31/05/2011

Available for over a year

Tom Holland talks to a listener whose grandmother volunteered to deliver the post during the General Strike much to the disgust of her husband who was a postman. He talks to Dr Sue Bruley from the University of Portsmouth about the role of women in the dispute - as strike-breakers and supporters. In our game of geographical chance and historical skill, 'Double Top Domesday', Professor Sir Barry Cunliffe - arguably Britain's leading historian - takes aim with a dart at a map of central Southern England and ends up in a farmyard not far from Basingstoke. Tom Holland considers what that, and the rest of Britain's landscape actually looked like 4,500 years ago in response to a listener's question about what the area around Stonehenge looked like when it was being built. Tom talks to Professor Tom Williamson at the University of East Anglia who explores the current debate about the so-called, pre-historic 'wildwood'. Finally, in Bridlington, Martin Ellis - Curator at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery - views an exhibition of holiday snaps taken between 1920 and 1960 by a company that employed cameramen to take pictures of holidaymakers. Their legacy is now a fabulous social history resource. Producer: Nick Patrick A Pier Production for BBC Radio 4.