18/08/2015

Available for over a year

Tom Holland is joined in the studio by the historical consultant for Horrible Histories, Greg Jenner. Helen Castor is on the South Downs with geographer Dr Geoffrey Mead who has been researching responses to the housing crisis of the 1920s. Close to Brighton, he has discovered an informal settlement - one that was maybe once described as a 'shanty-town', but was built by the aspirational middle-classes who could find £10 to buy a plot of land. Dr Adrian Green from the University of Durham explains that these communities, built on what geographers describe as marginal or non-productive land, were commonplace right the way back to the middle ages when people would move to be closer to work. Professor Sharon Ruston from Lancaster University is in Warrington, where she highlights the role of the town's dissenting academy - and the work of Joseph Priestley in particular - in promoting the teaching of science to a community of scholars that were barred from Oxford and Cambridge because of their radical religious beliefs and who, she argues, were the intellectual driving force of the industrial revolution. Tom Holland visits Sheffield to talk to research student Dr Hannah Probert about the significance of facial hair in Roman times. Producer: Nick Patrick A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.