Anglotopia Podcast | Discussing UK British Travel, History, Culture, London, British Slang, and More!

November might be the most underrated month in London's calendar, and this year it has the biggest museum opening in years. The London Museum opens at Smithfield on 28 November after a £500 million rebuild of a derelict Victorian market — free to enter, with galleries in the old crypts and Tube trains visible running through the building. Jonathan also covers the three great traditions that fall inside ten days: Bonfire Night on the 5th, Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph on the 8th, and the Lord Mayor's Show on the 14th. Then the city flips the switch on Christmas, with the lights going up on Regent Street, Carnaby Street and Covent Garden, the rinks and markets opening, and Winter Wonderland arriving in Hyde Park. Plus a strong run of new exhibitions led by Van Eyck at the National Gallery, the theatre and panto season, what the weather is actually like, and why low season is the best-value time to go.

Everything On This Month

The London Museum

The Three Great Traditions

Christmas Arrives

Exhibitions

If You're Over for Thanksgiving

Historian Sophie Shorland returns to the podcast — last time for The Lost Queen, her book on Catherine of Braganza, the forgotten queen who helped bring tea to Britain. This time she has turned her attention to the most famous queen England ever had, and found a story most of us think we already know but really don't. All the Queen's Men takes the endless question that hung over Elizabeth's entire reign — who will marry the Virgin Queen? — and reframes it completely. Not as a love life, but as foreign policy. Courtship as diplomacy; flirtation as statecraft; a single woman keeping every prince in Europe dangling for decades in order to keep her country alive. Sophie's argument is that the domestic picture of Elizabeth — progresses, tilts, flirting with favorites, and the occasional baffling decision that older scholarship put down to the menopause — makes far more sense once you add the geopolitics back in. When she abruptly invites a French suitor over, it's because the relationship with Spain is deteriorating and she would rather not be invaded. Historians usually reach for a chess metaphor; Sophie prefers poker, because in chess you have one opponent, and Elizabeth was playing against every head of state in Europe and sometimes her own subjects too. Along the way: the ambassadorial brawl over whose heraldic heart had the better arrows; why whoever married Elizabeth would effectively have won England, its navy and its wealth without a shot fired; the Earl of Arundel who spent a fortune in bribes while the queen laughed behind her sleeve; Eric of Sweden signing himself "your most loving Eric" and complaining that four years of courtship felt like ten; Ivan the Terrible, already on roughly his seventh wife, cancelling the Anglo-Russian trade relationship in a huff; and the Duke of Alençon — nicknamed her Frog, possibly for his small froggy fingers — with whom Elizabeth exchanged rings in front of witnesses, which under Tudor law meant they were technically married, before paying him a great deal of money to leave the country.

Sophie Shorland's Books

Anglotopia

This is part of a special Jane Austen series, sponsored throughout by Strictly Jane Austen.

It is one of Jonathan's favorite kinds of story: the man who talks an entire city into existence. Picture him arriving in Bath in the early 1700s — a chancer, a gambler, a womanizer, with no visible income, no rank, no property, and nothing to recommend him but charm, brilliant conversation, gold braid and an unmistakable white hat. Within a few years he has made himself the absolute monarch of the place. He writes the rules. He decides who dances with whom and when the evening ends. He turns a provincial spa town into the most fashionable destination in Britain. His name was Richard Nash, and everyone called him Beau. If you have read Northanger Abbey or Persuasion, you have walked through the world Beau Nash built — the Pump Room, the Lower Rooms, the ceremonies of introduction, the etiquette that governs whether Catherine Morland may even speak to Mr. Tilney. Dr. Moira Rudolf, historian of Georgian and Regency Bath, returns to introduce the man who wrote those rules, and the extraordinary trio who built the city he ruled. Along the way: the small debt and the pair of boots, two plays, a tobacco box and a fiddle Nash left behind at Oxford; the pageant that earned him a knighthood from William III, which he refused; the duel that vacated the post of Master of Ceremonies and handed him the city; the Brussels lace apron he tore from the waist of the Duchess of Queensbury and flung into the back benches, and her entirely good-humored apology; the royal princess told she could not dance after eleven; the fortune Ralph Allen made from reforming the postal service and then made again from the stone under Combe Down; the gravity railway that ran it down the hill with a nervous brakeman on the back; John Wood the Elder's plan to rebuild Bath as ancient Rome, and his death weeks after laying the foundation stone of the Circus; a full walk through a typical Bath day, from the six o'clock bath and the sweating cure to the Pump Room arrivals book and the supper boxes in the pleasure gardens; and the sorry end — a court case over a proto-roulette game called EO that cost Nash the city's trust and left him downsizing into his mistress's house.

