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Nude inspections, thigh flashers and fights to the death: 15 things you need to know about the Spartans
In our minds, Sparta has become a near-mythical Greek city-state populated by the tough and single-minded ancient predecessors of today’s special forces troops. But as historian Andrew Bayliss outlines, its supposedly hyper-militarised society was stranger and more complex than its reputation suggests
1. The ‘Spartans’ were really called the homoioi Although we know the citizens of the ancient Greek city of Sparta as the ‘Spartans’, they usually called themselves the homoioi. This can be translated as ‘equals’ or ‘similars’. As for outsiders, they usually called the Spartans ‘the Lacedaemonians’. This was because the city-state of Sparta – what the ancient Greeks called a polis – was actually called ‘Lacedaemon’. 2. All Spartan citizens were rich Although ancient sources often describe their lifestyle as austere, Spartan citizens were all wealthy men. Every citizen was required to join a mess group, where he dined each night. To keep his place, he had to supply large monthly contributions of foodstuffs from his estates: roughly 45kg of barley, 3kg of cheese, 1.5kg of figs, a small amount of pork and 37 litres of wine. Modern scholars have calculated that each Spartiate would have needed to own at least 15 hectares of land to meet his mess contributions. Such large holdings would have made them all properly wealthy by ancient Greek standards. 3. They wore their hair long – and sported striking red cloaks To reflect their relative equality as homoioi, Spartan citizens adopted a uniform appearance, keeping their hair long and dressing in red cloaks and tunics. Ancient sources claimed the Spartans’ long hair was designed to make handsome men more attractive and ugly men more frightening. Their red cloaks helped conceal bloodstains in combat. In fact, this appearance was designed to project citizens’ gentlemanly status. This is because the ancient Greeks thought it was impossible for any man with long hair to perform manual labour, while producing the red dye for cloaks was incredibly laborious, a process that required the harvesting of more than 10,000 murex shellfish to produce just a single gram of dye. 4. This was not a ‘warrior’ society Spartans are often described as ‘warriors’, but they didn’t spend all their time preparing for conflict as professional soldiers would. In fact, not one single surviving ancient Greek source describes the Spartans training for war. Nonetheless, this was a militarised society in that all Spartan citizens were required to serve in the army until the age of 60. In addition, throughout their lives citizens were expected to share in communal activities, with citizens exercising and hunting together during the day. Training in athletics, wrestling and boxing would have kept the Spartans’ bodies strong, while hunting would have been useful in conditioning them to kill with bladed weapons. The Spartans also dined together in their mess clubs each evening. Spartan citizens aged between 20 and 30 slept together in barracks each night. Read more | The Peloponnesian War: Athens fights Sparta for dominance in ancient Greece 5. They were parasites, who profited from slave labour Citizens’ communal lifestyle was based on their ruthless exploitation of tens of thousands of enslaved people known as ‘helots’. These helots outnumbered their Spartan owners by perhaps as many as 10 to one. The primary role of these helot slaves was, as Aristotle bluntly put it, to “farm the land for the benefit of the Spartiates”. By toiling on their masters’ estates in Laconia and Messenia, the helots produced the vast quantities of foodstuffs citizens needed to maintain their status atop society. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/5-BAL487241-8eda65b-e1777535569383.jpg" width="1500" height="996" alt="Three minimally clothed workers lean forward to pull a large wooden beam across open grassland, while a figure in red with a blue head covering stands behind them holding a whip." title="A modern-day illustration depicting a Spartan man whipping his enslaved servants. Known as ‘helots’, they were expected to toil the land to provide foodstuffs for their much richer owners (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> 6. The helots were regularly hunted and subjected to violence Each year, the Spartan authorities declared war on the helots. This meant the slaves could be slaughtered without incurring the religious pollution, or miasma, ancient Greeks believed resulted from an unlawful killing. In addition, helots were forced to wear dog-skin caps and coats. They were given a stipulated number of beatings, regardless of whether they had done anything wrong, to remind them they were slaves. Sometimes, helots were forced to drink large quantities of unmixed wine to show young men what drunkenness was like. At other times, helots were forced to perform ridiculous songs and dances. But from a modern perspective, the most disturbing risk faced by helots was surely the krypteia. This was a brutal rite of passage whereby the ‘smartest’ young Spartan adults were sent into the countryside armed with a knife and ordered to eliminate the strongest of the helots. 7. They (likely) had the world’s first compulsory state-run education system Choosing the ‘smartest’ of the young adult Spartans would have been easy for the authorities. This was because every single Spartan citizen had been tried and tested by the city’s compulsory and brutal upbringing, which lasted from age seven to 30. A state official known as the paidonomos or ‘boyherder’ oversaw this brutal regime. He had full authority to assemble the boys and punish them as he saw fit. To assist him in his boyherding, the paidonomos was given a staff of young adults called the ‘whip-bearers’. If neither the paidonomos nor the whip-bearers were around, any free Spartan adult would oversee the activities of the boys. The Athenian writer Xenophon stated bluntly that: “Spartan boys are never without someone in charge of them.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/6-GettyImages-916072764-0bb1562-e1777535652242.jpg" width="1498" height="1000" alt="Several people in draped ancient garments sit, stand, or recline around a central figure seated on an elevated chair within a classical hall of tall columns and stonework, with a dog resting nearby." title="Every citizen was tried and tested in a compulsory – and brutal – coaching system. This 1880s woodcut imagines a Spartan boy being shown a helot forced to drink unmixed wine (Image by Getty Images)" /> 8. Pederasty was a key part of life Youths in training were mentored by an older male, who was not one of the officials or a relative. But this was not mentoring in the modern sense. What we are talking about here is the ancient Greek practice of ‘pederasty’, a homoerotic relationship between a pubescent boy and an adult male. The mentor was meant to choose his protégé for his character rather than his looks. However, there is considerable dispute amongst sources about whether these Spartan partnerships were sexual. Xenophon insisted these pederastic unions were chaste, and that Spartans actually considered sexual molestation of boys as unacceptable as incest. But the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes regularly mocked the Spartans for their sexual interest in boys. For his part, Plato overtly rejected Sparta as a model for his ideal state – where pederasty was explicitly forbidden – because when it came to homoerotic affairs, the Spartans were “slaves to pleasure”. Read more | Were the Amazons just a “male fantasy”? Here’s the truth behind the ancient world’s warrior women 9. Fat-shaming was socially acceptable The food intake of Spartan boys was strictly limited. The Athenian writer Xenophon says the boys were provided with just enough food for them not to become “fat or sluggish”, but meagre enough for them to learn how to work hard without eating and make their rations last longer. It was not just Spartan boys who were required to stay slim. The young Spartan men aged 20–30 who lived in barracks were also expected to maintain a healthy physique. Spartan officials reportedly inspected these young men in the nude every 10 days to ensure they had not grown fat. A Spartan named Naucleides, who became “extremely corpulent”, was even made to stand in the middle of the assembly to shame him into changing his ways. 10. Spartan girls were known as ‘thigh-flashers’ Girls participated in sports too, including running, wrestling and jumping. The rationale was that they would grow strong enough to bear sturdy babies. But rather than competing naked like Spartan men and boys, Spartan girls protected their modesty by wearing short tunics. Nonetheless, these tunics exposed the tops of their legs, earning them the nickname ‘thigh-flashers’. Several bronze figurines have been unearthed depicting Spartan girls running or dancing, their short-sleeved tunics hitched to expose their left thigh. Other bronze figurines depicting Spartan girls bare-breasted and wearing only triangular loincloths. These are thought to depict the girls preparing to wrestle. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/13-GettyImages-463895159-e6008a6-e1777535847106.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="In a grassy landscape with hills and a distant mountain, several nude or partially clothed figures interact in the foreground while a group of clothed onlookers stands behind them." title="Young Spartans Exercising by Edgar Degas, c1860. Spartan boys would train in the nude, while girls wore loincloths or short tunics to cover up (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> 11. Spartan women developed a reputation for telling men what to do No fewer than 40 sayings by Spartan women were recorded in antiquity, most of which are judgments by Spartan mothers on how their sons fared in combat. When one Spartan mother handed her son his shield, she told him bluntly, “Your father kept this safe for you, so either keep this safe or don’t exist.” One particularly frightening Spartan mother went so far as to hitch up her dress to expose herself to her cowardly sons, before inviting them to “crawl back in” her womb. When another Spartan lad made the mistake of telling his mother that everyone in his company had been killed, she yelled, “So they sent you to announce the bad news to us?” She then bashed his brains in with a broken roof tile. 12. Aristotle deemed Sparta a gynaecocracy Sparta was almost unparalleled in the pre-modern world as a city-state where women were permitted to own land. By the fourth century BC, women owned as much as 40 per cent of all the land in Sparta. The philosopher Aristotle complained that owning so much land allowed Spartan women to dominate their husbands, sons and brothers, effectively turning Sparta into a ‘gynaecocracy’ – a state where women held power. The Spartan queen Gorgo would likely have agreed. When asked by an Athenian woman why Spartan women were the only ones who could rule men, Gorgo replied, “Because we are the only ones who give birth to men.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/12-Jean-Jacques-FrancoisLeBarbier-ASpartanWomanGivingaShieldtoHerSon-dffa38b-e1777535959262.jpg" width="619" height="413" alt="A seated woman in flowing garments gestures toward a helmeted man holding a round shield, spear, and sword, while two unclothed children stand close to him and a dog looks up at the group in a classical domestic setting." title="A Spartan woman gives a shield to her son in this 19th century painting. Women held a lot of power in Spartan society – an unfamiliar ‘gynaecocracy’ which bothered Aristotle" /> 13. They doubled down to create a dyarchy In truth, Sparta was not really ruled by women, it was ruled by kings. And in fact, Sparta was unique in having two kings from two separate royal houses – the Agiads and Eurypontids – reigning jointly. Sparta was not a monarchy, but a dyarchy. The Spartans claimed this peculiar arrangement dated back to the 11th century BC when their first king, Aristodemus, died before his wife gave birth to twin sons, Eurysthenes and Procles. Because the mother refused to reveal which one was the eldest son, the Spartans made them both kings. Read more | Think you know what an ancient Roman gladiator looked like? The reality will make you think again 14. But the real powerbrokers were officials known as ephors The power of the Spartan kings was counterbalanced by five annually elected officials known as ephors (literally ‘overseers’). The ephors began each year by ordering Spartan citizens to ‘cut’ their moustaches and obey the laws. The authority the ephors held was such that they were the only Spartan citizens not required to rise when one of the kings approached. The ephors also exchanged monthly oaths with the kings. The royals swore they would “reign according to the established laws of the state”, while the ephors responded, “While you abide by your oath, we will keep the kingship unshaken.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/15-SpartaEphorenWMH11-1861-62S48LLoeffler-d27e587-e1777536328758.jpg" width="619" height="413" alt="Five seated figures in ancient Greek‑style robes hold long staffs and face one another as if debating, set against tall architectural columns." title="An 1862 imagining of the ephors, the most powerful officials in Sparta. They managed all citizens – including the kings" /> 15. Spartans didn’t always fight to the death Famously, when King Leonidas learned that he and his men were going to be surrounded by the Persians at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, he sent the other Greeks away but ordered his 300 Spartans to remain at their posts. Leonidas and his men fought to the death. After the battle, an epigram was set up to commemorate their sacrifice: “Stranger, go tell the Spartans that here, obedient to their orders, we lie.” It would be natural, then, to think that Spartan law required Spartans to win or die trying. But there were actually numerous battles and skirmishes when the Spartans made tactical withdrawals or ran away. Sometimes, they even surrendered. When 120 Spartan citizens who were marooned on the island of Sphacteria near Pylos gave themselves up to the Athenians in 425 BC, the Athenians displayed the Spartans’ shields in the ‘Painted Stoa’, a covered walkway that housed artworks and war booty. Perhaps pointedly, the shields were situated close to a painting showing the Athenian general Miltiades defeating the Persians at the battle of Marathon in 490 BC. Today, you can see one of those captured Spartan shields in the Agora Museum in Athens. Andrew Bayliss is a classicist at the University of Birmingham. His latest book is Sparta: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Superpower (Profile Books, 2025)
Nicholas Higham explains why the story of the decline of Roman Britain, and the rise of England, is more complicated than you might have assumed
How did England – and Englishness – emerge from the final days of Roman Britain? And what separated Englishness from Britishness? Emeritus professor Nicholas Higham –whose latest book is How England Began: From Roman Britain to the Anglo-Saxons – speaks to James Osborne to explore the twisting and turning tale of England's origins from post-Roman Britain: a story of clashing cultures, religion, and migration.
