HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2025-10-02T08:00:38.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: The sinister secrets of Samuel Pepys
items: Inside a Roman home
items: What time of the day did medieval people eat?
items: From slums to suburbs: Britain’s council house revolution
items: 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Charles Dickens and his family home
items: David Olusoga on house histories: "Our homes are often the sites of great dramas and tragedies"
items: A brief history of shopping
items: Top 5 Dickensian recipes
items: Where did Adolf Hitler live? The homes of the führer and how they were used as Nazi propaganda
items: A decade of domesticity: how the 1950s made the modern home

The sinister secrets of Samuel Pepys
type: item
date: 2025-09-12T08:00:15.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: Historical people
description: His diaries are revered for their kaleidoscopic evocation of Restoration England. Yet a fresh analysis of Pepys’ world-famous journals – carried out by Guy de la Bédoyère – reveals a man with a proclivity for coercion and sexual violence
encoded: Samuel Pepys is England’s most celebrated diarist. Between 1 January 1660 and 31 May 1669, he recorded his day-to-day life in fascinating and illuminating detail. He wrote about his relationship with his wife, Elizabeth, and the frustrations of managing his household and the servants. He left first-hand accounts of the plague epidemic that likely claimed around 100,000 lives in the capital in 1665–66, and of the Great Fire of London that followed. He has come down through the years as one of the key primary sources for anyone trying to understand the early Restoration era. But there was a dark side to Pepys’ writings, which was never intended to be made public. He described a sordid litany of sexual encounters ranging from his relationships with long-term mistresses to his assaults on maids, including members of his own staff. In an era when corruption was commonplace, Pepys also wrote about using his position as a civilian naval official to coerce sexual services from women seeking promotion for their husbands or payment of unpaid wages. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-660416773webready-b8ec9d0.jpg" width="3680" height="2453" alt="London blazes in a colourised woodcut depicting the Great Fire of 1666, published the following year. Pepys’ diaries include valuable first-hand accounts of such events – but also explicit details of his often troubling personal activities (Image by Getty Images)" title="London blazes in a colourised woodcut depicting the Great Fire of 1666, published the following year. Pepys’ diaries include valuable first-hand accounts of such events – but also explicit details of his often troubling personal activities (Image by Getty Images)" /> Take the events of 18 February 1667, a day when Pepys met in his office with Elizabeth Burrows, who was around 30 years old and the widow of a naval lieutenant killed in action in 1665. Pepys had promised her financial assistance. His diary entry – tell…

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Inside a Roman home
type: item
date: 2022-04-13T11:48:00.000Z
creator: Emily Briffett
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Roman
description: Hannah Platts offers a multisensory tour of the Roman home – from the smells of the kitchen to the surprises of the dinner table
encoded: What could you expect to hear in the atrium of a Roman home? What was everyday life like for the slaves who worked in the kitchens? And which emperor hosted the worst dinner party? In conversation with Emily Briffett, Dr Hannah Platts takes us on a multi-sensory tour of the ancient Roman home. Hannah Platts is author of Multisensory Living in Ancient Rome: Power and Space in Roman Houses (Bloomsbury, 2019) Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones

