Sunday 6 September, 2026
7pm (London)
Subterranean London
Guest Speaker: Rob Smith

Londoners are used to going underground, being home to the world’s first underground metropolitan railway, we have perhaps become a little blasé about entering subterranean spaces.

However there is more underneath London than the Tube, and in this virtual tour on Zoom, Rob will tell you about twelve more subterranean London spaces you can visit. Crypts, caves, tunnels, vaults and bunkers beneath London will be revealed along with their history and the stories of the people that made them.

Rob Smith is one of the tour guides with Footprints of London. He has been exploring London for 40 years and decided to study to become a tour guide after doing a course on London History at Birkbeck College. In addition to his work as a tour guide Rob teaches London History courses at Morley College. He has appeared on TV on the Pubs That Made Britain and Who Do You Think You Are? He has appeared on Dan Snow’s, History Hit Podcast.

£10 for individual talk

Sunday 13 September, 2026
7pm (London)
The Grand Duke’s Ices: Cold Consumption in Early Modern Tuscany
Guest Speaker: Anna Speyart

Early modern Tuscans began chilling their refreshments with snow and ice, which they harvested and stored in winter for summer use. This talk reconstructs the practices and technologies with which users secured access to year-round ice and the health risks that physicians attributed to cold consumption.

Anna Speyart is a PhD Candidate in History of Science at Princeton University. She works on the science and technology of freezing in early modern Europe.

£10 for individual talk

Sunday 20 September, 2026
7pm (London)
Shadow Codes & Secret Gadgets: The Art of Espionage
Speaker: Melanie King

From shaved heads and secret tattoos to laser microphones and invisible pixels, espionage has always been a technological race between those who hide messages and those who hunt them down. This talk explores the astonishing gadgets and tradecraft that shaped the shadow world of spying, from 15th-century cipher machines to microdots, the legendary Enigma Machine, and covert programs such as PURPLE and MAGIC. Melanie will uncover how messages were hidden in plain sight, smuggled across borders, and now lie buried inside digital images and data streams. It’s a journey through centuries of innovation where secrecy, ingenuity, and deception collide.

Join Melanie as we uncover the tastes, sounds, and stories of a vanished world and celebrate the people who turned hardship into heritage. Her latest book Cold Comforts: a Journey Through Ice Cream will be published in 2026.

£10 for individual talk

Sunday 4 October, 2026
7pm (London)
The Frontier Ablaze: Life and Death on India’s North West Frontier
Guest Speaker: Lieutenant Colonel (retired) Mike Tickner

Service on the North West Frontier was characterised by searing heat, freezing winds, boredom, fatigue and sudden, violent death. Between 1936-7, 60,000 Indian and British troops deployed to Waziristan to fight the Fakir of Ipi in the last major Frontier campaign before independence. Learn how the British governed the Frontier and join a Column as it advances through the mountains and is attacked by Wazir and Mahsud tribesmen. Will the Column reach their camp tonight?

Lieutenant Colonel Mike Tickner is a retired Regular Army officer with a long term interest in the British Army in India and particularly the Far East campaigns and the North West Frontier. He regularly gives talks to military and civilian groups, clubs and museums and writes the occasional article. He has led battlefield studies to the India and South-East Asia, most recently to Singapore.

£10 for individual talk

Sunday October 25, 2026
7pm (London)
Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions
Guest Speaker: Lucy Hughes-Hallet

Geoffrey Chaucer made Cleopatra leading heroine of his Legend of Good Women. Half a millennium later Cecil B de Mille called her ‘the wickedest woman in history’. Poets, painters, playwrights and film-makers have been interpreting and distorting the story of the last queen of Egypt ever since her suicide in 44 AD.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett talks about the real Cleopatra, and about the many legends that have grown up around her. She shows how hostile Roman propaganda created the image of a woman so alluring that for her love’s sake the world would be well lost.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett is a biographer, cultural historian and novelist whose books have won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, the Costa Biography of the Year Award, the Plutarch Prize and the Biographers Club Award for an Exceptional Contribution to Biography.

Her book on Gabriele d’Annunzio, The Pike, was named in the Sunday Times as ‘the biography of the decade’. Her most recent book is The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham, which has been described as ‘fabulous’ (The Guardian), ‘dazzling’ (Wall Street Journal) and ‘stunningly good’ (The Sunday Times).

She is a widely respected critic and in 2020 she was chair of the judges of the International Booker Prize.

£10 for individual talk

Sunday 1 November, 2026
7pm (London)
Killing Lenin, Fooling Hitler and Making History: The Life of Robert Bruce Lockhart
Guest Speaker: Professor James Crossland

Robert Bruce Lockhart lived through and participated in some of the most important events of the twentieth century. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, he became the British government’s unofficial ‘Agent’ in Russia, where he conspired with MI6’s ‘Ace of Spies’, Sidney Reilly, to bring down their revolutionary regime.

