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

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 ...

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...

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 s...

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 thr...

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 temp...

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 secr...

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 p...

In October 2013, a young Dane named Thor Pedersen set off from his home with a single, slightly mad rule: he wanted to visit every country on earth — all of them — in one continuous journey, and to do it without ever once setting foot on an airplane. Container ships, trains, buses, and a great deal of waiting around. He thought it might take three or four years. It took almost ten. He cross...

This is Episode 1 of a special six-part Jane Austen series, sponsored throughout by Strictly Jane Austen — Bath's most Austentatious travel company.

We talk a lot on this show about the Regency. It's the backdrop to Jane Austen, to Bridgerton, and to a thousand romance novels and costume dramas. But what actually was the Regency? Strictly speaking it was a brief w...

For over a century, in a building most of us could not name, an organization known only by its post office box number — PO Box 500, London — has been quietly reading other people's letters, following other people's footsteps, and keeping the realm's most closely guarded secrets. MI5, the British Security Service, was founded in 1909 in the nervous run-up to the First World War under the mot...

Recorded on location in Hammersmith at Emery Walker's House — the best-preserved Arts and Crafts interior in Britain, packed with original William Morris wallpaper and once home to William Morris's great friend and collaborator, the printer Emery Walker — this is the September edition of What's On in London. Jonathan makes the case that September might be the single best month of the year t...

In this episode of the Anglotopia Podcast, Jonathan Thomas is joined by Dr. Richard Claxton, Chief Executive of the National Garden Scheme, for a conversation about one of the most quietly magical institutions in Britain. On weekends across England, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands, ordinary people — and some rather extraordinary ones — throw open their garden gates and invit...

In this episode of the Anglotopia Podcast, Jonathan Thomas is joined by Professor Patrick Nunn — geographer at the University of the Sunshine Coast, honorary professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne, and visiting fellow at Oxford — for a conversation that will permanently change how you look at the map of Britain. Patrick's new book, Whispers from Celtic Seas, published this month...

This is a special one. Recorded on home soil just days before departure, this is Jonathan Thomas's complete pre-trip briefing before he leaves to walk the entire 84-mile length of Hadrian's Wall — coast to coast across Northern England. It has been fifteen years in the making. Jonathan walks through the whole story: the conversation with his wife a year ago that set everything in motion, the year...

In this episode of the Anglotopia Podcast, Jonathan Thomas welcomes back Dr. Chris Smith — historian at Coventry University, author of The Hidden History of Bletchley Park and The Last Cambridge Spy, and a returning friend of the podcast for his third appearance — to explore one of the most remarkable and troubling stories in modern British history: the Cambridge Five. Five young men, recru...

In this monthly episode of the Anglotopia Podcast, Jonathan Thomas returns with his August edition of What's On in London — and this one comes with a personal twist, because Jonathan will be in London himself later in the month. August is London's most contradictory month: the busiest tourist season of the year, a million-plus visitors, packed attractions and carnival streets — and yet simu...

In this sponsored episode of the Anglotopia Podcast — brought to you by ACP Rail and BritRail — Jonathan Thomas sits down with Tim Roebuck, a man who has spent his entire career in rail travel: station manager, head of BritRail Travel International in New York, senior VP at ACP Rail for 25 years, and one of the most knowledgeable people alive on the subject of getting around Britain by trai...

In this episode of the Anglotopia Podcast, Jonathan Thomas sits down with Jeremy Harte — folklorist, winner of the Catherine Briggs Folklore Award, curator of Bourne Hall Museum in Surrey, and author of Cloven Country: The Devil in the English Landscape and Travelers Through Time: A Gypsy History — to discuss his remarkable new book Treasures on Earth: Buried Wealth in the English Landscape...

In this second sponsored episode with Findmypast — the follow-up to our Genealogy 101 introduction — Jonathan Thomas and Jen Baldwin, Research Specialist at Findmypast, go deeper into the records, techniques, and stories that turn a nervous beginner into a confident family historian. The episode covers the extraordinary richness of the 1921 census and 1939 register, why the newspaper archiv...