Carl Morris traces the origins of long-distance running as a sport back to the heyday of 19th-century pedestrianism
Why do people run marathons in their thousands these days? Carl Morris, in conversation with Dave Musgrove, traces the origins of running as a sport back to the heyday of 19th-century pedestrianism, when Victorian runners seen as the superstars of their day and performed in front of huge crowds. From these humble roots, they chart the start of the modern passion for marathons. To find out more about the strange story of long-distance wheelbarrow pedestrianism, check out the HistoryExtra podcast series, The Tiger Tamer who went to sea
The Oxford neurologist who broke an 'impossible' record: the incredible life of Roger Bannister
Olympic gold medallist Amy Williams chooses Roger Bannister (1929–2018) as her history hero
In profile Roger Bannister was an English neurologist and middle-distance runner. On 6 May 1954, he became the first person to run a mile in under 4 minutes. Later that year he won gold in the 1-mile run at the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Vancouver. Following retirement from athletics, he practised medicine for 40 years. He became the first chairman of the independent Sports Council (now Sport England), and was knighted in 1975. When did you first hear about Roger Bannister? In my early teens – I was a keen athlete from the age of 13. My best distance was the 400 metres but, when I realised that I wasn’t quite good enough to excel in that, I switched to the skeleton. I subsequently learned that Roger and I went to the same school in Bath. What kind of man was he? He balanced his athletic ambitions with his medical career while maintaining the discipline needed to be the best at his chosen distance. He also displayed resilience and mental strength to set a new world record; a lack of mental toughness and self-belief can often hold an athlete back. Everyone said it was impossible for me to win the skeleton at the Winter Olympics when Great Britain didn’t have its own skeleton and bobsleigh ice track, but that just made me more determined to prove them wrong. Read more | London 1908 was the weirdest Winter Olympics in history – and here's why What made him a hero? He made me realise that psychology is so important to athletic success. His scientific approach to training was also a big influence on my approach to the skeleton. He did much shorter, more intensely planned training sessions than many of his competitors, who focused on running mile after mile – he was ahead of his time in that respect. And he bounced back from the disappointment of a fourth-place finish in the 1500 metres final at the 1952 Summer Olympics. What was his finest hour? It’s got to be running a mile in under 4 minutes at the Iffley Road track in Oxford in May 1954. His mindset, courage and training regime all came together on that famous day – and every Olympian wants to do the same when you get the chance to prove yourself on the world stage. You’ve got that one moment to get your body, your brain and your mind in the right place to achieve victory. Read more | How a forgotten law helped women’s football conquer the world – but only by accident Can you see any parallels between his life and your own? I think we both broke down an invisible barrier – him by running a sub-4-minute mile, and me by showing that a British woman could win the skeleton. And I think that my 2006 Olympic disappointment fuelled my success – it put the fire in my belly – at Vancouver four years later, in the same way that his Helsinki setback fuelled his Iffley Road triumph all those years ago. What would you ask Bannister if you could meet him now? I’d like to know how he felt after his famous run. I was absolutely shattered after winning my Olympic gold, but also felt an overwhelming sense of relief. It took a while for the magnitude of what I’d achieved to sink in, but in time I felt an enormous sense of pride in what I’d achieved for my country and myself. Was it the same for him, I wonder? Amy Williams MBE won the gold medal in the women’s skeleton at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. She was a pundit for TNT Sports and discovery+ for the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics 2026 This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
What are history's biggest misconceptions? 9 experts reveal what we get wrong about the past
Our team of historians, broadcasters and authors take aim at the most egregious fallacies about the past
Ancient Athenian democracy was democratic There’s plenty to criticise about that ancient approach We wouldn’t recognise the system practised in ancient Athens as democracy in the sense we understand it today. Women did not have the vote, and the entire society depended on a massive slave population to be able to function. Yet in other ways it was also more democratic than our democracies today. Every (male) citizen took an active role in governing the city, and every major decision was taken by a vote involving every citizen who attended. An even more egregious misconception is the idea there is an unbroken link between ancient and modern democracy. Athenian democracy lasted for only around 200 years; since then, through most of the rest of antiquity, the Middle Ages and more modern historical periods, democracy has not been practised. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1155876683wbebready-ecda02a-e1775040845111.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration of an ancient Greek orator standing on a raised platform, wearing a robe and laurel wreath, gesturing toward a crowd of citizens and soldiers gathered below. Classical buildings and hills appear in the background" title="Demosthenes, a defender of Athenian democracy in the fourth century BC, pictured in a c1880s illustration (Image by Getty Images)" /> In more recent times, Athenian democracy has been held up as a system to avoid rather than imitate. During debates between the founding fathers about the Constitution of the United States in the 1780s, many argued that “even if every Athenian had been a Socrates [ie very intelligent], Athenian democracy would have been little more than mob rule”. It is only very recently that we have come (again) to admire Athenian democracy, and want to link our own system of government to that ancient ideal. Michael Scott, professor in classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick Most people in the past had much shorter lifespans Many people died very young – but many others lived long lives On paper, this seems to be true: today, the average global life expectancy is around 72, whereas for much of the medieval and early modern periods the figure hovered around 30–35. You might think, then, that modern medicine, public health initiatives and better nutrition have all combined to help us live longer than our ancestors. In fact, though there has been a significant improvement in living conditions, the idea that there has been a corresponding increase in lifespan over the centuries is incorrect. The overall life expectancy has risen simply because more of us are living to older ages. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1691539942wbebready-f6db793-e1775040973181.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A seated adult in dark clothing cradles a young child dressed in pale yellow, who leans against them as if unwell. A bowl and spoon sit on a nearby table, with a chair draped in green fabric to the right." title="A 17th-century Dutch painting depicts a mother with her sick child. Though infant mortality was high in pre-modern eras, many people who survived childhood lived long lives (Image by Getty Images)" /> It’s important to understand the difference between life expectancy and lifespan. The former is an average – so, for example, if two people are born on the same day and one lives to the age of 80 but the other gets ill and dies before their first birthday, their average life expectancy is 40. Although that is statistically correct, we should be wary of drawing conclusions about typical lifespans. Using such figures doesn’t tell us that all (or even most) people in the past lived shorter lives. For most of the medieval and early modern periods, infant mortality was high due to the prevalence of disease, the lack of vaccines and medical knowledge, poor hygiene and sanitation, and complications from childbirth. But if you made it through childhood, you had a fair chance of living for almost as long as the average person today. There are plenty of historical examples of people living well into their seventies, eighties and beyond. Elizabeth I was in her 70th year when she died, and the Roman author and scientist Pliny the Elder recorded one musician who enjoyed good health until his death at the age of 105. Tracy Borman, author, historian and broadcaster Every war ends at a single moment The consequences of conflict can drag on for years The greatest historical misconception is that wars come to an end neatly, on a specific date, with the signing of an armistice or surrender agreement. No war in history has ever ended happily-ever-after with a sudden return to normality. The consequences of war – famine, displacement, lawlessness and political violence – often last longer than the conflict itself. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-514079642wbebready-6a2479b-e1775041054396.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="“A group of people gather with copies of The Washington Times, holding up front pages with bold headlines such as ‘GERMANY SURRENDERS’ and ‘WAR IS OVER,’ reacting to news of the First World War’s end" title="Jubilant Americans celebrate German defeat in 1918. As Keith Lowe points out, though, the end of a world war has never resulted in a world fully at peace (Image by Getty Images)" /> The First World War is a perfect example. In our popular imagination, especially in the west, it came to an abrupt end on 11 November 1918. But the guns did not fall silent for long. Popular revolutions soon broke out in Germany, Austria, Hungary and many other places. Turkey was consumed by ethnic and religious violence, and vast battles took place between Poland, Ukraine and the new Soviet Union. Such events created an atmosphere of chaos that lasted well into the 1920s. The same thing happened after the Second World War. Ceasefires in 1945 did not bring immediate peace. Instead, armed groups rushed to fill the power vacuum left by the defeat of Germany and Japan. Political violence became the norm, and full-blown civil wars erupted in Greece, Poland, China and Indonesia, among other places. That period of chaos lasted at least until the end of the 1940s. War is sometimes unavoidable. But if we had a better historical understanding of the long-term consequences, perhaps we would prepare a little better for the period of instability that always comes afterwards. And maybe we would be less eager to embark on war in the first place. Keith Lowe, author of The Fear and the Freedom: How the Second World War Changed Us (Viking, 2017) Read more | Is the Eastern Front the forgotten theatre of World War One? History is written by the victors Voices of the defeated often resonate the loudest “History will be kind to me,” said Winston Churchill, “for I intend to write it.” Or such, at least, is the popular paraphrase of a line that Churchill trotted out on numerous occasions, always in jest. In reality, as he must have appreciated, no one gets to dictate how they are viewed by posterity. Nevertheless, the notion that ‘history is written by the victors’ is a persistent one. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1175727472wbebready-4a19229-e1775041240806.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white engraving showing a hooded, monk‑like figure offering a bowl and cross to an injured man supported by another. A fourth man in a helmet and holding a spear watches beside a forest stream and small waterfall" title="Welsh leader Llywelyn ap Gruffudd dies, 1282 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Consider a few counter-examples from the broad sweep of British history. Our only narrative source for Britain at the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasions is Gildas, a British monk lamenting the arrival of the invaders. Similarly, when the Vikings were ravaging Europe in the ninth century, the tale of their bloody progress was recorded by their monastic victims. Even the Normans, who produced an abundance of propaganda to justify their conquest of England in 1066, did not get to control the narrative. One of the most insightful portraits of William the Conqueror is the obituary of him penned by an English monk. The king, we are told, “was stern beyond measure to those who opposed his will… In his time people suffered grievous oppression and manifold injuries.” When Edward I conquered Wales in the late 13th century, no one (insofar as we know) celebrated his victory in verse, but Welsh poets did lament the passing of his vanquished opponent, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. The voices of the defeated are often the ones that resonate the loudest across the centuries. Marc Morris, medieval historian, writer and broadcaster Vikings drank from their enemies’ skulls Those horned helmets are hooey, too Lurid myths swirl around the Vikings: that they wore horned helmets, drank from the skulls of vanquished foes, and tortured and dispatched enemies by splaying their ribs in the gruesome ‘blood eagle’. It’s all nonsense. We can blame the 19th century for the horned helmets. When translations of the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas were published, that headwear started to sneak into the illustrations. Wagner didn’t help. In 1876, for the first performances of his Ring cycle, costume designer Carl Doepler decided that horned helmets would be just the thing. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-542363271wbebready-344c1a7-e1775041336198.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph of three people dressed in Viking‑style outfits, wearing horned helmets and fur garments, each holding a spear and a decorated round shield" title="Warriors don horned helmets in a Wagner opera (Image by Getty Images)" /> The idea of drinking from the skulls of enemies comes from a misreading of an Old Norse verse. That’s easily done, because the Norse wrote fiendishly complicated poetry that was deliberately difficult to unpick. One ode, Krákumál (‘The Lay of Kraka’), features a line about heroes drinking from the “curved branches of skulls”. It’s actually a poetic reference to animal horns, but 17th-century antiquarian Ole Worm translated it as heroes quaffing “from the skulls of those they had killed”. The ‘blood eagle’ is trickier to unpick, but again Old Norse poetry might be the source. The sons of Ragnar Lodbrok (‘Hairy-Breeches’), it was written, murdered the king of Northumbria by cutting his ribs from his spine and drawing out his lungs so that they looked like gory wings. It has been argued that this is a misunderstanding rooted in knottily obscure Old Norse verse, and that no such form of torture was ever perpetrated. The moral of the story? If in doubt, blame poets and costume designers. Eleanor Barraclough, historian, broadcaster and author of Embers of the Hands (Profile, 2024) Pompeii was ‘frozen in time’ Most citizens of the Roman town escaped a violent volcanic demise The eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 didn’t happen in an instant. Nor was Pompeii buried in one swift sweep by lava. In fact, there was no lava at all. On the morning of the eruption, a thin curl of smoke rose from Vesuvius. By midday, the volcano had erupted, sending a vast column of smoke, ash and pumice 16 miles into the sky. Pumice rained onto the surrounding towns, and over the next few hours many of their inhabitants started to flee. Sometime after 7pm, the column – now too heavy to support itself – collapsed. This sent a scorching gush of pumice, gas and ash known as a pyroclastic flow hurtling towards Herculaneum. The city was buried beneath 20 metres of volcanic material. There were no survivors. