What’s new in BBIH?   The June 2024 update to the Bibliography of British and Irish History adds 4,305 new publications. The new update includes books, journal articles, book chapters, and edited collections covering all areas of British and Irish history, from 55 BCE to the present day.   These updates bring the total number of BBIH records to 658,583.   The June 2024 update includes:   3,926 titles that were published in 2014-2024  256 publications relating to Scottish history   1,500 publication about the histories of England and Wales, including 119 publ ..read more

When the decision was taken by the Ministry of Aircraft Production to site a ‘Sunderland’ seaplane assembly factory and accompanying workers’ accommodation on requisitioned farm land at Calgarth on the shores of Lake Windermere in late 1941 in support of Britain’s war effort, it set in motion an often bitter contestation over the future of the site that would rumble on for nearly twenty years.  It pitted a national perception of the amenity value of the site against a local perception of the site as a source of future employment and housing.  Whilst the factory site was, prior to fou ..read more

2024 marks 125 years of the Victoria County History (VCH). In this second VCH at 125 blog post, Ruth Slatter (VCH General Editor – Architecture) sets out our ambitions for the project’s future. If you have not read the first post you can find it here. 2024 marks 125 years of the Victoria County History (VCH), which was founded in 1899 to research and write encyclopaedic histories of every English parish from the earliest times to the present day.[1]  Today, the VCH is a national network of place-based research made possible by professional historians, subject-specialists, volunteers, and ..read more

Dr Eloise Grey completed a summer internship at the IHR in 2023 with the goal of looking at how to use the Bibliography of British and Irish History to decolonise research and history teaching. She reflects on this experience and the challenges of decolonising such a resource. A Jain Cotton Manufacture Couple, unknown artist, Wellcome CollectionEye-rolling and decolonisation Mention the term ‘decolonising’ and you get a lot of eye-rolling. Formerly the term referred to the period of the end of empire, the process by which previously colonised spaces became independent nations. The current ..read more

This blog post was written by Pippa Potts is a co-convenor of the History of Gardens and Landscapes Seminar. The idea had surfaced occasionally but, as so often, it took a nudge from elsewhere to make it a reality. The idea was that the excellent papers being given to the History of Gardens and Landscapes Seminar shouldn’t be allowed to vanish into thin air but be given a permanent and wider audience in a publication.  The nudge came from the Birkbeck Garden History Group which had been responsible for publishing the work of students on the IHR’s MA garden and landscape history course unt ..read more

The Bibliography of British and Irish History seeks to appoint 2 new Section Editors with research and/or teaching expertise in the following areas: Imperial, Colonial, Commonwealth, and Indigenous histories since 1783 Britain since 1960 Section Editors play a vital role in the Bibliography’s editorial process. They provide specialist advice on new content that has been prepared by the BBIH Editor (based at the Institute of Historical Research (IHR)), by chronology, region, and subject. We anticipate that these roles might be of interest to PhD students, early and mid-career academics and in ..read more

The IHR’s Centre for the History of People, Place and Community has been carrying out some exploratory research on the potential of analysing London’s medieval customs accounts digitally. Detailed, or ‘particular’ customs accounts recorded immense detail about the goods and practices of trade, giving an unparalleled insight into the medieval material world and international networks. The challenge of these sources, however, is in their sheer scale, and their complexity. Eliot Benbow has been undertaking proof-of-concept work as part an IHR Internship. The London Customs Accounts can ..read more

Will Wyeth has recently joined the Advisory Board of the IHR’s Centre for the History of People, Place and Community as an ECR member. In this blog he talks about how he came to be an historian of castles. Underwhelming Motorway Castle Quite early on in my Ph.D. I did a tour of two dozen or so castles in south-west Scotland with one my supervisors and his colleague. We set out early on a cold morning from Edinburgh heading south-west into upper Clydesdale. As we neared the nodal motorway stop at Abington, I was told to boot up: “We’re here.” I’d come to castles, indeed medieval British history ..read more

This blog post was written by Louise Ryland-Epton. The Victoria County History of Wiltshire are involved in an exciting new project recovering the lives of medieval women in Wiltshire. Louise Ryland-Epton tells us more about it. These monuments commemorate a medieval woman from Wiltshire, Maud Heath—one dates from the 17th century and the other from the early 19th. They celebrate the narrative that in 1474, Maud entrusted property to several trustees to construct and maintain a causeway (a footpath). Five hundred and fifty years later, the trust still maintains the 4 ½ mile causeway in north ..read more

In this blog, PhD student Phil Winterbottom reflects on the ways in which he has used BBIH as a tool to help him develop his historiographical knowledge and keep up to date with the latest research in his field.  When I began my PhD research in 2020 I had not studied in an academic environment for nearly 35 years. My working life as an archivist had on occasion involved historical research using other archives and secondary sources, and in the year prior to registering as a doctoral student I had also built up a familiarity with the core literature and journals relating to my period and s ..read more