Category: Geography & Environment

King James I & VI (1566-1625) tried his hand at sericulture on 42 acres in central London in the early 1600s, but he was supplied with the wrong type of mulberry bush for silkworms. This and the unfavourable weather doomed his efforts to produce silk. The land, on which there was a large house acquired by the Duke of Buckingham in 1698, came into the possession of King George III (1738-1820) in 1762. This would become the now world-famous Buckingham Palace under the reign of his son, King George IV (1762-1830).

Queen Victoria (1819-1901) was the first monarch to take up residence there, which she did on acceding to the throne in 1837. The balcony from which royal groups wave to the crowd on special occasions was the idea of her husband, Prince Albert (1819-61).

The Palace, known affectionately as ‘Buck House’, has 775 rooms and is built around a quadrangle. The ballroom is the largest room at 120x59ft. and 44ft. high. The Palace hosts events such as receptions for Heads of State, garden parties and investitures. The public is able to visit the Queen’s Gallery and the Royal Mews, plus the 19 State Rooms at certain times during the year. The Palace’s 92 offices form the headquarters for administration of royal business.

(Image: James Cridland at Flickr.com / CC BY 2.0)

It is not known exactly how many of these spine-backed, small, hibernating mammals there are in the UK, but the estimate is one million. It is also thought that this is a drastic reduction from the hedgehog population of fifty years ago, at around 30 million. The vast majority live in England and they avoid being counted as they are nocturnal and generally sleep in a different hidey-hole every day of their active period from March to November.

British hedgehogs are of the Erinaceus-West European type, which can grow up to 1ft. long, with a little tail, 4-inch legs and approximately 6,000 spines an inch long. These spines are like tough bristles, comprising the same fibrous proteins as are in human nails and hair.

Hedgehogs feed on insects, snails, worms, beetles, caterpillars, slugs, baby birds, rodents and frogs. This tends to make them the gardener’s friend. Preservation societies encourage gardeners to reciprocate by making their plots hedgehog-friendly, with unobtrusive holes at the bottom of boundary fences and piles of logs and leaves in a wilderness corner. This enables hedgehogs to roam from garden to garden, as they like to do, and avoid the dangers of electric gardening tools and bonfires.

(Image: needpix.com / Public domain)

Until the Industrial Revolution, Cardiff was just a small town, having a population of only 1,870 in 1801 for example. Another eyebrow-raiser is that Cardiff is a relative newcomer as a capital city. Several Welsh towns had historic claims, but it is said that Queen Elizabeth II forced the issue of choosing a capital when she planned her first state tour. Cardiff’s official designation was announced in 1955.

Situated beside the wide River Severn estuary, its favourable location drew the Romans to build a timber fort there. This became the site of a Norman castle in the 1100s and a village sprang up around it. Eventually, industrial growth saw the population climb to 164,333 in 1900 and five years later it was awarded city status.

Cardiff’s ranking at that time as the world’s busiest port for the export of coal marks it out as a key player in the foundation of our modern world. Its dockland district of Cardiff Bay was formerly known as Tiger Bay and attracted many foreign workers. Today, Cardiff is the home of the National Assembly for Wales and the Welsh national sports arena, the Principality Stadium. Shopping arcades, parks and dockland redevelopment have largely replaced the factories and warehouses.

(Image: pxfuel.com / CC0 Public domain)

The Thames Barrier is the world’s second largest flood defence system. Without it, the sides of the Embankment would have to be so tall they would obliterate Londoners’ view of the Thames itself. More importantly, a huge area of London would be at risk of flooding, including the underground rail network. Fortunately, it is planned for the present Thames Barrier to remain in place against storm surges and any other rise in sea level until 2070, whereupon it will be replaced.

There have been floods from the North Sea in the past, of course, but it was the one in 1953, which claimed 307 lives, that gave the impetus to build the ten-gate steel dam on concrete piers and sills fixed to the chalk riverbed. The Thames Barrier and Flood Protection Act of 1972 eventually gave the go-ahead. The project took eight years and cost £535 million.

It is now operated by the Environmental Agency, who test the gates monthly and at the spring high tide. The Thames Barrier Duty Controller makes the decision as to whether to open or close the gates, acting on information received from various weather monitoring stations, including satellites. Since 1982 that crucial decision has been taken almost two hundred times.

(Image: Mechtraveller at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0)

Long ago, Gibraltar, Spain and Morocco were connected but after the Atlantic Ocean flooded into the Mediterranean, the 9-mile-wide Strait of Gibraltar was formed. Gibraltar, nicknamed ‘Gib’ or ‘The Rock’, is a 2½-mile-long limestone outcrop which came into British sovereignty in 1704. Since 2006 its Constitution has given it self-government with the UK responsible for external matters.

Its strategic position at the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea has been invaluable to the UK. Its airport is owned by the Ministry of Defence and the runway has been extended into the sea to cater for civilian aircraft as well. Tourism, financial services, shipping and the military provide the major sources of income for Gibraltar, the world’s fifth most densely-populated nation.

Spain has long since wished to reclaim Gibraltar, but the population of 32,000 identify themselves as ‘British Gibraltarians’ and have twice voted overwhelmingly to remain under the UK’s wing. The 1969-85 Spanish closure of the border only helped to solidify their British allegiance. The official language is English and there is also ‘Llanito’ or ‘Yanito’, a code-switching mixture of English, Andalusian Spanish, Italian, Genoese, Arabic, Hebrew, Maltese and Portuguese.