This Jane Austen series is brought to you by Strictly Jane Austen — Bath's most Austentatious travel company.

If this episode has put you in the mood to experience the Regency for yourself, there is no better way than stepping into Jane Austen's Bath with an expert guide — and this is an episode that rewards walking the ground. Nash's Bath is still there to be found: the Pump Room, Terrace Walk and Parade Gardens where Harrison's Rooms once stood, the Lower Rooms' riverside setting, Queen Square, the Circus, the Royal Crescent, and the house beside the Theatre Royal with its plaque to Beau Nash.

What they offer:

Book or learn more at strictlyjaneausten.com · Call +44 1225 333747 (Mon–Fri, 09:00–17:00 GMT)

Winner, Bristol Bath & Somerset International Tourism Award 2025 (Bronze). Part of ECT Travel, a Bath-based tour operator running successful travel programs since 1993.

Nash's Bath, and Austen's

Previous Episodes in This Series

Anglotopia

Jonathan is finally ready to talk about it. After fifteen years of wanting to, a year of preparation and nine days of walking, he completed the Hadrian's Wall Path National Trail — coast to coast across the neck of England, from Wallsend in the east to Bowness-on-Solway in the west, following a line a Roman emperor drew across Britain nearly two thousand years ago. This is the full account: what it was actually like, what he learned, the glorious bits and the genuinely hard bits, and whether you should do it too. The honest version includes a first leg out of Newcastle that was frankly a disappointment — graffiti on every information board, burnt-out shopping trolleys, an industrial hum he recognized from growing up near the Indiana steel mills. It includes three cafés and leisure centers that turned out to be shut when he arrived starving. It includes a thousand-foot climb he's not sure he could have managed if he hadn't broken the first day in half, and a final fifteen-mile stretch across open marshland with no shade and cars passing at sixty that was, he says plainly, the hardest day of the whole thing. But it also includes the day that made the entire walk worth it: a tiny church alone on a hill at Heavenfield, sheltered from a ferocious wind by ancient trees, empty, silent, and one of the most beautiful places he has ever been. And a man in a lay-by whose entire job is selling two-pound cups of tea to walkers, who became his hero. And honesty sheds with kettles and PayPal QR codes. And a communal dinner with eleven strangers at a Lanercost B&B that he dreaded and which turned out to be one of his favorite evenings of the trip. And standing at the little hut at Bowness with Scotland in the distance, phoning his wife in tears. Plus the practical stuff: how the self-guided model actually works, why you will walk considerably more than 84 miles, why distance is a bad measure of difficulty, and what he'd tell you to do differently.

This episode is brought to you by Macs Adventure — the self-guided walking and cycling specialists who planned and booked Jonathan's entire Hadrian's Wall walk and made it possible.

The self-guided model is the reason a walk like this is achievable for someone who isn't a hardened hiker. You walk at your own pace, on your own, but everything else is arranged: a bed booked every night along the route, breakfast included, and — the genuinely magic part — luggage transfer, so you leave your bag at reception each morning and it appears at your next stay while you carry only a day pack. You also get their app, which handles navigation, distance, pace, elevation profiles and a written briefing for each day including where to find food and facilities. There's a 24-hour emergency line if things go wrong.