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What time of the day did medieval people eat?
type: item
date: 2020-05-13T16:00:02.000Z
subject: Medieval
subject: Period
subject: Medieval life
subject: Medieval Life and Death
description: In the Middle Ages, who you were and what you did for a living had great bearing on what you were allowed to eat – and when. Here, Professor Chris Woolgar explains medieval mealtimes…
encoded: What meals are eaten by whom and when? There were three principal meals eaten in the Middle Ages: breakfast, lunch and supper. Breakfast (jantaculum) was largely confined to the elite; to travellers and to some manual workers. In terms of timing, it was not to be eaten until the first mass of the day had been completed. It was also not eaten on Fridays. Lunch (prandium) was the main meal of the day and was probably eaten at around 11am, but this varied across establishments, depending on the number of people there and the number of sittings required. The timing of lunch also depended on which day of the week it was: the meal was eaten later on Fridays, when in many establishments it may have been the only meal eaten that day, and there was a notion that it should not be eaten until after vespers (evening prayers). The evidence suggests, however, that vespers were said much earlier on Fridays – around the middle of the day – so people did not, in fact, have to wait until into the evening to eat lunch. Supper (cena) was an evening meal, which was lighter than lunch. What time of day it was eaten depended on the time of year. In winter, it may have been eaten during daylight hours. Afternoon tea There were two other occasions for drinking and food. There was mid-afternoon drinking, a bit like afternoon tea (although they didn’t actually have tea). The masons at York Minster, for example, in around 1350 in summer were to work until the first bell to vespers and then they might drink in their lodge until the third bell, after which they would return to work. How the Tudors invented breakfast Pig-chickens, beavers’ tails and turtle soup: 8 weird foods through history Then there was also something called ‘all night’. This was a livery of food and drink typically directed to a chamber so that the Lord and some others might have food and drink during the night. The buttery and pantry in great households were closed up overnight. In my talk, we will discuss the bars to these …

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From slums to suburbs: Britain’s council house revolution
type: item
date: 2019-08-08T05:24:40.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: A century ago, the government triggered a massive housebuilding programme aimed at freeing Britons from the scourges of rats, damp, poor sanitation… and Bolshevism. Historian Eugene Byrne chronicles Britain’s council house revolution
encoded: In the middle of the Sea Mills estate on the edge of Bristol there is an open green space generally known as Sea Mills Square, though it is actually a semi-circle. It was here, on 4 June 1919, that Dr Christopher Addison, president of the Local Government Board and the architect of the 1919 Housing and Town Planning Act, formally inaugurated Bristol’s council house building scheme. A large crowd looked on. Cutting the first sod, Dr Addison said he could not imagine a more glorious location for housing than Sea Mills, a greenfield site close to the upmarket suburbs of Sneyd Park and Stoke Bishop. Addison proclaimed himself happy that the famous and ancient city of Bristol was now at the forefront of the nation’s great postwar drive to create new homes. Around the square, tidy red-brick houses, which are still there today, would be built in the coming years. Bristol’s lady mayoress planted an oak tree to mark the occasion, and the attending great and good drove off to inspect plans for the houses. That evening, Addison gave a speech in which he said that, under legislation just passed, he was to become the country’s first minister of health, and that housing would most definitely be part of his responsibilities. Housing would remain the preserve of successive health ministers for decades to come, because everyone understood that housing was a health issue. His remarks reflected the fact that the living conditions of many of the poorest in urban Britain were truly shocking. Numerous Victorian and Edwardian social reformers and journalists had catalogued the atrocious living conditions of the poor in towns and cities around the country, yet little had been done about it. Rats, mice, lice, damp, dry rot, bad or non-existent sanitation and overcrowding all curtailed the lives and opportunities of millions of Britons. Army medical officers were appalled by the poor health of many recruits in the First World War, just as they had been during the Boer War less than a generat…