Notice the main road (Winston Churchill Avenue) crossing the runway at the end of this video:-

(Top image [cropped] showing Gibraltar, top left: Riccardo Rossi at Flickr.com (courtesy of eol.jsc.nasa.gov) / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The English Channel was formed by catastrophic flooding from the direction of the North Sea. This occurred anything from 10,000BC to 3,800BC and was an after-effect of the sinking of the land mass known as Doggerland, which once connected the UK and Ireland to northern Europe and Scandinavia. The breach of the last sliver of land linking England to France was either the result of a megatsunami or the bursting of the banks of a massive lake.

The English Channel (or La Manche, in French) is 350 miles long but only 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, the Strait of Dover. It is also quite shallow there, as this was the breach point mentioned above. It is one of the world’s busiest shipping routes. Not only do captains have to take account of varying tides, currents and weather conditions such as fog, but they must also make sure they are sticking to the correct lane.

Marine craft of all kinds are travelling east, west, north and south, along with the occasional brave swimmer making the crossing for charity. The English Channel has been the scene of several ‘firsts’ over the years, including the first jet-powered hoverboard crossing in August 2019.

(Top image: Pierre Markuse at Flickr.com / CC BY 2.0)

The Norfolk Broads comprise an area of rivers, dykes, streams and lakes in the easternmost part of England. The city of Norwich lies to the west and the coastal resort of Great Yarmouth to the east. The Broads, or ‘Broadland’, has been a popular holiday destination since the turn of the twentieth century, encouraged by an 1882 guidebook by G. Christopher Davies (1849-1922), in which he extolled the delights of slowly boating along its 200-mile network, admiring the scenery and wildlife.

The waterways were previously used for transportation of goods inland, but this gradually ended with the advent of the railways. Today it is possible to hire all types of motor cruiser, yacht, houseboat and dinghy to explore its freshwater routes and the sight of disused windmills is a reminder of their commercial history.

Broadland itself is evidence of historic land use. Norfolk was densely populated in the twelfth century and its peaty layers were dug out for fuel. This continued for two centuries, re-shaping the land as it did so, but it stopped when floodwaters came in. This factor was discovered in 1952 by ecologist Dr Joyce Lambert (1916-2005).  Furthermore, this video shows how cyclical flooding affected Broadland even before that time:-

(Top image of Thurne Dyke drainage mill on the Broads: John Fielding at Flickr.com / CC BY 2.0)

Our most famous and oldest chalk-cut hill figure is the White Horse near Uffington. Unlike later equine hill figures, this one is quite stylised, even modern in its design. It measures 360 ft. in length and can be seen best from above or from two or three miles away on another hilltop. Its purpose is unknown and it does not seem to have been placed for onlookers on the ground, as it is on a shallow slope near the top of Whitehorse Hill, rather than the steeper slope below.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were ‘scouring festivals’ every seven years, when people would gather to clean up the chalk trenches, followed by a party at the nearby Uffington Castle hillfort remains. This, along with the natural shifting of soil over the centuries, has likely resulted in it now being smaller than the Bronze Age original.

Today it is maintained by the National Trust on behalf of English Heritage. Tourists can picnic on the site and walk around it, but unofficial drones are not permitted! As it can be spotted from twenty miles away in good weather, during WW2 it was covered over so as not to aid enemy warplanes.

(Image: Dave Price at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Birmingham is our second biggest city and is geographically just below the centre. It sits on a plateau which was once heavily forested and home to wild boar and wolves prior to the start of industrialisation. The name evolved from ‘Bromwich-ham’ or ‘Brummagem’, explaining the city’s nickname of ‘Brum’, with adjective ‘Brummie’ and those born there being affectionately referred to as ‘Brummies’.

A small market town sprang up there in the 12th century but it was not until the 18th century that it became a hub of industry large and small, from huge ironworks to one-man workshops. With this came the need for financial services and Lloyds Bank was established there in 1765 and Ketley’s Building Society (the world’s first) in 1775. It also left the legacy of an extensive canal system, one hundred miles long in total.

Due to bomb damage in WW2, much of Birmingham has been re-built and after the UK joined the Common Market in 1973 the manufacturing industries have been largely replaced with the service sector. Birmingham hosts five universities, its city-centre shopping zone, called the ‘Bullring & Grand Central‘, is the UK’s largest, and its National Exhibition Centre on the city outskirts is one of Europe’s busiest.

(Top image: Stephen JG at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Spaghetti Junction is the nickname for the world’s most complicated motorway intersection. Its official name is the Gravelly Hill Interchange and it is junction 6 of the M6. This connects the M1, M5, M6, A38(M), A38 and the A5127, as well as other local roads in that area of Birmingham. It includes eighteen routes and covers thirty acres of land, some of which had to be purchased from local residents, whose houses were then demolished.

It was at least four years in the planning and another four in the construction, which began in 1968. It eventually opened on 24th May 1972. Amazingly, it is located over two rivers, two railway lines and three canals, hence the 13.5 miles of elevated roadway on five levels. These are supported by 559 reinforced concrete columns, the tallest reaching a height of 80ft.

The construction team did not take too kindly to the ‘spaghetti’ name at first, as it seemed to poke fun at what was a huge feat of engineering. It acquired the label even before building had begun, when sub-editor Alan Eaglesfield of the Birmingham Evening Mail made it the headline for an article commenting on the design in 1965 in which “a plate of spaghetti” was mentioned.

(Image: Highways Agency at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0)