As Jonathan puts it: you still have to walk every hard mile yourself, and nobody carries you. But the logistics are handled by a staff of people who have done these walks themselves, and that is what makes it manageable.

Book one a year ahead if you can — there is a limited stock of accommodation near the trail, and Jonathan's was booked the October before he walked.

The Trail Itself

East End — Newcastle & Wallsend

Heddon-on-the-Wall to Chollerford

The Central Section — The Best of It

Into Cumbria — Gilsland to the Sea

Coming Soon

Anglotopia

This is Episode 5 of a special six-part Jane Austen series, sponsored throughout by Strictly Jane Austen.

It is, when you stop to think about it, one of the strangest love affairs in literary history. Here is a country founded on tearing up the rule book of aristocracy, of inherited rank, of who married whom — a nation that fought a war precisely to be free of all of it. And what does it do? It falls utterly and permanently for a clergyman's daughter from Hampshire who wrote six novels about the English gentry. Americans fill ballrooms in Regency gowns. They queue for Chawton. They've given the world Clueless, Bridget Jones, and Mr. Darcy fighting zombies. Mark Twain loathed her so passionately he said he wanted to dig her up — and lost, comprehensively, to his own countrymen. Jonathan Thomas is joined by Dr. Gabrielle Malcolm, who holds a PhD from the University of Kent, is the author of Fan Phenomena: Jane Austen and There's Something About Darcy, and is the creative director of Strictly Jane Austen — so there is nobody better placed to explain what draws people across an ocean to walk in Austen's footsteps. The conversation starts with the tote bag that started it all: Gabrielle moved to Bath, saw students and tourists carrying bags reading "I ♥ Darcy," and realized no other character in English literature could possibly warrant one. Along the way: why everybody calls her Jane and nobody calls Dickens Charlie; the Netherfield scene that demonstrates exactly how Austen gets inside everyone's head at once; her genuinely provocative argument that Americans recognized Austen's contribution before the English did; the Victorian children's novel in which an American girl visits Austen's grave and the cathedral warden has no idea who she's talking about; why male academics were still dismissing Austen as a romance writer within living memory; what makes Darcy structurally different from Rochester and Heathcliff — he is the one who actually changes, rather than needing to be set on fire first; why the 1995 adaptation and the growth of the internet were a tandem phenomenon; why Austen fandom is, improbably, the kindest corner of the internet; and why Bath — a city Austen never much liked — became the heart of the pilgrimage.

This entire six-part series is brought to you by Strictly Jane Austen — Bath's most Austentatious travel company. Today's guest, Dr. Gabrielle Malcolm, is their creative director, and in this episode she explains exactly what she was brought in to build.

Gabrielle's role is to recruit the speakers and specialists — experts in Georgian embroidery, fashion, architecture and gardens, the literary history of Austen's writing and her family — so that guests spend each day of a residency doing something different. Guests stay at the Gainsborough Bath Spa, with access to the warm spa waters, the opportunity to dress in Regency costume (which in Bath, as Gabrielle notes, causes nobody to bat an eyelid), and the chance to actually spend time with those speakers rather than simply hear them. Novelist Gill Hornby, whose Miss Austen has now been dramatized for television, has been among them.

And if you want a shorter visit, the expert guided walk is the thing: an architectural historian or literary specialist who will take you to the nooks and crannies of Jane Austen's Bath — Sydney Place and Sydney Gardens, Gay Street, the Old Theatre Royal, Milsom Street — the places we know from her letters that she shopped, bought her walking boots, and bought the stationery she wrote them on.

What they offer:

Book or learn more at strictlyjaneausten.com · Call +44 1225 333747 (Mon–Fri, 09:00–17:00 GMT)

Winner, Bristol Bath & Somerset International Tourism Award 2025 (Bronze). Part of ECT Travel, a Bath-based tour operator running successful travel programs since 1993.