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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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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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A brief history of shopping
type: item
date: 2018-11-23T07:30:00.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Shopping
description: Where is Britain's oldest shop? And was Selfridges really the first department store? Julian Humphrys serves up four facts about our shopping culture...
encoded: Where is Britain’s oldest shop? The site with the strongest claim appears to be the Boxford Stores in the Suffolk village of that name. Records suggest that this partly medieval building has been open for business in one form or other since the reign of Henry V. If you want to see what a medieval shop might have looked like, check out the merchant’s house in French Street in downtown Southampton. Built at the end of the 13th century for a local wine merchant, it features a vaulted cellar for stock, accommodation for the family and a shop at the front of the property. When did shopping malls arrive? The shopping mall has a surprisingly long history. London’s Royal Opera Arcade, completed in 1818, and Burlington Arcade (1819) sought to woo well-to-do shoppers away from the city’s muddy, crowded streets into a more genteel environment. Looking back even further, the trading floor of London’s Royal Exchange, opened by Elizabeth I in 1571, was in 1660 surrounded by a two-storey shopping mall featuring 100 kiosks and shops. A brief history of Harrods Christmas shopping: Shop ’till you drop A time traveller’s guide to medieval shopping Was Selfridges the first department store? Though Harry Selfridge’s Oxford Street store, opened in 1909, was perhaps the first to sell shopping as a pastime rather than a chore, Britain’s first true department store had begun trading over a century earlier. Harding, Howell & Co’s Grand Fashionable Magazine, which opened on Pall Mall in 1796 with four departments selling furs and fans; haberdashery; millinery; and jewellery, ornaments and perfume. When did we go self-service? Though the world’s first true self-service store – the intriguingly named Piggly Wiggly – opened in Memphis, Tennessee in 1916, it wasn’t until after the Second World War that the idea caught on in Britain. Sainsbury’s first self-service store opened in Croydon in 1950. As Alan Sainsbury found out to his cost, the concept wasn’t universally popular. When one customer rea…

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Top 5 Dickensian recipes
type: item
date: 2018-11-21T16:46:16.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Family and parenting
subject: Historical recipes
subject: Life in Victorian Britain
description: Food is a key theme in the work of novelist Charles Dickens, from the pork pie that Pip stole for Magwitch in Great Expectations to the 'highly geological home-made cake' which features in Martin Chuzzlewit. Victorian food may have a reputation for being either stodgy or unnecessarily fussy, but recreating the dishes that Dickens and his characters tuck into shows that it can be delicious, savoury and warming, light and elegant. Here, author Pen Vogler shares five top Dickensian recipes, updated for modern kitchens…
encoded: The many scenes of eating in the novels of Charles Dickens (1812-1870) are useful ingredients of Victorian social history, particularly his scenes of the young, who are hungry for food and security and are let down by the well-fed adults and, crucially, the institutions who should be caring for them. Dickens knew the agony of childhood hunger and loneliness. He loved convivial meals and we know his wife Catherine gave a lot of thought to them, because she published a little book of ‘bills of fare’ called What Shall We Have for Dinner? In their London home, she oversaw the cook sweltering over a coal-burning cast-iron range in a cramped basement kitchen, to produce an impressive variety of dishes for a dinner party. To help balance the books, family menus featured economic and filling puddings. Dickens’ knowledge of domestic details is unusual in a Victorian man: in A Christmas Carol, he knows that Mrs Cratchit, too poor to have an oven, sends her goose to the baker’s and the washing copper doubles up as a pudding pan; in Martin Chuzzlewit he makes a joke about making a beefsteak pudding pastry with butter. This is all part of a picture he loved to paint – a rosy-cheeked young woman learning to cook for her brother or husband. Victorian food may have a reputation for being either stodgy or unnecessarily fussy, but recreating the dishes that Dickens and his characters tuck into shows that it can be delicious, savoury and warming, light and elegant – and always best shared. With new book Dinner with Dickens, fans of Victorian cooking can try their hand at recreating more than 60 dishes featured in the author's work, including 'charitable soup', oxtail stew and pineapple rum… Charitable soup Catherine Dickens’ menu book is most indebted to the recipes of the celebrity chef Alexis Soyer. In 1847, in the midst of the Irish potato famine, he travelled to Dublin to set up a famine-relief kitchen and wrote Soyer’s Charitable Cookery, the proceeds of which he gave to charity.…