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-918985082wbebready-dc62e0f-e1775041410267.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Two plaster casts of human bodies lie on a bed of light gravel, one smaller figure close beside a larger one, set against a stone wall" title="Casts of a mother and child lie in the ruins of Pompeii – two of an estimated 2,000 victims there (Image by Getty Images)" /> It wasn’t until 6.30am the following day that the first pyroclastic surge reached Pompeii’s northern walls, sweeping about 200 metres into the city before losing momentum. Then, between 7.30 and 8am, the column above Vesuvius collapsed again – and Pompeii was engulfed. Any people remaining in the city were killed instantly, their bodies locked in a rigid ‘boxer pose’ as their muscles contracted rapidly in the fierce heat. Though many died beneath collapsing structures or from suffocation during the first parts of the eruption, most residents escaped before the final lethal surges; the death rate in Pompeii may have been as low as 10 per cent. The eruption didn’t happen in an instant – and the destruction it wreaked took place over the course of some 24 hours. Jess Venner, ancient historian, presenter and author of The Lost Voices of Pompeii Read more | Your ultimate guide to Pompeii, plus 8 fascinating facts about the ancient Roman city The North won the American Civil War White racial democracy was not displaced even after Confederate defeat Southern planters lost much when the American Civil War ended in 1865. The North’s victory in that conflict ensured that the Confederacy would never establish a global empire of cotton, and paved the way for emancipation, citizenship for freed people, and the franchise for black American men. Yet white racial democracy was not displaced, even if the slaveocracy was somewhat diminished. For the remainder of the 19th century, white people mounted deadly battles against black voters, business owners and politicians. They raged against the short-lived experiment in full democracy known as Reconstruction until they struck a deal with the federal government to end it. By 1877, the rest of the country had left black southerners and their few allies to defend democracy alone. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1329737646wbebready-3d4918b-e1775041532812.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A rectangular metal sign with white lettering on a dark background that reads ‘WAITING ROOM FOR WHITES ONLY BY ORDER OF POLICE DEPT" title="A Jim Crow-era sign enforcing racial segregation at a railway station in the US South (Image by Getty Images)" /> Even more strikingly, white southern elites won a narrative war that changed Americans’ sense of what happened. Historians call it the myth of the ‘Lost Cause’: an understanding shaped in schoolbooks, monuments and popular media that the antebellum South was a place of romance, not horror, and that there was something noble in the region’s last stand. Secessionists were understood as rebels, not traitors, and freed people as, in the words of future president Woodrow Wilson, “dusky children untimely put out of school”. “Whoever tells the best story wins,” it’s been said. The white South told such a compelling story that they secured Jim Crow segregation by 1900, bringing themselves back into the union on their own terms – and at the expense of black Americans. Adriane Lentz-Smith, associate professor of history at Duke University The Victorians were po-faced prudes The queen herself loved to laugh "We are not amused.” These words, supposedly uttered by Queen Victoria, have burdened the 19th century with an unfair reputation for prudishness and humourlessness. Many still characterise the Victorian era as a stiff and solemn time when fun and pleasure were suffocated under a cloud of self-discipline and respectability. This, quite frankly, is nonsense. Fun was a vital part of Victorian culture. Celebrity comedians packed music halls every night, the country’s most popular newspapers brimmed with jokes, and the saying “laugh and grow fat” – the belief that cheerfulness promoted health – was a familiar household phrase. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-3321199wbebready-60feebc-e1775041641325.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A person poses in a theatrical costume: a plaid jacket with large buttons and a wide collar, checkered trousers, a tall tilted hat, and exaggerated facial makeup, set against a plain background." title="Music-hall star Dan Leno poses in a ludicrously mismatched outfit c1890s, illustrating Bob Nicholson’s point that “fun was a vital part of Victorian culture” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Victoria herself was no exception. Her diaries are packed with things that made her laugh. At one dinner party, she found herself talking to an elderly admiral who bored her with a story about a damaged ship. Hoping to change the subject, she asked after his sister’s health. Mishearing her, the admiral replied: “She’ll be fine, ma’am, when we turn her over and scrape the barnacles off her bottom.” Victoria shook with uncontrollable laughter until tears ran down her face. It’s true that Victorian humour was less coarse than that of earlier generations. Jokes about sex, farts and other bodily functions fell out of favour – in respectable circles, at least – but puns became a national obsession, and the era’s comedians produced plenty of books, cartoons and one-liners that still have the power to amuse. It’s high time we stopped treating the Victorians as solemn bores, and started laughing with them instead of at them. Bob Nicholson, writer, broadcaster and historian at Edge Hill University Read more | Think the Victorians were prudes? Their filthiest jokes will shock you The Middle Ages were dismal The Renaissance starts here I am continually astonished by how often I hear the medieval period in Europe called the ‘dark ages’. One thousand years of history cannot be dismissed so quickly. This was a period of seminal political developments – of genuine statecraft. It was a period of architectural and visual glories. It was a period of outstandingly rich intellectual achievement. It encompassed the Carolingian Renaissance in the eighth and ninth centuries; the so-called 12th-century Renaissance, another period of great cultural revival and vibrancy; and the late 14th and 15th-century Renaissance. (Indeed, we can blame those latter Renaissance thinkers for the denigration of the earlier Middle Ages: they had a vested interest in making out their immediate predecessors to have been benighted and stupidly dogmatic.) <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-526750990webready-9c11477-e1775041787316.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large circular stained‑glass rose window composed of vivid blue, red, and yellow panels depicting religious figures, framed by Gothic stone tracery and pointed arches." title="he c1220 Dean’s Eye rose window of Lincoln Cathedral, a wonder of the Middle Ages (Image by Getty Images)" /> Modern intellectual approaches were developed in the 12th century, pioneered by the scholar Peter Abelard in his dialectical text Sic et non (‘Yes and no’). Abelard also wrote a text called the Ethics, which set the tone for many centuries of ethical thinking; he foregrounded the idea of intention, too, and promoted the dictum ‘Know thyself’. On a more everyday note, the Middle Ages were also not as filthy as often assumed. By the later part of the period, urban authorities in particular were deeply concerned about hygiene, and regulated extensively. The metaphor “standing on the shoulders of giants” is often attributed to Newton, but he was merely quoting a 12th-century philosopher, Bernard of Chartres: “We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants.” We should, like Bernard, acknowledge our intellectual debts to our medieval predecessors. Hannah Skoda, associate professor of medieval history at the University of Oxford This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
From Stranger Things to communist cars: why we can't resist nostalgia
In our politically unstable modern world, the allure of retreating into memories – sometimes mirages – of bygone eras seems to have grown. Six historians explore how this tendency impacts our historical understanding
“The nostalgia that Stranger Things evokes is complicated” The first thing to remind ourselves is that our view of the past is definitely shaped. The way that we understand history is translated, constructed, created for us in multiple ways – the majority of which have very little to do with the actuality of what happened. We imagine and dream history across culture, making versions of it that comfort us and accord with our world views. Film, television, games, adverts, heritage spaces, novels – they all enable us to inhabit other times, to form our sense of memory, to consume the past. Nostalgia is simply one of the ways that we access these feelings of pastness. It is incredibly powerful because of its appeal to emotion beyond rationality. It is a way of connecting with the historical that ignores order and authority – and historians underestimate it at their peril. Nostalgia has become a keynote for contemporary collective memory. Global populist politics are shot through with a dangerous nostalgia for a claimed glory that has been seemingly squandered. This is not new, but it is newly dominant. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/2WX7XXY-CMYK-12a5f8b-e1772530438298.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A poster for the TV show Stranger Things, showing four children on bikes on a long road with a yellow line down the middle. They are all looking towards a red, cloudy sky" title="The hit series Stranger Things is “a confection of an imagined 1980s”, says Jerome De Groot, enjoyed by an audience of whom many have “no memory of the eighties other than a cultural hangover of tropes and clichés” (Image by Alamy)" /> In the television series Mad Men (2007), Don Draper cynically uses the past to sell product, observing: “Nostalgia – it’s delicate, but potent.” Memories of the past can be manipulated. The biggest English-language show worldwide in 2025 was Stranger Things, a confection of an imagined 1980s – Spielberg, Nike, Kate Bush and the Cold War melded to present a version of the decade. Yet the nostalgia that Stranger Things evokes is complicated. Much of the show’s target audience has no memory of the eighties other than a cultural hangover of tropes and clichés. The eighties it recollects is itself rooted in a view of 1950s US small-town life. The nostalgia at work here is culturally performative, sold as an expression of algorithmic power rather than actual choice. No one remembers in a neutral way; everyone’s version of the past is a translation enabled by culture. Nostalgia is delicate, but this fragility is a kind of pure experience – even if it is prone to commodification. Jerome De Groot is professor of literature and culture at Manchester University, and author of Double Helix History (Routledge, 2022) “Nostalgia is one of history’s greatest promoters” Nostalgia seems to be everywhere – so much so that some people argue there’s something specific about the 21st century that prompts nostalgia. But it has been around, in one form or another, for centuries – and it has profoundly shaped our relationship with the past. The term ‘nostalgia’ was coined by a Swiss physician in the late 17th century. At the time, it was deemed a disease – a kind of pathological homesickness. It wasn’t until the turn of the 20th century that it morphed into its more familiar form: a longing for a bygone time rather than a distant place. Since then, nostalgia has been our constant companion, becoming rife in popular culture, journalism and political commentary in the 20th century. The 1970s has even been dubbed the “second-hand seventies” for that reason. Psychologists have also studied nostalgia’s prevalence, arguing that it’s experienced by pretty much everyone, all of the time. Though some people might be more or less prone to the feeling, nostalgia is a core human experience with distinct evolutionary advantages. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-3259343webready-3771e14-e1772529840639.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing a large group of children playing on a roundabout in a playground. Some adults stand to the right, watching over them. Behind them all are some large brick walls and a few high rise buildings" title="Children play on a roundabout in a London housing estate, 1973. Thanks to nostalgia in popular culture and media, that decade has been dubbed the “second-hand seventies”, notes Agnes Arnold-Forster (Image by Getty Images)" /> Broadly, nostalgia can be divided into two types: personal and historical. The first is the nostalgia you feel about your own life; the second is nostalgia for some period in the past that you haven’t yourself experienced or lived through. Read more | Swings and roundabouts: a history of Britain's playgrounds It is the latter that poses the most problems. In political life, it is often lambasted as the emotional driver behind rightwing populist movements. Academic historians also take issue with this brand because it paints a sentimental and often inaccurate portrait of the past, and advocate detached, dispassionate and objective investigation. Yet not only is it impossible to quell nostalgia’s influence, that also shouldn’t be the goal. Nostalgia is one of history’s greatest promoters. And history is not just an academic enterprise. It is a vibrant ecosystem of period dramas, battle re-enactments, museums, documentaries and genealogists. Nostalgia might not be the only thing that draws people to the past – but where would this ecosystem be without its seductive emotional force? Agnes Arnold-Forster is chancellor’s fellow at the University of Edinburgh, and author of Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion (Picador, 2024) “Today, nostalgia speaks in a different idiom, in ALL CAPS and acronyms” Nostalgia, as the old joke goes, isn’t what it used to be. Twenty years ago, the term was popularly associated with the embattled citizens of eastern Europe, who retreated from the shock of market capitalism into a cosy world of Trabants, Lenin statues and the evocative smell of communist-era pickle jars. Appropriately enough, it was the Russian-American scholar Svetlana Boym who came up with the era’s most perceptive analysis of nostalgia. For her, the pull of a “restorative nostalgia” – a longing for a home or homeland that has never existed – was always at play in the nationalist fantasies of the right as much as it also shaped people’s memories of communism. Today, nostalgia speaks in a different idiom, in ALL CAPS and acronyms – MAGA, MEGA, ‘Take Back Control’ – but Boym’s warnings still ring loud and clear. Here, a look at recent history can be helpful. Nostalgia for a fantasy of imagined racial homogeneity is hardly a new force in British politics. Keir Starmer’s unconscious echoing of Enoch Powell’s noxious rhetoric (in 2025 the PM said Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers”, a phrase he later expressed regret for using) highlights how the spirit of Powell is animating contemporary political discourse. