of a showy statement, that builder’s initials ‘ES’ are emblazoned above those huge windows in stone carvings atop the several turrets of the house. ES stands for Elizabeth of Shrewsbury, but the woman in question is more commonly known as Bess of Hardwick. Born in 1527, Bess married four times to a succession of rich and influential men, the last of whom was the Earl of Shrewsbury. …

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A history of homelessness
type: item
date: 2018-11-22T09:08:11.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: General History
subject: General Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Victorian
subject: Housing
description: The UK government recently pledged to 'end homelessness' by 2027. But has such a strategy ever been attempted before and, given the success of historical examples, is it even possible? Writing for History Extra, Nicholas Crowson considers the question, tracing the history of homelessness in Britain from the Victorian era to the present day, exploring how people without homes have been grouped and treated…
encoded: Teresa May’s government recently pledged itself to eradicate rough sleeping by 2027. This came as part of a new Rough Sleepers Strategy, with a spending allocation of £100m, in which a coalition of government, local councils and homelessness charities will collaborate to address issues relating to access to housing, hostel provision and mental health. Setting aside criticisms that have been directed towards the policy (that there is no new money or that the policies are essentially a repackaging of previously announced initiatives), history suggests there is good reason to be sceptical about the prospects for success. Shifting perceptions of homelessness How ‘homelessness’ has been described through history matters. Today, the public continues to associate homelessness with rough sleeping, in large part because of its visibility. This is despite the efforts of charities, like Shelter, to widen the definition to a spectrum of need: from absolute rooflessness to temporary and insecure accommodation. Many of the public and the media suspect that homeless people are in this position after making bad life choices. Opinion polls frequently show at least a third of respondents attribute fault to the homeless. The labels that have historically been used to describe homeless people complicate the responses: vagrant; squatter; loafer; sofa-surfer; statutory homeless; dosser; beggar; of no fixed abode; and tramp are just a few of the names applied. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/09/GettyImages-3164662-d62a65c.jpg" width="3548" height="2866" alt="The labels that have historically been used to describe homeless people complicate the responses to homelessness, writes Nicholas Crowson. In this picture, a homeless man sleeps in Regent's Park during a heatwave in London. (Photo by Chris Ware/Keystone/Getty Images)" title="The labels that have historically been used to describe homeless people complicate the responses to homelessness, writes…

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