Writing
I love to write - so far I’ve written five books and dozens of articles, essays and blog entries. My current work in progress includes a book on the history of London’s 19th-century Spanish community and a history of one of the most interesting houses in the lost Warwickshire hamlet of Oldnall End.
You can keep up to date with my current projects at my Oldnall End One-Place Study and at my Hispanic Britain blog, or read more about these and some of my favourite past projects below.
Some of my favourite writing projects:
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What did the Edwardians know about Spain, and what was that knowledge worth? The Edwardians and the Making of a Modern Spanish Obsession draws on a vast store of largely unstudied primary source material to investigate Spain’s place in the turn-of-the-century British popular imagination.
Set against a background of unprecedented emotional, economic and industrial investment in Spain, the book traces the extraordinary transformation that took place in British knowledge about the country and its diverse regions, languages and cultures between the tercentenary of the Spanish Armada in 1888 and the outbreak of World War I twenty-six years later.
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This beautiful illustrated book was commissioned by the Fundacion Mondariz-Balneario. I was given access to the hotel’s wonderful Edwardian visitor books and used these, together with Galician, English and Spanish archives to reconstruct the story of an early experiment in package tourism to an unfamiliar corner of Spain.
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This essay reconstructs the story of the forgotten Earl’s Court Spanish Exhibition of 1889. Launched by Spanish expats who wanted to promote their country as a modern, progressive business partner for Britain, it was taken over by British businessmen who were mostly interested in drinking sherry and getting rich. The result was a spectacular (but very interesting!) failure.
What happened next? Read the follow-up blog!
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A One-Place Study delves deeply into the history of a single building, street, place or institution. I’m researching the lost Warwickshire hamlet of Oldnall End, part of the large rural parish of Berkswell. As well as combing archival sources to discover Oldnall End’s stories, I’m walking and photographing its lanes, fields, and footpaths.
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I write this (occasional!) blog to share interesting stories from my research into the connections between Britain and Spain during the long nineteenth century. Recent entries track down a community of Catalan cork-cutters in London, and explore how Ancestry’s freemason records helped me uncover a previously unknown London Spanish business network.
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I researched, designed, and produced this pamphlet, which traces the history of The Place to Pause and Breathe in High Bonnybridge near Falkirk in Central Scotland. This was a desk-based rather than archival project, due to the distance and a small budget, but it’s a great example of what can be achieved when resources are limited.
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Augurio Perera has long been an enigmatic figure. He and his friend Major Harry Gem are credited as pioneers in the creation of lawn tennis, but while Gem’s life and career are well researched, Perera’s biography was a mystery. This working paper reconstructs his life and work, from his origins in Manresa (Catalonia) to his work as head of his family business in Birmingham, his time in elegant Leamington Spa, and his final years in Italy.