Oil Drum Lane

  This weblog  is mostly  a scrolling collection of notes  on offbeat real and imagined places and the events and people that shaped them. The content wanders but is biased toward London and the surrounding counties. It is formatted for reading on a phone, so I try to keep the word count down to a 10-15 minute read.    To see if there is anything that interests you, check the 'Contents' index above; all the posts are linked from there.      A note on methodology. I read a lot: books, articles and (thanks to the British Library) academic papers.  If theories conflict, I usually go with the most popular or credible one, as the word count doesn't allow me to detail the alternatives. I use AI only  as a glorified search engine, to spot egregious errors and for quick checks on dates, etc.  Why Oil Drum Lane?  The boomers among you might recall the TV comedy 'Steptoe & Son'.  They were rag-and-bone men who lived and wor...

This short post is about how people relate to the places in their lives. It’s complicated. What exactly are they relating to? And should we care? Many people don’t; each home, town or holiday destination is just a staging post in a life which mainly revolves around their work, family, or other connections. At the outset, I should stress that this isn’t about nationalism or patriotism; those are a different kettle of fish. See my older post here: Link:   Your Land is My Land Lots of people write about lots of places in lots of contexts; some are passing through, some with feet rooted in the soil, while others are seeking refuge. Most express a claim of belonging somewhere, often with a sense of pride, often based purely on association. It’s a bit like a football supporter being proud of a team which they will never, never play for. [Geek Note # 1] In London, around 40% of the people were born outside the country, and many more come from places within Britain, so it’s probably ...

The King of the Romans Berkhamsted Castle has a rich history. It was built on the spot where Edgar Aethling gave up the English throne to the Normans, Thomas Becket (probably) enlarged it, Prince Louis of France besieged it, and the Black Prince owned it. By the 17th c. it was derelict and had been plundered for stone. What was left became the first ‘listed’ building in Britain when the builders of the adjacent railway proved an even more potent threat.  It was a proper castle; not like the cramped, desperate redoubts of the Marcher Lords or the later efforts,  constructed for show long after cannons made the old walls redundant,  with stained glass windows and goldfish in the moat,  Berkhamsted Castle Ruins After Louis had been seen off, it passed into the hands of Richard of Cornwall, a character who had popped up in the story of several of my other favourite castles. He was referred to as the King of the Romans. I was intrigued not least because I didn't think Rom...

Would you rather meet the King / Stormzy (delete as applicable) in real life, or at Madame Tussauds? Would you rather glimpse Britain's pre-history in a glass case in a museum, or climb on it?  You can do that with Britain's hillforts, and unlike Stonehenge, they are free and not fenced off.  John Constable said that his famous painting of Stonehenge was intended to capture something in the air that "carries you back to beyond all historical records into the obscurity of a totally unknown period". That is where I wanted to go, and I reckoned that hillforts were a better way of getting there, so  I visited dozens of them before wading through dense archaeology papers in the British Library (did you know that fossilised snail shells were used to date these things!), scaling a mound of local landscape history books and tiptoeing through prehistory nerd websites.  Stonehenge: Constable: 1836  This is a  much-revised version of an earlier post I wrote ...