Our Guest

Austen Societies & Events

Places of Pilgrimage

Previous Episodes in This Series

Anglotopia

This is Episode 4 of a special six-part Jane Austen series, sponsored throughout by Strictly Jane Austen.

We tend to imagine great writers alone — a solitary genius at a small writing desk, which in Jane Austen's case is quite literally true; you can still see the little twelve-sided walnut table at Chawton. But nobody becomes Jane Austen alone, and behind those six perfect novels stands a whole crowded, noisy, loving and complicated world of people. Jonathan Thomas is joined by Theresa Roche, a Jane Austen speaker and one of Strictly Jane Austen's own Bath guides, who has mapped out the entire web of Jane's relationships: an orphaned clergyman father who gave his daughters a boys' education and 500 books to roam in; a sharp-witted mother who may well be the original of Mr. Woodhouse; an eldest brother whose Oxford magazine published Jane under an alliterative pseudonym before she was fifteen; a disabled brother she spoke to on her fingers; the brother who was handed three estates and without whom, Theresa argues, we would have no novels at all; a favorite brother who was a bit of a rogue and negotiated her publishing deals; two naval brothers who sailed into Mansfield Park; and the sister who was her whole heart and who burned most of her letters to protect her. Then the women beyond the family: a flamboyant French cousin presented at Marie Antoinette's court whose husband was guillotined, who hit it off with Jane instantly and died holding her hand; Martha Lloyd, who took on the housework so Jane could write and who ended up marrying Jane's brother and becoming Lady Austen; and Anne Sharp, a governess in financial limbo whom Jane befriended across a class line she was not supposed to cross. Plus the proposal Jane accepted one evening and fled the next morning, the Irishman she danced with and never forgot, and the clergyman at Sidmouth who may have been the love of her life and who died before anything could come of it.

This entire six-part series is brought to you by Strictly Jane Austen — Bath's most Austentatious travel company. Today's guest, Theresa Roche, is one of their Bath guides, so book a tour and you may well get her.

If this episode has put you in the mood to experience the Regency for yourself, there is no better way than stepping directly into Jane Austen's Bath with an expert guide. Strictly Jane Austen's award-winning tours bring Regency England to life through expertly guided walks, immersive storytelling, and carefully curated itineraries in Bath and beyond. Their guides are avid Janeites steeped in Regency knowledge — and, as Austen herself would have it, genuinely "clever, well-informed people."

What they offer:

Book or learn more at strictlyjaneausten.com · Call +44 1225 333747 (Mon–Fri, 09:00–17:00 GMT)

Winner, Bristol Bath & Somerset International Tourism Award 2025 (Bronze). Part of ECT Travel, a Bath-based tour operator running successful travel programs since 1993.

Places in This Episode

Books & Further Reading

Previous Episodes in This Series

Anglotopia

Tomorrow is October 1st, which means it's time for the monthly What's On in London — and October might be Jonathan's single favorite month to be in the city. The summer crowds have gone, prices have softened, the museums have hung their big autumn blockbusters, and the parks turn gold. It's the month the locals quietly love and the guidebooks tend to ignore. In this solo episode Jonathan runs through everything opening this month: Renoir and Love at the National Gallery, the British Museum's sweeping Korea, Painting the French Riviera at the Royal Academy, Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji out at Dulwich, Tim Walker's Fairyland at the National Portrait Gallery, The 90s: Art and Fashion at Tate Britain, a completely free Freddie Mercury display at the V&A, and Agatha Christie: A World of Mystery at the British Library. He covers the one big exhibition closing mid-month — Anish Kapoor at the Hayward, gone after the 18th — and the single most important date in the episode: October 21st, when the British Museum releases Bayeux Tapestry tickets for January to March 2027, the only realistic shot left for anyone visiting in that window. Then the practical half: what half term actually means for visitors and how to use it to your advantage, spooky-season programming from Historic Royal Palaces to the Mail Rail tunnels to Hidden London's Clapham South deep-level shelter, why you should pack for wet rather than cold, when the clocks go back and the transatlantic time muddle that follows, and the best thing happening in London this month, which costs nothing at all. Editor’s Note: I have the BST/US Daylight Saving Time change backward, and it’s BST to GMT.