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-2233375765webready-490da1a-e1772529952548.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing twelve tall lampposts in a line, each with a single England flag on them, blowing in the wind" title="The English flag flies from lampposts in Sheerness, 2025. The way Britons express nostalgia has changed a great deal over the past 20 years, argues Benjamin Jones (Image by Getty Images)" /> In my field, modern British history, a number of analysts have diagnosed ‘imperial nostalgia’ as an underlying cause of the Brexit-era lurch to the far right. I wonder if this is quite right. Though we might accept that some nationalists dream of resurrecting the British empire, most people’s feelings regarding our imperial past are probably messier and less coherent. Cultural theorist Paul Gilroy argued two decades ago that, rather than acknowledging the complexities of empire, the British instead retreated into “postcolonial melancholia”. Imperial pride was expressed just as colonial violence was denied. We need a cure for such morbid symptoms. Migrants – the enslaved, the indentured, the impoverished, more rarely the privileged – made empire and re-made Britain in turn. Clear vision is required to understand this past; rose-tinted lenses will only obscure our view. Benjamin Jones is author of The Working Class in Mid Twentieth-Century England (Manchester UP, 2012) “German Democratic Republic nostalgics are a minority, but a growing one” When Boris Johnson visited socialist East Germany months before reunification in 1990, he was “amazed at how far behind West Germany” it was: a land “of strange little cars with two-stroke engines and fake coffee”. Most East Germans agreed, keen to swap those “strange little” Trabant cars for VWs, and to leave behind the dictatorship and its make-do economy. Today, things are changing. Cars made in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) are seeing a revival. Restored Trabants fetch up to 7,000 Euros – close to the sum paid when new. Though half of owners are over 60, thousands are under 30, born long after the last Trabi left the factory. This fits into a wider trend of GDR nostalgia, or Ostalgie. In 2019 – 30 years after the Berlin Wall fell – a survey found that 10 per cent of East Germans wanted the GDR back. When the newspaper Nordkurier asked the same question recently, it was nearly a quarter. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1555920290webready-0db3990-e1772530085287.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of several small, colourful cars parked together, in front of a large building with a central circular tower and pointed rooftops" title="Trabant cars in central Leipzig, East Germany in February 1990, shortly before that state’s reunification with West Germany. A resurgence in the brand’s popularity reflects nostalgia for the certainties of communist rule (Image by Getty Images)" /> GDR nostalgics are a minority, but a growing one. Ask them why, and most cite not socialist convictions but a feeling that life was simpler during the Cold War. The present, with its wars, economic uncertainty and rapid technological change, can feel frightening. So the small world of the GDR appears reassuringly predictable, irrespective of the Stasi’s omnipresence. The Trabi embodies this paradox: it’s a tiny, underpowered car but one that anyone can repair and on which families relied for decades. West Germans aren’t free from nostalgia. With the rise of the far right, unstable coalitions and economic pessimism, many reminisce about the postwar era and its political stability and economic miracle. West Germany was no dictatorship but it was staunchly conservative, initially limiting opportunities for women and social mobility. There is no moral equivalence, but Westalgie also views history through a soft filter. Read more | Life in East Germany: the cultural evolution behind the Iron Curtain In our uncertain times, the pull of Cold War nostalgia is seductive. Historians must stay the course of academic rigour and integrity, providing a much-needed lifeline of solid analysis until calmer days return. Katja Hoyer is a historian, journalist and visiting research fellow at King’s College, London. Her forthcoming book is Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe (Allen Lane, May 2026) “The ‘nostalgia’ label is often applied indiscriminately to almost any period film” As Agnes Arnold-Forster concludes in her recent historical work on this “dangerous emotion”, there are “many nostalgias”, not just one, so assessing whether it shapes our view of the past depends on context and specific detail. Of course, we should be concerned by nostalgia’s role as a social and political emotion – the contentious yearning for an idealised ‘lost’ place or past. Its potential for manipulation demands particular scrutiny in relation to histories, collective memory and public understandings of the present as well as the past. These are no idle fears in our present times. When it comes to period films, historical media genres and their audiences, I would question how much nostalgic pleasures and practices really tell us about the public’s relationship with British history. The ‘nostalgia’ label is often applied indiscriminately to almost any period film or media text, regardless of its genre or intentions, and also to audiences. This issue was a core motivation for my 2011 empirical study Heritage Film Audiences. Even the (few) respondents who expressed acute nostalgia were self-reflective on the subject. “We would not really swap our comfortable modern lifestyle for those days,” wrote one. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1319979896webready-5db6466-e1772530181978.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing a person's hands holding an old photo of a woman in a high necked dress holding a small child in a white dress. Behind the photo are several others strewn across a desk and an open laptop with a family tree on it" title="Popular factual television programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are? can act as a bulwark against idealised versions of the past, contends Claire Monk (Image by Getty Images)" /> The first two decades of the 21st century brought an unprecedented new wave of accessible public history, from free digitised resources (such as Old Bailey Online) via the rise of online family history to innovations in history television that engaged audiences with fact-based histories, primary sources and historical methods. The BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are?, launched in 2004, has now run for 22 seasons. Channel 4, particularly during the late Hamish Mykura’s tenure, excelled in innovations in primary-source-based historical drama and drama documentary. The series Georgian Underworld (2003) and City of Vice (2008), on the formation of the Bow Street Runners, were notable. However, the future of engaging public-history media for British audiences rests on institutional factors, not least the future of UK public-service broadcasting itself. Claire Monk is professor emerita of film and film culture at De Montfort University “In contemporary politics, nostalgia is playing a powerful role” Nostalgia is neither inherently good nor bad. It helps us connect to the past, remembering friendships, experiences, places. It can help us work through regrets, offering insights that benefit us in the present. But nostalgia can produce sentimentality based on mischaracterisations of how things once were, painting the past in rose-tinted hues that bear little resemblance to historical reality. Either way, it produces very strong emotions. And in contemporary politics, nostalgia is playing a powerful role. We are seeing a surge in far-right nationalism, not least in the UK. Nostalgia feeds into this, weaponising ‘great’ moments in the past. These are taken selectively from British imperial history, evoking, as cultural theorist Stuart Hall puts it, “the fantasy of a late return to the flag, family values, national character, imperial glory and the spirit of Palmerstonian gunboat diplomacy”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-526776478webready-1b1f2a8-e1772530266615.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A 17th‑century coastal scene showing a large group of men, women, and children gathered on a shoreline as they prepare to board ships. Several sailing vessels wait offshore, with small rowboats ferrying passengers to them. People wear cloaks, bonnets, and wide‑brimmed hats typical of the period. Behind them, cliffs rise to a fortified stone building overlooking the harbour. The mood suggests a significant departure or migration" title="A coloured engraving shows Huguenot refugees landing at Dover after toleration of Protestantism ended in France in 1685. Contrary to a populist narrative invoking false nostalgia, “Britain was never a homogeneous nation”, notes Anamik Saha (Image by Getty Images)" /> As Benjamin Jones notes, Paul Gilroy described this turn as “postcolonial melancholia”. The issue is not only how nationalists refabricate moments from history for their own ends, but also how they bind them to strong feelings of nostalgia. Crucially, Gilroy highlighted the racial dimension of this longing for a Britain before postwar immigration from the former colonies, when life was supposedly simpler, more peaceful and more homogeneous. Read more | Catholics vs Huguenots: your guide to the French Wars of Religion Postcolonial melancholia relies on a wilful amnesia about the past. Historians show us that Britain was never a homogeneous nation free from internal conflict. It has experienced waves of immigration over many centuries, following a familiar pattern: immigrants are initially met with fear and distrust before becoming naturally absorbed into British life and identity. Yet this is buried in popular representations of British history. Historical precision now struggles against nationalistic nostalgia that paints Britain’s past in broad, brutal strokes, obscuring important histories for political ends. Good history can salve postcolonial melancholia, helping the nation face and work through the troubled elements of its past. Anamik Saha is professor of race and media at Leeds University, and author of Race, Culture and Media (Sage, 2021) This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
London 1908 was the weirdest Winter Olympics in history – and here's why
Boxing and football? In a Winter Olympics? In October? Held in 1908, the first-ever winter games was an experimental affair. But, writes Martin Polley, it was one that sowed the seeds for future – and snowier – competitions
“Outside dirty, slushy streets, a melancholy drizzle and a muggy, uncomfortable atmosphere suggestive of nothing more remote than the crisp, keen, invigorating air that is associated in everyone’s mind with the sport of skating.” This editorial, published in Sporting Life, was far from a sparkling endorsement of the first-ever Olympic skating event. But then this was far from a typical Olympics. In fact, the inaugural Winter Olympics, held in London in 1908, would be unrecognisable to modern eyes familiar with today’s four-yearly snow-and-ice spectacle. Yet it forged the way for what’s now become a major fixture on the international sports scene, the latest iteration of which – Milano Cortina 2026 – is being staged across Lombardy and north-eastern Italy this February. The figure-skating event introduced in such dismal terms by Sporting Life was held in the Prince’s Club, Knightsbridge, and was part of a larger ‘winter’ programme staged in Britain as part of the fourth modern Olympic Games. Those games would witness a number of innovations, some of which today sound odd or even faintly ridiculous – motorboat racing or bicycle polo, for example. Other experiments stuck, though. The 1908 games saw the concept of national teams first formally introduced, while the distance for the Marathon that the London organisers used went on to become the standard for the race. And like these other innovations, the winter programme left a long-lasting legacy. Though it was another 16 years before Olympic organisers staged a full Winter Olympics, it was the British Olympic Council (BOC) that first put an ice-based sport on the programme, and which first organised an event called the Olympic Winter Games. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-1236365554webready-ddcdecb-e1770899425786.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A postcard depicting a large white, circular stadium in London. It is surrounded by free spaces and in the background, Big Ben and the houses of parliament stand. The sky is pink and blue" title="The Great Stadium at what’s now White City was the first purpose-built Olympic arena (Image by Getty Images)" /> Organisational feat London took on the 1908 Games in late 1906. In less than two years, the BOC pulled off an enormous organisational feat. It scheduled a fortnight of sports in July, centred on the world’s first purpose-built Olympic stadium at the Franco-British Exhibition Grounds in Shepherd’s Bush, known at the time as the Great Stadium (or just the Stadium), later as White City. Other events – from sailing and rowing to shooting and polo – were held at venues in London and farther afield. London’s Winter Games was conceived as a distinct programme involving six disciplines. Four were team games – football, hockey, lacrosse and rugby – that were played between September and May in Britain, and thus considered winter sports. The fifth was boxing, added to the Olympic programme too late to be held in July. The sixth was figure-skating – the sport that gave the programme a genuinely winter flavour, and which made this experiment a forerunner of the Winter Olympics that started in earnest in 1924. From its first meeting in December 1906, the BOC comprised representatives from numerous disciplines, including two people from snow and ice sports: W Hayes Fisher of the National Skating Association (NSA), and Edgar Syers of both the Ski Club of Great Britain and the Figure Skating Club. They joined counterparts from the Football Association and the Rugby Football Union. That first meeting discussed “the possibility of holding Olympic Skating Competitions in the winter of 1907–08”. By March 1907, the Amateur Hockey Association (AHA) had joined the committee, the English Lacrosse Association had been invited, and the BOC agreed to stage “a cycle of winter sports [as] an integral part of the Olympiad”. The meeting minutes don’t explain this decision. At that time, just over a decade after the first games under the auspices of the IOC was held in Athens in 1896, the Olympics was still a novelty without any fixed programme; local organisers were relatively free to shape the schedule. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/0720506webready-d570ad7-e1770900127137.