The Special Operations Executive, headquartered in London, was formed in the Second World War to secretly recruit men and women who would perform acts of sabotage in countries occupied by Germany. The lengths that these brave men and women went through is truly remarkable and I’ve read a fair few biographies of some of the women recruited – I’d recommend A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell.
A Grade II listed building Exchange Flags is an office complex and restaurant space in the centre of Liverpool’s commercial district. The name of the building reflects the city’s history in regards to slavery – cotton traders and brokers would meet here to do their buying and selling and exchange a form of business card, hence the name.
A friend and I picked Leamington Spa in Warwickshire as a good day trip location roughly half-way between where we each live. Our first stop was to wander around Jephson Gardens. Around five minutes from the train station the gardens, which are named for Dr Henry Jephson who promoted the town as a spa destination, were created in 1831 and have been a popular attraction ever since.
The National Monument in Amsterdam was built in 1956 as a memorial to those killed and injured in World War II.
The HM Treasury building is directly opposite the Foreign and Commonwealth offices in Whitehall. The area you are allowed to visit here as part of Open House London was significantly smaller than at the FCO; only a fraction of the vast area composing the Government Offices Great George Street, or GOGGS, which houses HM Treasury, HM Revenue and Customs and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport among others was accessible.
On my final day in Liverpool I decided to take a walk down from my hotel towards the Albert Dock in order to visit the museums there but the first building I actually stepped inside was the Liverpool Parish Church.
The Dutch Resistance Museum, or Verzetsmuseum, is directly opposite Amsterdam Zoo which made it very convenient to visit. It focuses on the Netherlands in World War II exploring briefly what life was like before the war and then on to the different ways the Dutch people survived and fought back whilst under Nazi occupation.
The Imperial War Museum is one of those major London museums that I’d never managed to find time for until a recent trip to the Old Vic found me a quick 10 minutes walk away. Founded during the First World War in 1917 I was impressed by the range and detail of items on display both from the site of war and at the home front and the interactive nature of many of the displays.
Although I was aware the the Nazi’s occupied Norway, I knew very little about it; it’s simply not something that gets taught in British schools (at least not in my day) and I have to say that the Resistance Museum provided the perfect starting point to learning more about that time.
Recently I decided to visit the Museum of Nottingham Life at Brewhouse Yard which, as I mentioned in my post about Nottingham Light Night, I didn’t think I’d visited before, though it actually appears I may have made a trip there when I was at primary school. Regardless it all felt new and has certainly undergone some changes since that trip. It is based just around the corner from the entrance to Nottingham Castle, right next to Ye Olde Trip To Jerusalem and traces the social history of Nottingham over the past 300 years. It spans five 17th century houses and includes a school room, kitchen and bedroom, shop fronts such as grocers and pharmacies and an air raid shelter from the Second World War.
Louise Jayne's Blog 