Opening This Month

The Bayeux Tapestry

Closing This Month

Half Term & Spooky Season

Theater & Music

Also Mentioned

Plan Your Trip with Londontopia

Anglotopia

This is Episode 3 of a special six-part Jane Austen series, sponsored throughout by Strictly Jane Austen.

When we picture Jane Austen's world, most of us aren't actually picturing Hampshire in 1810 — we're picturing a television program. Colin Firth striding out of a lake. Keira Knightley on a windswept crag. A proposal in the pouring rain in front of a domed temple. The great screen adaptations gave Austen's imagined places real addresses, and this episode maps them out house by house. Jonathan Thomas is joined by Dr. Gabrielle Malcolm — author, leading expert on Austen fan culture and literary tourism, and creative director at Strictly Jane Austen — who has interviewed the people who actually made the 1995 Pride and Prejudice and knows exactly which door is which. They cover why 1995 changed everything (before it, every adaptation was studio-bound), Simon Langton's instruction to "throw open the drawing room doors," and the hierarchy of houses the production had to find: Luckington Court as Longbourn, Edgcote House as Netherfield, Lyme Park and Sudbury Hall as Pemberley, and the village of Lacock as Meryton. Along the way: the message Susannah Harker sent Gabrielle about the summer of 1994; the choreographer who poured Coca-Cola on Edgcote's polished floors so the cast wouldn't slip; the truth about who actually dived into that lake, and where the underwater shots were really filmed; why Chatsworth is arguably too grand even for Mr. Darcy; the Wilton Diptych and how Wilton House saved it; Stourhead's Arcadian fantasy gardens; and Barton Cottage on the Flete Estate in South Devon, with a five-bedroom "cottage," only two servants, and a Ferrars family named after a nearby Devon village. Most usefully of all, Gabrielle explains which of these places you can actually get into, which ones you can only nose around on an estate agent's website, and how to string the best of them together into one Wiltshire trip.

This entire six-part series is brought to you by Strictly Jane Austen — Bath's most Austentatious travel company. Dr. Gabrielle Malcolm, today's guest, is their creative director.

If this episode has you dreaming of an Austen pilgrimage, there is no better way to begin than stepping directly into Jane Austen's Bath with an expert guide. Strictly Jane Austen's award-winning tours bring Regency England to life through expertly guided walks, immersive storytelling, and carefully curated itineraries in Bath and beyond — including the Wiltshire locations discussed in this episode, which, as Gabrielle points out, are very hard to reach without a car. Their guides are avid Janeites steeped in Regency knowledge — and, as Austen herself would have it, genuinely "clever, well-informed people."

What they offer:

Book or learn more at strictlyjaneausten.com · Call +44 1225 333747 (Mon–Fri, 09:00–17:00 GMT)

Winner, Bristol Bath & Somerset International Tourism Award 2025 (Bronze). Part of ECT Travel, a Bath-based tour operator running successful travel programs since 1993.