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a large crowd of men standing looking in the same direction. To the right of the crowd, some brick building stand, and there are some children standing on one of the roofs, looking out over the crowd" title="Competitors prepare for the marathon at the Athens Olympics in 1896. When the games reached London 12 years later, they were still a novelty with no fixed schedule (Image by Topfoto)" /> The BOC, led by sportsman and politician William Grenfell, Lord Desborough, wanted to use the Olympics to showcase British sport in the round. In his younger days, Desborough had been something of an archetypal Victorian amateur sportsman, and he had served as an MP before entering the House of Lords in 1905. With his sporting credentials and political networks, he was perfectly placed to drive the Olympic project. He led fundraising schemes, chaired the BOC, organised banquets, and delivered speeches to garner maximum publicity for the Games. Read more | Cricket, cocaine and cocoa houses: 5 ways Victorians spent their free time The winter programme was a crucial part of this project, intended to ensure that the Olympics would achieve more than they would if they finished in July. What’s more, the Franco-British Exhibition – the organisers of which financed the London Olympics – did not close until 31 October. Having extra sport in October would bring in more paying customers to the exhibition. International ambition There was also an international imperative. From Desborough’s idealistic perspective, the inclusion of winter sports ensured an extension to what he called, in his speech at a banquet for competitors, “the great idea of the Olympic Games”: that they could “draw together, not in a small sphere, but in the larger sphere of the world’s politics, the nations of the world… through the idea of friendly competition”. The BOC hoped that the team sports would inspire entries from overseas, and give the Winter Games an international profile. Rugby already had a significant following in South Africa and Australia, both of which sent teams to the summer Games. The Olympics were for amateurs only, and rugby union broadly conformed to this culture. Football and hockey were both growing as amateur sports in many European countries, as was boxing. Skating, an amateur but socially elite sport, could draw from many European nations. Lacrosse was the outlier, with a smaller reach, but the organisers hoped at least for a Canadian entry and some British representation. The fact that countries were able to send teams at what Desborough described as “an inclement time of year” added to the value of the winter project. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/1304204webready-bf6df5e-e1770900245969.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of men running along a field, holding hockey sticks. To the right, there are two men wearing pale shirts with black shorts and long black socks. To the left, there are two other men dressed in all white, with black socks" title="England take on France in the first round of the field hockey tournament, winning 10–1. They went on to victory over Ireland in the final (Image by Topfoto)" /> As preparations progressed in 1907, the BOC planned to stage the Winter Games at Easter of the Olympic year, then settled instead on two weeks in October 1908. Of the six sports included, competitions in hockey and skating had not been held in the previous three Olympics. Football had appeared in the previous two, rugby had featured at Paris 1900, and boxing had made its debut at St Louis in 1904. The innovation, then, lay both in some of the sports and in packaging them as a winter programme. The Olympic Winter Games of 1908 opened on 19 October. First up was football, with matches held at the Stadium; Great Britain won the six-team tournament with a 2-0 victory over Denmark in the final. In between football matches, the Stadium hosted a two-team lacrosse event in which Canada beat Britain. In the two-team rugby tournament, Australia ran out winners over Britain. The action then moved to the Northampton Institute in Clerkenwell on 27 October for the boxing tournament. Two days of skating began at Prince’s on 28 October, followed by the six-team hockey tournament at White City. The Games ended on 31 October with the hockey final. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BL0000560190810280590009boxingwebready-e8211dc-e1770907962273.jpg" width="1500" height="1001" alt="A black and white photograph of a large boxing ring, with one man on all fours on the ground, while another man stands over him. Surrounding the ring is a large crowd, all sat down looking towards the ring. There are white posters and signs around the sides" title="English boxer RK Gunn defeats his French opponent in a featherweight bout in 1908. He was one of the five British pugilists who took all of the top medals in that sport at the Winter Games (Image by British Library)" /> Think rink It was, of course, the skating that gave this programme a winter feeling, away from the muddy pitches at White City. The BOC hired the Prince’s Club, London’s only all-year private rink, for several weeks in October, allowing competitors to practise ahead of the two-day event. Spectator tickets were expensive – £2 2s (well over £200 today) for a two-day pass, or £1 1s for one day – but they sold well, and there were full houses throughout the competition, perhaps because it attracted some of the biggest names in the sport. There was Ulrich Salchow of Sweden, who won gold in the Gentlemen’s Individual, and Nikolai Panin of Russia, winner of the Special Figures. They were joined by Britain’s leading female skater, Florence ‘Madge’ Syers. She won the Ladies’ Individual event and, partnering her husband and BOC member Edgar, took bronze in the Pairs. These Olympic medals rounded off a stellar international skating career in which she had won British and World titles. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-881629540webready-3559007-e1770899596586.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A gold medal depicting three naked people: one man standing in the middle and a woman each side of him, placing a wreath on his head. On the bottom left, the words OLYMPIC GAMES are written. On the opposite side, the words LONDON 1908 are there" title="A gold medal from the London games of 1908, which saw a number of Olympic innovations (Image by Getty Images)" /> The relatively low turnout of countries in the team sports rendered some of the games sadly one-sided, as seen most clearly in the early rounds of the football. Bohemia and Hungary withdrew at a late stage, so France entered A and B teams to make up the numbers, competing alongside Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden. France B lost 9–0 to Denmark, while the same opponents hammered France A 17–1 in the semi-final, before Britain took gold. With rugby and lacrosse attracting only two teams each, these tournaments comprised just finals. The Australian rugby team happened to be in Britain at the time anyway, so simply added the Olympics to its schedule. A British tour of Australia and New Zealand that year prevented the main team from competing, so the BOC designated the county champions, Cornwall, as Britain’s representatives. Australia won 32–3. Hockey attracted only Germany and France from overseas, so the AHA split Britain into its four constituent nations (at the time including Ireland as one entity) for the tournament. England beat Ireland 8–1 in the final. In boxing, 32 of the 42 fighters were British; the other 10 included representatives from Australia, Denmark and France. All five of the gold medals went to Britons. Skating was the most international event, with entrants from Britain, Argentina, Germany, Russia, Sweden and the US. Read more | From Hollywood to war heroes: 10 Olympians who were more famous outside sport In the gold medal tally for the Winter Games, Britain came top with eight, followed by Australia, Canada, Germany, Russia and Sweden with one each. Frosty reception This pioneering Winter Games programme had a mixed reception. Crowds at the stadium events were small, with fewer than 3,000 watching the rugby final and 2,000 at the football (in a venue that had held more than 80,000 back in July). Tickets in the uncovered sections were available for only 6d (about £3 today), but most matches were held on weekdays and in bad weather, which did not help attract spectators. Boxing and skating, both held indoors, fared better. Most newspapers, both general and sporting, were interested throughout, with the Daily Mirror leading the way. It offered updates on all of the competitions throughout October, and ran action photographs that ranged from the Canadian lacrosse team in training to portraits of the Olympic boxing champions, and action photographs from the skating and the team games. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL294984webready-d9b66c6-e1770899858122.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a large group of men dressed in white shorts and white jumpers with a maple leaf reading Canada on the front. They are all holding lacross nets up in the air and cheering. In the background to the right is a man dressed in a long black coat and a bowler hat" title="Canadian lacrosse players cheer their defeated opponents, Great Britain, after the Olympic final. They were the only two teams involved in that competition (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Sporting Life also excelled, running interviews, previews, fixture lists, ticketing news and match reports. Other papers and magazines, including Country Life, The Field, the Daily Mail and the Athletic News, gave the Winter Games coverage in the form of previews, reports and, in some cases, action photographs. Local newspapers carried syndicated stories, ensuring nationwide coverage. Read more | The madcap Paris Olympics: the chaos that nearly derailed the 1900 Games In some cases, the reporting was negative. The Athletic News described the two-team rugby tournament as “an Olympic Fiasco”, and The Field printed the slightly barbed remark that the boxing bouts involved “more fighting than science”. Broadly, though, the press took a positive approach, welcoming this novel gathering of international teams across so many sports. However, at a time when the Olympics had not yet become the centrepiece of world sport, these events were relatively minor elements of Britain’s sporting scene. That status was reflected in some of the press, with fixture lists particularly revealing. So, for example, the football match between Paddington Thursday and Great Eastern Railway appeared just below the Olympic semi-finals in Sporting Life on 22 October. Similarly, The Field’s account of the hockey final ran in the same column as its report of Cambridge University’s match against Beckenham. Lasting legacy The 1908 games were staged long before the idea of legacy figured in Olympic thinking. However, the experimental Winter Games had some lasting impacts. Though lacrosse has not returned to the Olympic programme since 1908, and rugby struggled along only until Paris 1924 (though it was reintroduced in Sevens mode in 2016), the other team sports blossomed after their inclusion at London. The football tournament was the largest of its kind held to that date, and hockey has featured in all but two subsequent editions. Similarly, boxing later became a permanent fixture. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-541055111webready-753f687-e1770900377445.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of five men dressed in black uniforms, black hats and black ice skates. Behind them, other men dressed in dark clothing look across the ice rink at them" title="Figure-skaters including Ulrich Salchow (centre), who won numerous World and European titles around the turn of the century as well as Olympic gold in 1908 (Image by Getty Images)" /> It was the skating, though, that helped to create a specifically winter legacy. No ice sports featured at the Stockholm Olympics in 1912, but Antwerp’s planners re-introduced figure-skating at their 1920 Olympics. British skater Phyllis Johnson returned at that games – adding the bronze in the Pairs to her silver from 1908 – and Salchow unsuccessfully defended his Olympic title. Antwerp also saw the first Olympic ice hockey tournament. From that point, it was a short step in 1924 for France to organise a programme of snow and ice-sports at Chamonix to complement that year’s Paris Summer Olympics. The IOC formally launched a separate Winter Olympic Games in 1928 at St Moritz in Switzerland. Almost a century on, the 2026 iteration in northern Italy is set to be a sporting behemoth, featuring more than 3,500 athletes from 93 nations. Yet the seeds for this now-global event were sown not on pristine Alpine slopes but in the “melancholy drizzle” of London’s “dirty, slushy streets” in October 1908. Breaking the ice Five athletes who made their mark at London's Winter Games William Grenfell: Channel-crossing chairman The 1st Baron Desborough (1855–1945) was the first chairman of the British Olympic Association, and the head of the British Olympic Council that organised the 1908 Games. Educated at Harrow and Oxford, he was a talented amateur sportsman in his student days. He twice rowed in the Boat Race against Cambridge, and excelled in cricket, fencing and athletics. His wider sporting adventures included climbing the Matterhorn, rowing across the English Channel in an eight, and swimming across the pool at the bottom of Niagara Falls. Florence 'Madge' Syers: England's ice queen The London-born daughter of a property developer, Syers (1881–1917) had revolutionised the sport of figure-skating by entering the World Championships in 1902 – even though there was no dedicated female class. She came second. Syers advocated for more practical dress for skaters, arguing against “flowing skirts and garden-party hats”, proposing that skirts should be short, falling above the ankle, and narrow. She also decried corsets, explaining that “the waist must be free, so that the muscles of the back may have play, and the body be easily rotated from the hips”. Syers also wrote about winter sports, and competed to a high standard in swimming and diving. Sophus Nielsen: free-scoring Scandi strikerThis famously bow-legged footballer (1888–1963), nicknamed ‘Krølben’ (‘curly legs’), netted a staggering 10 goals in one incredible match – Denmark’s 17–1 win over France A team in the 1908 Winter Games semi-finals. That scoreline has never been matched in the Olympics, and the record of one player scoring 10 goals in a game has been repeated only once. One English sporting newspaper joked that many clubs in the Football League “would be glad of a forward who would shoot at goal 10 times in a match, let alone score 10 goals”. Nielsen played for Denmark again in the 1912 Olympics, and later managed the national team. Tom Richards: lion-hearted wallaby This Australian rugby player (1882–1935), who won the 1908 Olympic gold medal with his team – scoring a try in the final – was described by the Daily Telegraph as “the cleverest forward in the world” for his overall performance in the Wallabies’ 1908–09 tour of Britain. The son of a Cornish migrant to Australia, Richards was one of only two players to have played for both Australia and the British Lions – a fact celebrated by the Tom Richards Cup, named in his honour and contested between Australia and the British & Irish Lions between 2001 and 2025. During the First World War he served with the Australian Imperial Force, fighting at Gallipoli and Arras, and was awarded the Military Cross.Ulrich Salchow: Sweden's skating superstar This all-conquering Danish-born Swedish figure-skater (1877–1949) won numerous World and European titles, most of them in the first decade of the 20th century. Sporting Life described his gold medal-winning performance in the Individual event in 1908 as “an astonishing display [that] combined acrobatics with wonderful power and fascinating elegance”. Speaking at the Olympic banquet on 31 October, Salchow said that it was “quite admirable that the skating competition should have been carried out in such a splendid way in a country where for climatic reasons skating cannot be said to be a national sport”. In 1909, Salchow pioneered a move still named after him, which involves the athlete taking off for a jump on the rear inside edge of the skate on one foot and landing on the outside edge of the other. Martin Polley is professor emeritus in history at De Montfort University. His books include The British Olympics: Britain’s Olympic Heritage 1612–2012 (Historic England, 2011) This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