Lockhart continued to work in the shadows during the 1920s and 30s, facing down the other great ideological force of the age – Fascism. Lockhart foresaw the danger of Mussolini and Hitler, and waged a war of words and ideas against them. This campaign culminated in 1942, when Lockhart was appointed head of the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) – a top secret organisation commissioned by Winston Churchill to use fake news, subversion and propaganda to take the fight for Europe’s hearts and minds to the Third Reich.

From the jungles of Malaysia to the snow-driven streets of Moscow, from the private clubs of Prague to the secret bunkers of Britain’s countryside, Lockhart’s story is one of scandals and subversion, bitter truths and cunning deceptions, scattered across an age of war, revolution and extremism.

James Crossland is a Professor of International History at Liverpool John Moores University and host of the History’s Devils podcast. He has a broad interest in the history of intelligence, political violence, and the politics of warfare. In addition to Rogue Agent, he is the author of The Rise of Devils: Fear and the Origins of Modern Terrorism (MUP, 2023), War, Law and Humanity: The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1853-1914 (Bloomsbury, 2018) and the forthcoming The Afterwar: Britain’s Secret Battle Against Revolutionaries, Rioters and Russians (Elliot & Thompson, 2027).

£10 for individual talk

Sunday 22 November, 2026
7pm (London)
Cold Comforts: The Hidden Ice Houses of Britain
Speaker: Melanie King

Long before electrified refrigeration, the great houses of Oxfordshire had their own ingenious way of keeping food chilled and drinks deliciously cold. Hidden beneath gardens, buried in woodland, or tucked away behind grand estates lay the remarkable structures known as ice houses. But how did they work? Where did the ice come from? And what do these forgotten buildings reveal about the lavish lifestyles of the past?

Join Melanie King as she uncovers the secrets of Oxfordshire’s ice houses, exploring how 18th- and 19th-century households went to extraordinary lengths to preserve their perishables and impress their guests with out-of-season delicacies. From frozen lakes to underground chambers, from Georgian extravagance to Victorian ingenuity, we will go on a journey into a world where ice was a symbol of wealth, status and technological ambition.

£10 for individual talk

Sunday 29 November, 2026
7pm (London)
Poverty, pestilence and public health in Victorian Britain
Guest Speaker: Dr Simon Wenham

Britain may have been the ‘workshop of the world’ in the Victorian period, but the sceptre of poverty and pestilence loomed large over the lives of many of its citizens. A large proportion of people were not only close to the bread line, but repeated epidemics decimated whole swathes of the population. This talk explores the wealth and health of the British during the Victorian period and the State’s struggle to improve conditions.

Dr Simon Wenham teaches courses on the Victorian period at University of Oxford’s Continuing Education Department. He is the author of two books, Pleasure Boating on the Thames: A History of Salter Bros 1858-Present Day (published in 2014 and updated in 2017) and Hobbs of Henley: A History (published in 2020). Simon is an experienced speaker and offers illustrated talks on social history to history societies and museums. He offers online history courses and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio Oxford and has appeared on the UK Channel 4 and Channel 5.

£10 for individual talk

Sunday December 6, 2026
7pm (London)
How to Forge a Secret Agent: The History of the Briggens House Forgery Unit
Guest Speaker: Charles Pither

Briggens House in Essex was owned during the war by the 4th Baron Aldenham, Walter Gibbs who was chairman of the National Westminster Bank. It is an 18th century manor house, requisitioned by the MOD in WW2. It was used initially for training Polish army exiles, being prepared to return to Poland to engage in acts of sabotage. Such personnel required fake documents, and the Poles established a forgery unit in the basement.

With the progression of the war this unit was expanded and became section XIV of the Special Operations Executive. The unit went on to produce all documents needed by agents working gin Europ as well as bank notes, stamps and other propaganda material.

This is the story of that secret unit.

Charles Pither trained as a physician and anaesthetist at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. For over thirty years is worked as an academic consultant physician specialising in pain management. Throughout his medical career he continued to write creatively and is the author of a novel about Biggins House called Ipseity.

£10 for individual talk

Sunday 13 December, 2026
7pm (London)
The Conquest of Gaul: Julius Caesar’s Road to Power
Guest Speaker: Dr Ross King

If Julius Caesar was one of history’s greatest military commanders, his most important and successful campaign was the Gallic Wars, fought in modern-day France and Belgium between 58 and 50 BC. This lecture explores the wars not simply as a Roman military conquest, but as the making of Caesar himself: Gaul was the vast arena in which he won personal glory, incredible wealth, and the fierce loyalty of his battle-hardened legions. The Gallic Wars were therefore both a military drama and a political turning point, setting Caesar on the road to crossing the Rubicon and seizing power in Rome.

Dr Ross King is the author of numerous books on Italian art and history, including Brunelleschi’s Dome and The Bookseller of Florence. His two latest books are The Shortest History of Ancient Rome (2025) and The Shortest History of Italy (2024).

£10 for individual talk