From My Blog

A little interview I did in ‘Discover Britain’ magazine

Here’s a little interview I did which appears in the current issue of ‘Discover Britain’ magazine: My Britain: Historic Royal Palaces Chief Curator Lucy Worsley on her love for heritage. My mum and I used to visit historic properties when I was a child, but it was when I was about 18 and starting to think

Last week I dreamt I went to Milton Manor again

I know I’m always banging on about the time when I worked at Milton Manor, but I found myself back there once again last week.  I’m delighted to say that nothing’s changed in the last seventeen years, and that Anthony, Gwenda, and Cleopatra the llama are all still alive and thriving. Here are some photos from

New BBC film: ‘Food in England, The Lost World of Dorothy Hartley’

‘‘Food in England’, The Lost World of Dorothy Hartley’ … is a brand-new programme due to be shown on BBC4 at 9pm on Tuesday 6th November. It’ll be accompanied by a new edition of some of Dorothy’s journalism from the 1930s, ‘Lost World’ (left), published by Prospect Books with an extensive new biographical introduction.  Any

‘You rang, Majesty?’ … an article about royal servants

With Downton Abbey back again, and an interesting-looking new series on domestic service beginning this week on BBC2, here’s a relevant article I wrote a couple of years ago for the BBC Who Do You Think You Are? magazine.  It’s about how go about your research if you think ancestors of yours may have worked

Ladies, can you please help me find a new coat?

Hello!  Now, I do appreciate that this post is going to be of limited appeal.  It’s aimed squarely at the ladies among my acquaintance – and I know that there are at least a few of you out there – who love coats and dresses as much as I do.  Apologies to everyone else. In

Larking around in bed at Avebury Manor

Here’s an article about royal sleeping arrangements from the new National Trust magazine.  We did have fun larking around in the bed taking the photos! Sleeping Beauties Visit our country houses and you’ll soon run across the phenomenon that is the ‘state bed’.  Reserved for rare royal visits, these status symbols represented the most expensive item

My best bits of seventeenth-century Britain, from The Guardian

From The Guardian’s Travel section, 18th August, 2012. My best bits of historic Britain: historians’ top tips. From a tomb 5,000 years old to a club famous 50 years ago, the UK is so rich in sites it’s hard to know where to start. Here historians and authors pick their favourites. Lucy Worsley on the

In which I catch a robber, and get tourists to sit on him

You may have heard that my BBC history colleague Dan Snow sits on his own robbers.  I prefer to delegate it to other people. I’ve been in Oxford this last weekend, which prompts me to recount one of my favourite anecdotes.  It’s very well worn, and I hope it’s not become too exaggerated through repetition.

Historic Royal Palaces curators – a year in pictures

Last week I once again had to present our annual curators’ review to the trustees of Historic Royal Palaces, to update them on what we’ve been doing for the last year.  Here are some of my favourite pictures of my colleagues from the report.

‘All The Bells’, including this one from 1727

All the bells were ringing last week for the start of the Olympic Games, and this unusual bell from our collection joined in with a tinkle of its own. At the coronation of George II in 1727, a group of barons representing the Cinque Ports (Hastings, Hythe, New Romney, Sandwich and Dover) had the privilege