From goat eyelids to bread: history's 12 strangest sex toys
Our ancestors weren’t quite as prudish as we like to think they were. Hilary Mitchell looks at some of the tools past generations have used in the pursuit of sexual pleasure – from steam-powered vibrators to goat eyelids
This article contains explicit descriptions of sex and sexual practices throughout – please use discretion 1. The Hohle Fels phallus Around 28,000 years ago, an effigy of a human penis was left inside Hohle Fels cave, southwestern Germany. Made from fine-grained siltstone, the object was meticulously ground, polished and etched with grooves at both ends. Given its polished surface and true-to-life size, some researchers have suggested it may well have been an early masturbatory aid – or the first-ever dildo, to put it bluntly. However, that was not the artefact’s only possible purpose. When University of Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas J Conard first announced the find in 2005, he suggested that it was also used for knapping flints. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/1D3GB1X-3e0e6f1-e1764240558215.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A man holds a phallus-shaped object in his hands, while a woman points to it. In the background, a group of people are working on excavating the floor of a cave" title="Archaeologists Nicholas Conrad and Petra Kieselbach pose with the Hohle Fels phallus shortly after its discovery in 2005" /> 2. Bread Yes, that’s right. As well as being a staple food in ancient times, bread may also have been used for less salubrious purposes. A passage from the Babylonian Talmud, for instance, contains a description of what should be done to treat a man afflicted by a puncture in his penis. The suggested solution is that a piece of warm barley bread should be placed on the man’s anus to induce ejaculation, proving whether or not the perforation has properly healed. Notably, the ancient Greeks are also said to have used makeshift sex toys known as olisbokollikes: batons of stale bread that were inserted into the anus, using olive oil as lubrication. It may sound far-fetched (and could have just been a rude joke), but the practice is mentioned in the lexicon of Hesychius of Alexandria, compiled in the fifth or sixth century AD. 3. Goat eyelids Texts from ancient China describe penis rings made from a rather unusual material: goat eyelids, often with the eyelashes left intact. These were reportedly used between the third and fifth centuries AD to enhance sexual pleasure and performance by trapping blood within the penis. The elasticity of the goat eyelid was presumably the major selling point, but leaving the eyelashes on suggested they played a part too, potentially providing extra stimulation for both parties. By the 1600s, some Chinese men had upgraded their penis ring technology. These more modern devices were made from materials like jade and ivory, and were ornately carved, often depicting dragons. The dragons’ tongues usually extended to form a protruding nub, which could be placed against the woman’s clitoris to enhance her pleasure during intercourse – a forerunner to today’s clitoral stimulators. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/4GettyImages-1052933946-4c20b47-e1764240604387.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Evidence from ancient China suggests that goats’ eyelids were used to heighten sexual pleasure for both men and women (Image by Getty Images)" title="Evidence from ancient China suggests that goats’ eyelids were used to heighten sexual pleasure for both men and women (Image by Getty Images)" /> Read more | What did the Tudors think was ‘good’ sex? These tips and tricks were key to relationships in the 16th century 4. Apadravya (‘apparatus’) Even if you’re not remotely interested in the history of sex and sexuality, you’ll have likely heard of Vātsyāyana’s third-century AD tome, the Kama Sutra. As well as guidance about living a healthy sex life, the Sanskrit text also extols the virtues of using apadravya (‘apparatus’) to enhance one’s pleasure, describing the use of dildos, penis extenders and other sex aids made of wood, rubber, gold, silver, copper and ivory. Some of the devices are particularly unusual: one is shaped like a flower bud, while another resembles an elephant’s trunk. If that wasn’t enough, the Kama Sutra also contains instructions for creating artificial vaginas made of “hollowed-out pumpkins” and bamboo moistened with oil or ointment. Sounds a bit more effective than bread… 5. The Science Museum’s luxury ivory dildo One of the best-documented early modern sex toys is currently in the care of London’s Science Museum. Labelled “ivory dildo with a contrivance for simulating ejaculation”, the 18th-century device takes the form of an erect penis and includes a small pump and reservoir, seemingly intended to cause fluid to shoot out at an opportune moment. Curiously, the catalogue entry also states that the item was “found in the stuffed seat of a Louis XV armchair, which was in a convent on the banks of the Seine, near Paris”, but how it got there is a mystery sadly lost to the mists of time. 6. George Taylor’s steam-powered ‘Manipulator’ he ivory dildo might have been very novel in many ways, but one crucial thing that it didn’t do was vibrate. So where did the concept of the vibrator come from? The answer, it appears, lies in a steam-powered device from 1869 known as the ‘Manipulator’. Invented by American physician George Taylor, the Manipulator was not a theme park ride as its name suggests, but a large, padded table connected to vibrating ball, which would be positioned against the patient’s pelvic area as they lay on the device. The ball – which was powered by a coal-fired steam engine – provided continuous mechanical stimulation and was described as a “medical vibrating and kneading machine”. The Manipulator was an adaptation of a similar machine created by Swedish physical therapist Gustaf Zander; Taylor merely improved on Zander’s ideas by attaching his ‘Medical Rubbing Apparatus’ to what was, in effect, a stationary steam engine. However, Taylor warned physicians who bought the device that treatment of female pelvic complaints with the Manipulator should be supervised to prevent “overindulgence”. 7. ‘Rubber women’ Rubber, in its natural form, has been known and used for thousands of years, but modern rubber as we know it today was developed much later. In 1839, American inventor Charles Goodyear discovered vulcanisation, a process that made rubber strong, elastic and weather-resistant, paving the way for a wide range of industrial and consumer applications – some of which were later exploited for erotic purposes. Selected accounts suggest that, by the 1850s, manufacturers were producing rubber items that could be interpreted as early forms of sex dolls. These items have been described as ‘rubber women’ or femmes en caoutchouc in French, though they were not explicitly advertised as sex toys. The first mention of manufactured sex dolls in academic literature appears in Iwan Bloch’s The Sexual Life of Our Time (1908), where he claims they were marketed primarily to sailors. However, modern scholarship suggests that Bloch relied heavily on fictional sources and exaggerated advertising, calling into question the book’s accuracy. Given the modern popularity of sex dolls, however, it seems plausible that variations on the theme may have existed in the early 20th century. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/7.Femme-en-Caoutchouc-c16ea73-e1764241535367.png" width="620" height="413" alt="An illustration shows a man holding a rubber woman in his arms" title="A 19th-century French song, La Femme en Caoutchouc (‘The Rubber Woman’), tells the story of a sailor’s ‘relationship’ with a sex doll. The affair does not end well, as indicated by the illustrations adorning this edition of the sheet music" /> Read more | Rich men, reckless affairs and ruined reputations: the scandalous lives of London's 18th-century courtesans 8. Granville’s ‘Percuteur’ Large, steam-powered vibrators like George Taylor’s ‘Manipulator’ were far too bulky and costly for most physicians, so British doctor Joseph Mortimer Granville decided to invent a smaller, spring-driven electromechanical vibrator known as the ‘Percuteur’. After patenting his device in the early 1880s, Granville was adamant that it should only be intended for therapeutic use on men, stating: “I have avoided, and shall continue to avoid, the treatment of women by percussion… simply because I do not want to be hoodwinked… by the vagaries of the hysterical state.” It’s not clear whether fellow doctors heeded Granville’s advice, but it’s important to note that vibrators at the time were viewed primarily as medical instruments rather than sexual devices. Indeed, Dr Carol Queen – curator of the Antique Vibrator Museum in San Francisco – has cautioned against calling these early vibrators ‘sex toys’, saying: “The vibrators were not marketed and sold for this purpose. They were healthcare devices that just happened to cause orgasm if you knew where to apply the vibration… there is no evidence that people who owned or used them knew this… though there’s also no evidence that they didn’t.” 9. Dr Young’s Ideal Rectal Dilators Modern butt plugs did not originate as sex toys, but as treatments for a range of ‘rectal ailments’, including constipation and ‘nervousness’. They were first patented in 1892 and marketed as ‘Dr Young’s Ideal Rectal Dilators’ from 1893 to 1940. They were sold in sets of four, in increasing sizes, and advertisements and surviving sets show that each dilator had an olive or bullet-shaped tip and a flanged base to prevent full insertion – a shape strikingly similar to today’s butt plugs. The devices were made of rubber, and the instructions suggested they be used with either Dr Young’s Piloment lubricant or Vaseline. Like early vibrators, they were marketed as ‘healthcare devices’, but back then – as now – the human anus contained a great deal of nerve endings, meaning inserting the dilators into the rectum will have caused many ‘patients’ to experience sexual pleasure. To paraphrase Dr Carol Queen, there’s no evidence to suggest that people did use these dilators during sex – but, equally, there’s nothing to say they didn’t. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/9Credit-CreepyCuteTreasuresEtsyDr-Youngs-Rectal-Dilators-7f08bac-e1764241593117.jpeg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A set of Dr Young’s Ideal Rectal Dilators. The box’s instructions suggest that the user should keep their chosen dilator inserted for “half an hour” to achieve the best results (Image by CreepyCuteTreasures/Etsy)" title="A set of Dr Young’s Ideal Rectal Dilators. The box’s instructions suggest that the user should keep their chosen dilator inserted for “half an hour” to achieve the best results (Image by CreepyCuteTreasures/Etsy)" /> 10. Louis B Hawley’s Patented Penis Stiffener In 1907, US inventor Louis B Hawley sprang into action to quite literally support men with erection problems. Hawley’s patented ‘surgical appliance’ took the form of an external splint to keep the penis erect, with a covering to help hold it in place. Unfortunately, there are no first-hand accounts of how comfortable the device would have been for both parties, though given later patent writers’ critiques about its design being bulky and awkward, it’s probably fair to speculate that the answer may well have been “not very”. However, this early prototype did pave the way for more modern penis ‘stiffeners’, most notably Dr F Brantley Scott’s inflatable device, which was first sold in the 1970s and made up of two inflatable silicone cylinders with a reservoir and pump. That, in turn, led to the advent of surgically implanted and inflatable prostheses, which are still helping people enjoy robust and vigorous sex lives today. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/10GettyImages-837400890-547dfa0-e1764241628703.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Physicians have long sought new ways to treat erectile dysfunction – including the creation of inflatable prostheses (Image by Getty Images)" title="Physicians have long sought new ways to treat erectile dysfunction – including the creation of inflatable prostheses (Image by Getty Images)" /> Read more | Queen Victoria’s voracious appetite for food and sex 11. Hand-cranked ‘massagers’ The earlier question of “but did people really use these things to masturbate?” raises its head again as we look at hand-cranked vibrators like Dr Macuara’s Blood Circulator, which was sold throughout the early 1900s and could deliver 6,000 vibrations per minute. At this time, masturbation was widely viewed as shameful, and ‘obscene’ content was illegal in the US under the 1873 Comstock Act. This meant that vibrators could not be openly advertised as sexual products. However, according to sex toy historian Hallie Lieberman, “it’s impossible to deny that sexual uses for vibrators weren’t known”. The makers of the Bebout Vibrator, for example, made their target market very clear in a 1908 advert, describing their device as “gentle, soothing, invigorating and refreshing [and] invented by a woman who knows a woman's needs”. Interestingly, many of these hand-cranked devices came with dildo-like attachments – though these were ‘officially’ intended to treat uterine complaints. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/11-2RX45AW-0c62c65-e1764241663308.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Dr Macuara’s Blood Circulator could deliver 6,000 vibrations a minute – but it was never explicitly marketed as a sex toy (Image by Alamy)" title="Dr Macuara’s Blood Circulator could deliver 6,000 vibrations a minute – but it was never explicitly marketed as a sex toy (Image by Alamy)" /> 12. The Oster Stim-U-Lax This scalp massage device, marketed to barbers, promised to deliver “several thousand rotating-patting Swedish-type massage movements per minute” via the operator’s fingers. But it wasn’t only used on scalps. A frank first-hand account by US sex educator Betty Dodgson (1929–2020) describes using an Oster Stim-U-Lax with her lover in 1966, explaining: “One day he was getting a haircut when his barber ended with a scalp massage using a vibrating machine that was strapped onto the back of his hand. Grant got the bright idea that it would be great for sex. On our next date, Grant brought out his new toy for us to try. Although I wasn't all that crazy about getting off on a mechanical device, my motto is to always try everything at least once.” It was, according to Dodgson’s account, extremely effective, and led her to become a keen advocate for vibrators from that point onwards. Dodgson is even credited with helping to bring such sex toys into the mainstream, promoting devices such as the now-ubiquitous Hitachi Magic Wand, first marketed in 1968.