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Where did Adolf Hitler live? The homes of the führer and how they were used as Nazi propaganda
type: item
date: 2018-08-02T09:21:55.000Z
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Housing
description: In the years leading up to the Second World War, media depictions of Adolf Hitler at home – reading, walking his dogs and enjoying fine artwork – were used by the Nazi regime to create a favourable public image of the führer, claims the author of Hitler at Home
encoded: In Hitler at Home, Professor Despina Stratigakos explored how the Nazi PR machine relied upon Hitler’s three dwellings to foster the myth of the führer as a morally upstanding and refined man. The book considers the architecture and design of Hitler’s private homes and their role in Nazi propaganda. Here, writing for History Extra, Stratigakos explores the fascination with Hitler’s domestic life… On 16 March 1941, with European cities ablaze and Jews being herded into ghettos, the New York Times Magazine featured an illustrated story on Adolf Hitler’s retreat in the Berchtesgaden Alps. Adopting a neutral tone, correspondent C Brooks Peters noted that historians of the future would do well to look at the importance of “the führer’s private and personal domain,” where discussions about the war front were interspersed with “strolls with his three sheep dogs along majestic mountain trails”. Read more: When Hitler took cocaine The dark charisma of Adolf Hitler The woman who gave birth for Hitler <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2014/05/Lebensborn-Germany-2ba71c5-357af4f.jpeg" width="680" height="452" alt="German women carrying children believed to be part of the Lebensborn programme, which aimed to raise the birth rate of blonde-haired, blue-eyed ‘Aryan’ children through interbreeding. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)" title="German women carrying children believed to be part of the Lebensborn programme, which aimed to raise the birth rate of blonde-haired, blue-eyed ‘Aryan’ children through interbreeding. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)" /> For more than 70 years, we have ignored Peters’s call to take Hitler’s domestic spaces seriously. When we think of the stage sets of Hitler’s political power, we are more likely to envision the Nuremberg Rally Grounds than his living room. Yet it was through the architecture, design and media depictions of his homes that the Nazi regime fostered …

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A decade of domesticity: how the 1950s made the modern home
type: item
date: 2017-08-22T14:00:53.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: General Modern
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Housing
description: By the early 1950s, food rationing and utility restrictions imposed on household goods like furniture, textiles, clothing, and crockery during the Second World War were gradually being removed. Here, Janet and John Shepherd explain how bombsites and slums were replaced by new homes in many of Britain's major cities and the creation of new towns coincided with massive advances in interior design and household technology...
encoded: A young couple from the 1950s pouring milk for a baby sat in a popular Formica-branded baby chair. (H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty Images) For many thousands of visitors, the 1951 Festival of Britain on London’s South Bank became synonymous with a period of regeneration and modernisation. The festival provided an advertising platform for architects, artists and designers who regaled visitors with an avalanche of modern designs, such as Ernest Race’s popular, ultra-modern steel-legged chair. Pavilion exhibits made extensive use of new dyes, and photographs of brightly coloured festival umbrellas, reproduced on millions of commemorative postcards, can still be found today. Once colour was incorporated into 1950s designs, there was no looking back to the dull, drab landscape of the wartime years. An age of plastics During the war, plastics had played a central role in the production of essential equipment such as waterproof tents, goggles, parachutes, electric wiring and even parts of atom bombs. As demand for these wartime items faded, factories that made these synthetic products moved into the domestic sphere. The 1950s witnessed the successful launch of many new products as Britain returned to a peacetime economy. Materials such as PVC (polyvinyl chloride), fiberglass, melamine, aluminium and vinyl were now used to produce polythene sandwich bags, plastic crockery, kitchen utensils and furniture all of which transformed domestic life. A 1950s advertisement for a Formica kitchen. (Picture Post/Getty Images) The 1950s has rightly been seen as the decade that produced a revolution in laminated plastic. Although the leading brand Formica actually dated from the US as early as 1913, it was the introduction of bright colours and labour-saving qualities in the 1950s that gave Formica its huge success in the domestic market. Hard wearing and “gleaming”, Formica said it provided work surfaces that “could not be burned, scratched or stained”. The company was so confi…

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