Our Guest

Longbourn — Luckington Court, Wiltshire (private; not open to the public)

Netherfield — Edgcote House, Northamptonshire (private; not open to the public)

Pemberley, 1995 — Lyme Park & Sudbury Hall

Meryton — Lacock, Wiltshire

Pemberley, 2005 — Chatsworth & Wilton House

Stourhead

Barton Cottage — Flete Estate, South Devon (private; not open to the public)

Also Mentioned

Anglotopia

If I say "British spy," you picture a man: James Bond, George Smiley, Kim Philby. And the one woman most people can name from that world is fictional — Miss Moneypenny, sitting outside M's office, quietly in love with 007. But Miss Moneypenny was real, or at least the woman who inspired her was. Her name was Kathleen Pettigrew, personal assistant to three consecutive chiefs of MI6, and every secret in the wartime service passed across her desk. When someone asked whether she'd been the real Moneypenny, she replied: "I was Miss Moneypenny, but with more power." In this episode, Jonathan Thomas is joined by Dr. Claire Hubbard-Hall, historian of secret intelligence, honorary associate professor of intelligence history, and author of Secret Servants of the Crown: The Forgotten Women of British Intelligence (published in the UK as Her Secret Service). Claire explains how she found the pencil-crossed "Miss Pettaval" in Fleming's first draft of Casino Royale; how Pettigrew and one colleague received every decrypted Enigma message sent from Bletchley Park to MI6; why the word "secretary" was a perfect cover for agent running, code work and courier duty; and how she tracked down women trained to leave no trace — reading margin notes and paper chits, then turning family historian and writing some 200 letters to surviving relatives. Plus: Rita Windsor, the MI6 officer in wartime Lisbon who got July Plot survivor Otto John out of Europe; the post-war "travel agency" she ran with Ina Molesworth; an incendiary briefcase carried by train to Bletchley Park and blown up on the lawn; the long zigzag road to the first female heads of MI5, GCHQ and MI6; and why Slow Horses gets it right.

The Book

US edition published by Citadel (Kensington). ISBN 9780806543710. Published in the UK as Her Secret Service: The Forgotten Women of British Intelligence.

Claire Hubbard-Hall

Places to Visit

Mentioned in the Episode

Related Anglotopia Episodes

This is Episode 2 of a special six-part Jane Austen series, sponsored throughout by Strictly Jane Austen.

Today's episode has duels fought over a runaway marriage. It has a scandal so severe it drove one of England's richest men into exile. It has the truth about what those elegant public baths were actually like to get into — considerably less charming than the paintings suggest. It has quack doctors selling electricity as medicine, and a notorious celestial bed that promised to cure infertility for fifty pounds a night. It has vanished pleasure gardens, a vulgar villa, a ferry ride that went badly wrong, and two of the great women of English letters falling out spectacularly over their choice of husbands. Jonathan Thomas is joined by Dr. Moira Rudolf, historian of Georgian and Regency Bath, for a tour of the city's darker corners — and Jane Austen, as Moira points out, pops up in nearly all of them. Along the way: Richard Brinsley Sheridan's two duels over the honor of Elizabeth Linley, the celebrated "Maid of Bath"; William Beckford, his scandal, his exile, his 276-foot tower with no foundations, and the Bath retreat Moira describes as the most haunted building she has ever stayed in; what Jane's brother Edward actually endured in the name of taking the waters; Tobias Smollett's stomach-turning account of the King's Bath; where Mary Shelley really wrote Frankenstein; and Fanny Burney's gloriously catty account of an evening at Bathwick Villa, complete with a mechanical eagle.

This entire six-part series is brought to you by Strictly Jane Austen — Bath's most Austentatious travel company.

If this episode has put you in the mood to experience the Regency for yourself, there is no better way than stepping directly into Jane Austen's Bath with an expert guide. Strictly Jane Austen's award-winning tours bring Regency England to life through expertly guided walks, immersive storytelling, and carefully curated itineraries in Bath and beyond. Their guides are avid Janeites steeped in Regency knowledge — and, as Austen herself would have it, genuinely "clever, well-informed people."

What they offer:

Book or learn more at strictlyjaneausten.com · Call +44 1225 333747 (Mon–Fri, 09:00–17:00 GMT)

Winner, Bristol Bath & Somerset International Tourism Award 2025 (Bronze). Part of ECT Travel, a Bath-based tour operator running successful travel programmes since 1993.

Places in Bath Mentioned

Anglotopia