From a lion-taming lightweight to the Muscular Maids: 5 Victorian boxing sensations you need to know about
Sarah Elizabeth Cox introduces the pugilists who punched their way into Britons’ affections during the dying days of bare-knuckle prize-fighting
The lion-taming lightweight How a West Indian warrior became a knock-out success in London’s East End Picture the scene. Two boxers walk out before an uproarious crowd at the Sebright Music Hall in the London district of Hackney and “received a welcome of extraordinary character”. “The house rose en masse when the men appeared on the stage,” declared the Sporting Life of 3 January 1888, “and before they were allowed to place themselves into position, had to bow their acknowledgements over and over again. The place was crammed to suffocation.” The late Victorian era was a boom-time for British boxing. Across London in the 1880s, audiences could watch gloved exhibitions, tournaments and matches every night of the week. And few pugilists drew crowds quite as large as one of the men who stepped onto that Hackney stage back in January 1888: Hezekiah Moscow. Moscow has recently been lapping up the audience’s acclaim once again, in the TV drama A Thousand Blows, inspired in part by his story. So who was this pugilist who made headlines in the 1880s and again in 2025? Instant impact We know that Moscow was born in 1862 in the West Indies – although the 1891 census doesn’t give us any more detail about exactly where – and that he arrived in London at the age of 19. It was then, soon after setting up home in Britain’s capital city, that he began to box. Moscow clearly made quite an impression – so much so that his fellow fighters at the Blue Coat Boy boxing saloon in the impoverished heart of the East End soon started calling him ‘Ching Hook’. This nickname appears to have been inspired both by Moscow’s abilities with his fists and his ethnicity – sporting newspapers from 1882 referred to him as a black Chinese man (we know that east Asian indentured servants were present in Jamaica, Trinidad and Guyana in the years before Moscow’s birth). Moscow struck up a close friendship with Jamaican mariner and established boxer Alexander Munroe. The two sparred white opponents – and one another – in east London’s pubs and beyond, and Moscow gained a reputation as a talented lightweight fighter. England had no segregated championship for black fighters. But that didn’t stop the growing number of Caribbean-born, African-American and black British boxers based in big cities such as London and Liverpool vying to be acclaimed the (unofficial) black champion. Moscow was occasionally billed as such in the sporting newspapers, and would go on to become a respected figure in the wider boxing world, managing gyms in London and training boxers in the Midlands. Read more | A Thousand Blows: the real history behind the Victorian boxing drama His life outside boxing was equally eventful. As well as a formidable fighter, he was also a lion-tamer, and was hired by the East London Aquarium to perform with lions, wolves, bears and a hyena. This wasn’t without controversy: in 1884, Moscow faced charges of cruelly treating the bears, after an RSPCA inspector observed him striking one with a whip. However, the case was dismissed and the inspector charged with perjury. In 1890, Moscow married Mary Maddin, a white woman, and they had a child whom they named Eliza. However, their relationship would be short-lived. In 1892, a decade after arriving in London, Moscow left his lodgings and vanished. Mary sought an answer to his whereabouts from the boxing fraternity, but her search was in vain. Hezekiah Moscow’s disappearance is shrouded in mystery, but there is evidence that he travelled to New York. The once popular boxer was supposedly spotted in the US city years later by a former friend. He was, so the witness reported, working as a dock guard, “half-starved and friendless”. The rise of the Muscular Maids from Mexico They blazed a trail for female fighters – and the press loved them for it “The fighting fizzle fever seems to be spreading. The ladies have caught it.” So wrote weekly sports newspaper the Cricket and Football Field on 24 March 1888. The “ladies” to whom the paper referred were a pair of black boxers who criss-crossed the countryside fighting in fairground shows. They were known as the Sisters Mills. So, what do we know about these two boxers? In advertising for a performance at Sebright Music Hall in 1888 the Sisters Mills were named as Violet and Rosaline and promoted as “The Muscular Maids from Mexico”. Elsewhere they were described as Creole and black. A Police Gazette woodcut image, published in 1890, shows them to be of shorter stature, sporting boxing gloves and lace-trimmed dresses. Whether they were really from Mexico, or even sisters, is unknown. The pair were promoted by Alf Ball, a top middleweight boxer and travelling showman (see box 3). In the 1880s, the Sisters performed against each other as a novelty act in Ball’s fairground boxing booth. They never fought competitively (Ball would not let other women challenge ‘his’ fighters) but were admired for their skill by boxing reporters. Two years after their first newspaper mention, the Sisters vanished from event write-ups and advertising. We have just flashes of detail about these women – likely England’s first black female boxers – and then they disappear. Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn't know about Victorian Britain Lights! Camera! Knock-out! How multi-talented Alf Ball turned bare-fist fighting into an art form It was the classic mismatch. In 1889, a travelling showman – weighing in at just 11 stone – stepped into the ring with Peter Jackson, the world black heavyweight champion. The mighty Jackson demolished his opponent in front of a frenzied audience at Astley’s Amphitheatre in central London. But the plucky smaller man – Alfred Ball – still impressed the crowd. In fact, over the course of his life, Ball turned impressing crowds into a way of life. Today, Ball is best remembered as a pioneer of early cinema, wowing audiences in the late 1890s with his presentations using a bioscope (film projector). Yet in the 1880s, he was one of London’s best-known middleweights, with a good claim to being English middleweight champion. Like many boxers of his generation, he competed in bare-fist competitions and gloved matches. He also toured with a troupe of boxers who sparred with each other or took on local challengers. Ball was born in Hull in 1864, the son of a travelling auctioneer. From his late teens he toured fairgrounds with a shooting gallery before moving into the boxing world. In the 1880s, Ball’s pavilion, or ‘Professor Ball’s School of Boxers’, was based in Deptford, London, with the Balls living in caravans among a community of travelling showmen. The 1890s started with Ball performing with rival Alf Mitchell at the Sebright Music Hall, the pair billed as “Muscular Middleweight Marvels” and “Popular Professors of Pugilistic Prowess”. Ball continued to tour with his boxing booth but always had a finger on the pulse of what the public wanted in their entertainment, bringing in female boxers and “the smallest married couple in the world” at fairgrounds and music halls. His shows also featured a boxing “lion”, which was actually a puma. “Alf Ball is too well known to need any introduction,” wrote the Music Hall and Theatre Review on 17 April 1903. “As a showman, Alf Ball has left no stone unturned to provide the public with superior entertainment at a nominal charge.” Ball died in 1926. Today, his great-great grandsons continue to entertain the masses in the Ball name, running Clacton Pier in Essex. In a nod to the past, their arcade contains a shooting range and a boxing machine. Scrapping in the house of God The unholy tale of the middleweight who had a fight in a chapel It was one of the most notorious bouts of the Victorian era. In 1882, a boxer named Sugar Goodson was arrested for taking part in a prize-fight – in, of all places, a chapel. And, if that wasn’t bad enough, bets were laid on the communion table. Goodson is portrayed by Stephen Graham in A Thousand Blows as one of the last relics of the bare-knuckle era, a middle-aged fighter who refuses to conform to the new rules for boxing. There is some truth to the story, although the real Goodson was only 26 at the time the show is set. Born in 1856 off Brick Lane, Goodson started boxing young. In 1881 he was hospitalised with smallpox. In 1882, minus the sight in one eye, he started running boxing nights with his brother Thomas ‘Treacle’ Goodson at the Blue Coat Boy. Then came the scandalous bout in a chapel. Fighting in a church made for juicy newspaper copy. “The fact that the hands of the combatants in the prize-combat are adorned with gloves is not invariably a guarantee that there will not be savage and desperate fighting,” wrote the North Devon Journal on 6 April 1882 after the chapel bout. Read more | Cricket, cocaine and cocoa houses: 5 ways Victorians spent their free time Following the fight, Goodson and his opponent, Jack Hicks, were charged with “unlawfully committing a breach of the peace by engaging in a prize fight”. The trial was a sensation. Goodson swore he had been wearing proper gloves for the match. He also claimed that the Queensberry Rules – which had come into force in 1867, in an unsuccessful bid to end bare-knuckle fighting – had been followed. The police and press reported otherwise, but Goodson was let off with a warning not to fight without gloves in the future. Two years later he was arrested again for bare-fist fighting in a barn, but he followed a career as a gloved boxer, too. At a compact 5ft 5¾ and weighing 11 stone, Goodson once entered a heavyweight competition while competing as a middleweight. Many boxers of Goodson’s generation had tragic ends, with poverty, alcohol, criminality and brain damage from years of being punched taking their toll. Goodson escaped the worst, becoming a successful publican in the 1890s. When he died in 1917, he left a decent sum of money to his widow. Goodson’s obituaries remembered him as the man who fought in a chapel. A bare-knuckle boozer The champagne lifestyle of the last icon of Victorian boxing There was no boxing board of control in the 1880s – and, therefore, no official titles. But Jem Smith was generally regarded to have been the English heavyweight champion from 1884–91, and the last champion of the bare-knuckle era. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/08/GettyImages-1277842318-4b52eea.jpg" width="1020" height="681" alt="A muscular man stands topless and in long white trousers, with his arms tensed and fists clenched. Around him, there is writing, including his name JEM SMITH and his titles" title="The muscular heavyweight Jem Smith, pictured in his prime. Smith’s pre-fight training included running, swimming and quaffing a glass of port for lunch (Image by Getty Images)" /> At 5ft 8½ and 13 stone fighting fit, Smith had an extraordinarily muscular physique. Yet he did not defend his title regularly and, like many boxers, had a tendency to pack on more than 50lb between fights. Details of his diet and training regime, published by the Sporting Life newspaper in 1889 while Smith was preparing for a fight against Peter Jackson, make for an entertaining read. A low carbohydrate diet of chops, watercress and eggs will look familiar to athletes today, as will the intense cardio workouts: swimming, running in thick flannels and a balaclava, punching a hanging ball and training with Indian Clubs. However, Smith’s daily liquid intake in the weeks before a big fight – sherry for breakfast, a glass of bitter and a glass of port for lunch, plus champagne in the afternoon with his friends – probably wouldn’t earn a modern coach’s seal of approval. Across his career, Smith was often criticised for his performances or the antics of his supporters. During his well-publicised big-money match with Jackson, Smith was disqualified for using a heel trip, against the Queensberry Rules. In earlier bare-fist bouts, his friends had allegedly interfered in the match. Yet after his death at 68 in 1931, Smith was remembered in newspapers as the last great bare-knuckle champion, a man who fought to keep boxing the way it had been in its ‘golden age’. “The death of Jem Smith, twice champion pugilist of England, is rather a surprising reminder that the days of bare fists and the grass ring are still a matter of memory,” said the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer on 12 September 1931. “The battles of his craft… belong to the era of coaches rather than the age of aeroplanes.” Sarah Elizabeth Cox researches the wrestlers and boxers of late Victorian London and was historical adviser to A Thousand Blows, streaming on Disney+. Her first book will be published by Duckworth in autumn 2026 This article was first published in the August 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Swings and roundabouts: a history of Britain's playgrounds
We all have childhood memories of playgrounds. But what does the evolution of outdoor play in Britain tell us about the experience of being young over the past 200 years? Jon Winder serves up a history of sandpits, bombsites and battles with cars
A pub might seem a strange place to begin a history of Britain’s playgrounds. Yet in June 1858, Charles Dickens delivered a speech at the London Tavern in Bishopsgate Street that, he hoped, would transform the lives of children across the imperial capital. As the guests dined on seasonal delicacies and fine wines, Dickens gave an impassioned plea on behalf of the Playground and Recreation Society, an organisation that had been established just a few months earlier with the express aim of providing “playgrounds for poor children in populous places”. To the accompaniment of music laid on by the band of the 1st Life Guards, the celebrated author extolled the benefits that having a “playground near to their own dwellings where they knew their children would be safe” conferred on parents. “I venture to assert that there can be no physical health without play; and there can be no efficient and satisfactory work without play; that there can be no sound and wholesome thought without play,” he declared. It was a powerful argument, and one to which Dickens’ audience evidently listened – for, by the end of the following year, the Recreation Grounds Act had made its way into law. Henceforth, local authorities across the land would be allowed to create and own playgrounds for children and young people. It marked a turning point in British children’s access to play. Or did it? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-1300568438cmyk-2620726.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white photograph showing. group of children playing in a playground on a concrete housing estate" title="Children play in London’s Lisson Green estate in 1973. Since the Victorian era, playgrounds have been seen as vital to young Britons’ physical and moral development (Image by Getty Images)" /> The new legislation – and Dickens’ high-profile support – could have been a Big Bang moment for the playground movement in Britain. But, despite celebrity endorsement, political backing and widespread publicity, by 1860 the Playground Society had collapsed in a heap. It had amassed considerable debts – largely from putting on extravagant fundraising dinners. More damningly still, it had failed to create a single space in which London’s children could play. Read more | From slums to suburbs: Britain’s council house revolution The movement was hardly in full swing elsewhere, either. While dedicated play space was set aside in Salford and Manchester in the 1840s, unaccompanied children were barred from entering some city parks – notably Saltaire Park in Bradford – altogether. This sorry Dickensian tale contrasts starkly with the state of play in modern Britain. Fast-forward to 2025 and you’ll find more than 26,000 children’s playgrounds in cities, towns and villages across the UK. And while the best efforts of Britain’s great novelist failed to save the Playground Society from financial disaster, today more than £85m is spent on maintaining playgrounds each and every year. No one’s arguing that playground provision in modern Britain is perfect. Far from it. In fact, it’s a live debate as to whether playgrounds remain the best places for our children to be playing in the 21st-century city at all. However, one thing can’t be doubted. And that’s that to tell the story of the British playground is also to shine a light on what it’s meant to be a child in this country over the past 200 years. Pollution and disease Of course, child’s play didn’t begin with the Victorians. Archaeologists have discovered rag balls from ancient Egypt and sculptures of playing children from ancient Greece. