London used to be filled with coffeehouses where residents of all kinds who meet and debate the latest politics and literature. Listen here to a forgotten piece of London's history.

In Oxford, England, 25-year-old medical student Roger Bannister cracks track and field’s most notorious barrier, a barrier that people at the time thought impossible: the four-minute mile. Bannister, who was running for the Amateur Athletic Association against his alma mater, Oxford University, won the mile race with a time of 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds.

For any maritime nation, investment in long distance trade, outposts and settlements overseas made navigation, including the ability to determine a ship’s longitude, increasingly important. As nations including Spain, the Netherlands and France, sought to dominate the world’s oceans, each offered rewards for solving the longitude problem. But it was in Britain that the approach paid off as a result of the 1714 Longitude Act.

The London Underground is a system of electric trains which are in London, United Kingdom. It is the oldest underground railway in the world. It started running in 1863 as the Metropolitan Railway. After the opening the system was copied in many other cities, for example New York and Madrid.

The Berlin Wall was built by the communist government of East Berlin in 1961. The wall separated East Berlin and West Berlin. It was built in order to prevent people from fleeing East Berlin. In many ways it was the perfect symbol of the "Iron Curtain" that separated the democratic western countries and the communist countries of Eastern Europe throughout the Cold War.

The Battle of the Somme started on July 1st 1916. It lasted until November 1916. For many people, the Battle of the Somme was the battle that symbolised the horrors of warfare in First World War; this one battle had a marked effect on overall casualty figures and seemed to epitomise the futility of trench warfare.

Pub signs are collectively a unique record of Britain's history -- religious, industrious and scandalous. Many are also beautifully-crafted works of art on public view. There's a world of stories hanging over your head.

Here's a potted history of some of Britain's most famous pub names...

London – the largest and most influential city in the country – provided a grand backdrop for some of the most famous executions in history. With large crowds often gathering to watch these gruesome spectacles, the state used these events to publicly wield its power and to ultimately dissuade others from taking their first steps into less than salubrious careers.

Here is a history of some of the city's most infamous execution sites...

The Irish Civil War followed the War of Independence and the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and lasted from June 1922 to May 1923. It was the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty that triggered the war – the Provisional Government supported the Treaty whilst the anti-treaty faction believed the Treaty was a betrayal of the Irish Republic.

After nearly 700 years of being controlled by Britain, Ireland, in the early 20th-century, decided it was ready to rule itself. In this lesson, we'll check out the Irish War of Independence and see how Ireland managed to separate itself from the UK.

This episode looks at the war with the British, the IRA, the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the war in the North.