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s remarkable Children’s Games (1560) depicts more than 200 children playing in 80 different ways. We know that most Victorian working-class children played outside, often in the streets close to home. Although children and their families faced many difficulties at this time – including overcrowding, pollution and disease – finding places to play and friends to play with was rarely an issue. As more children spent their day in education rather than work, there was also more time to play after school, too. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-3425260cmyk-WL-2ead018.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Two children ride bikes on a fake road" title="Children learn the highway code in a traffic playground in north London, 1947. Playgrounds loomed large in postwar town planners’ thinking – a fact that was reflected in their growing sophistication (Image by Getty Images)" /> And yet social elites and urban reformers increasingly imagined the street as a bad place to play, long before cars were common on British roads. For William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, poor city children had a “miserable subsistence” and their play was “curtailed to the running gutter”. For housing reformer Octavia Hill, children learnt “lessons of evil” while playing in streets and alleys. In response to this growing sense of disquiet, the elaborately named Metropolitan Public Garden, Boulevard and Playground Association was founded in 1882 and became the leading advocate for children’s playgrounds in the late 19th century. But could it succeed where the Playground Society had failed? The association was concerned by the “pale faces, stunted figures, debilitated forms, narrow chests, and all the outward signs of a low vital power” that it saw in urban working-class children. To address these alleged physical imperfections, it set out to create “a children’s playground divided into two portions, one for boys and one for girls, both supplied with gymnastic apparatus” within a quarter of a mile of every working-class home. Strong and healthy children would, after all, create more effective and efficient factory workers, soldiers and sailors. By the early 1890s, the association had spent more than £14m in today’s money on upwards of 50 open spaces, including 20 with children’s gymnasiums. In Southwark, Little Dorrit’s Playground – named after the eponymous star of one of Charles Dickens’ most celebrated novels – cost the equivalent of £2.4m to buy and kit out. Such spaces bore little resemblance to the playgrounds we know today. The separate areas for boys and girls reflected the inequitable gender norms of the time. And they were fitted with equipment that we would probably associate with Olympic gymnastics, including parallel bars, vaulting horses and gymnastic rings. At Spa Fields playground in Clerkenwell, a large gravel area doubled as a parade ground for local army reservists. Whatever the expectations of adults, children seem to have enjoyed using such spaces. On a visit to a playground in 1896, the campaigner Isabella Holmes described a boy “whose clothes were literally dropping to pieces… and he twisted himself about on the handle swings, putting his toes through the handles, and performing all sorts of gyrations which many a well-fed boy, clad in the best of flannels, would have given his all to be able to accomplish”. While children had been busy playing, by the early 20th century adult attitudes to playground design were beginning to change. For the author Annesley Kenealy, writing in 1907, the “pitilessly meagre surroundings” of most children’s gymnasiums did little to protect children from the “unwholesome sights and sounds of a sordid, huckstering, fetid slum street”. Better playgrounds were needed. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/12079707-cmyk-WL-dfaf616.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="6 children play in the wreckage of a building. The boy in the front is looking directly into the camera, smiling" title="Children in the rubble of demolished houses in Hulme, Manchester, 1965. One study found that many youngsters preferred to play beyond the playground – even if there was one available to them (Image by Mary Evans)" /> Not fit to fight? Such calls coincided with concern during the First World War about unfit conscripts and juvenile delinquency on the home front. Wartime investigations into the health and wellbeing of mothers and children concluded that a playground close to home was essential for a child’s proper physical and moral development. Voluntary organisations, philanthropists, municipal parks departments and commercial manufacturers all responded enthusiastically in the interwar period. The National Playing Fields Association became an important advocate and funder of children’s playgrounds across the country. With King George V as its patron, and regular funding appeals on BBC Radio, the NPFA had considerable success in promoting the playground cause. This cause was given greater urgency by the growing number of children being killed by cars. In fact, such was the death toll that street play was increasingly regarded as unacceptable. One coroner investigating the death of three toddlers observed that it was “not fair to drivers that parents should allow their children to play in the street”. The NPFA even campaigned against the temporary closure of streets to enable safer play, preferring instead to encourage children into playgrounds. By the 1930s, there were nearly 50 playgrounds managed by the London County Council in the capital, with 26 in Manchester and many more elsewhere. The burgeoning demand for equipment saw manufacturing companies adapt their production lines. The entrepreneur and inventor who had the greatest impact on this development was Charles Wicksteed. Read more | “Leisure was built into the whole shopping experience” | Annie Gray on the history of the high street On the back of earlier commercial success, Wicksteed created a public park in his home town of Kettering in Northamptonshire. Disappointed that so few children visited, he decided to make it a more exciting place to play. And so he designed a raft of products inspired by Edwardian amusement park rides in Great Yarmouth and Blackpool. These included the joy wheel (an early roundabout), the jazz swing (commonly known as a plank swing today), the ocean wave (witch’s hat) and large wooden slides. A progressive liberal, Wicksteed hoped to create healthy, happy and free childhoods. Girls and boys, children and adults were all welcome to play together in the Wicksteed Park playground. Writing in 1929, he suggested that “the poor little gutter-children with all their hardships, playing with mud in freedom, are far happier than many well-to-do children under the perfect control and sad dullness and weariness of a too-much-ordered life”. His playground equipment was designed to be so robust that children could play with it however they liked. And we’re not just talking British children. Soon, municipalities from across the globe were placing orders with the Northamptonshire entrepreneur. In fact, by the late 1930s, Wicksteed’s company had equipped more than 4,000 playgrounds – from South Africa to Hong Kong and Venezuela to the tiny South Atlantic island of St Helena. Wicksteed’s advocacy and wider shifts in social values meant that few playgrounds were segregated by gender by the late 1930s. But playgrounds now looked the same, no matter where they were in the world. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-1414384444cmyk-aa9a638.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Children play on a large wooden climbing frame in a park. In the foreground, two children play in a sandpit" title="Children at play in St John’s Wood, 1962. While many playgrounds now sought to promote creativity and self-expression, sandpits (like the one in the foreground) remained a perennial favourite (Image by Getty Images)" /> Natural evolution Back in Britain, swings, slides and roundabouts became an essential feature of efforts to redevelop British towns and cities in the mid-20th century. Slum clearance schemes, including those in Caryl Gardens in Liverpool and Quarry Hill in Leeds, positioned the playground at the centre of new blocks of flats. Sites requisitioned or damaged during the Second World War were also put back into playful use. Paddington Recreation Ground had been repurposed as a municipal piggery during the war, producing more than 300 tonnes of meat. It was reopened in 1948 by Field Marshal Montgomery with manufactured play equipment, a paddling pool and a sandpit. Town planners working on Plymouth’s reconstruction designed a network of more than 100 playgrounds in public parks and on bomb-damaged sites across the city. The playground explosion may have been a big hit with children but, to many adults, it was a little dull. In fact, in the eyes of some commentators, Britain’s new wave of standardised playgrounds – with their uniform climbing frames and stark tarmac surfaces – were “as bleak as barrack squares and just as boring”. A postwar movement of progressive educationalists, landscape architects and artists, headed by Lady Allen of Hurtwood, envisaged a more fulfilling future for Britain’s outdoor play spaces – and it was one that promoted creativity, self-expression and contact with the natural world. As an experiment, bombsites were converted into adventure playgrounds so that children could build with scrap materials, dig in the mud, nurse fires and tend small gardens. Sculptures, decommissioned steam rollers and immobilised trucks were meant to inspire make believe. Commando playgrounds incorporated tree trunks, suspended tyres and concrete pipes to provide “not only a free and varied outlet for energy but a spur to imagination and invention”. Landscape playgrounds had undulations, banks, trees and bushes as a more naturalistic setting for creative play. In a handful of cities, traffic playgrounds provided playful amusement and taught children about road safety. Children’s responses to these play spaces were seldom recorded. Instead, we must look to the work of sociologists in the 1960s and 1970s to get a sense of how playgrounds were used. One study of nearly 6,000 children found that swings and roundabouts primarily acted as a meeting point for friends and play mates, who then went on to play beyond the playground. Another study showed that more children preferred sandpits and paddling pools over manufactured equipment. Overtaken by the car These doubts about the value of the playground were reinforced by events in the later 20th century. Funding cuts meant that local authorities increasingly found it difficult to maintain play spaces. In 1973, Colin James, the bishop of Stepney, felt that many councils had got their priorities badly wrong, suggesting that “it is not through malice or evil intent I am sure, but they have been overtaken by the motorcar and other matters so that play provision has been left behind”. In the 1980s and 1990s, as social housing and state-run industries were privatised, the children’s playground remained a publicly owned and communally funded place for play – although not without its share of problems. Tabloid and broadsheet newspapers reported on the risk of parasitic infection from the snapping pincers of toxocara canis (dog roundworm) and the threat posed by paedophiles. Further funding cuts meant that many playgrounds became derelict, with the journal Play Times even running a monthly award for the worst playground in the country. Read more | What were the games and pastimes enjoyed by Tudor children? National government has rarely been interested in play provision. But in 2008, £235m was allocated to local authorities across England to improve playground provision. Accompanying guidance, called Design for Play, encouraged councils and designers to think more creatively about play provision. However, the implementation of policies of austerity from 2010 saw funding and guidance withdrawn. Despite periods of neglect, the playground remains an everyday feature of British urban life. This is hardly a surprise given our almost universal – and often nostalgic – experience of using them. Children still enjoy digging in sandpits, the rhythm of the swings, and the trepidation of scaling tall climbing structures. But we must not let this nostalgia mask problems with the playground concept. As the campaign group Make Space for Girls has shown, there is still much to do to ensure public spaces are welcoming to all children and young people. The obsession with playgrounds, often tucked away in the corner of a park, might even be seen as a distraction from wider efforts to create child-friendly towns and cities in which children rather than cars dominate our streets. The long history of the playground helps us to understand how we arrived in the present. But it should not stand in the way of efforts to create inclusive and humane urban environments for the future. Ropes, pulls and a joy wheel Five fixtures of the British playground. But which was your favourite? 1. Swings Children and adults have long swung from ropes tied to the branch of a tree, while ingenious Victorian children fashioned rope swings from lamp posts. More formal swings were often a feature of travelling fairs and circuses. In the 1890s, bylaws for Victoria Park in London limited the cost to 1d a go. 2. Roundabouts Roundabouts evolved from an Edwardian amusement park ride called the joy wheel, and were found in both Great Yarmouth and Blackpool from around 1913. The ride was a polished mechanical disc that used high speed and centrifugal force to dislodge its adult riders. Charles Wicksteed marketed a joy wheel from the 1920s. Costing £40 and made from metal tubes, it was self-propelled, smaller and included plenty of places to hold on. 3. Sandpits German educator Fredrich Froebel promoted the use of indoor sandpits in the classroom from the 1820s. Sand first appeared in Victoria Park, London in 1893 when the park superintendent reported “a novel mode of enjoyment has been provided for the little children of the East End in the form of a sea-sand pit which is apparently much appreciated”. 4. Climbing frames Victorian gymnasiums for children and adults included wooden frames that supported ladders, ropes and poles for climbing. Climbing frames really took off from the 1960s as manufacturers experimented with new materials, including Playstyle’s ‘playcubes’ which comprised a series of interconnected plastic polyhedrons. 5. Slides Slides became a common playground feature in the early 20th century. Initially made from wood, they were soon constructed from metal with safety railings at the top. In the 1920s, a grand ‘joy slide’ was installed in St James’s Churchyard, Bermondsey, paid for by Arthur Carr, owner of the nearby Peek Freans biscuit factory. Dr Jon Winder is a historian of modern Britain at the University of Liverpool This article was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine