London History

Hazel Baker introduces Smithfield (West Smithfield near St Bartholomew’s Hospital and Smithfield Meat Market) as a deceptively ordinary open space that for centuries served both as a major market/fairground and a prominent execution site used to project state and church power.
With tour guide Maria Alexe’s commentary, the episode traces Smithfield’s execution history from William Wallace’s hanging, drawing and quartering in 1305 to the last clearly documented burning in 1612, noting its particular association with heresy burnings and high-profile traitors, especially the Marian burnings under Mary I (about 48 at Smithfield, per Foxe). It highlights John Foxe’s shaping of Protestant martyr memory through accounts such as John Rogers and Anne Askew, describes execution methods including hanging, burning, quartering and boiling (Richard Rouse in 1531; Margaret Davy in 1547), and explains the crowd spectacle, commerce, and the risk of creating martyrs. It ends by identifying surviving local traces—St Bartholomew the Great, the gateway, street names like Cloth Fair, and modern contrasts—and invites listeners to related walking tours.

Hazel Baker hosts journalist and author Rachel Hartigan on the London History Podcast to explore Amelia Earhart’s lesser-known relationship with London in 1928 and 1932, from Toynbee Hall’s settlement-house ideals to Selfridges displaying her plane and outfitting her after transatlantic flights with no spare clothes. Hartigan recounts how Earhart, then a Boston social worker, was recruited to join the 1928 Friendship crossing backed by Amy Phipps Guest, landing in Wales before reaching Southampton, and how London’s receptions—Ascot, Wimbledon, and events with figures like Winston Churchill and Lady Astor—revealed the scale of her sudden celebrity.
The episode discusses media portrayals, her evolving public persona, sources including Earhart’s own dispatches and archives, and what her London visits show about gender, modern fame, and optimism around aviation.

Hazel Baker traces the story of White Conduit House in Barnsbury, Islington, from its origins as a 1431 Henry VI–licensed water conduit supplying Charterhouse to its later life as an affordable, working-class pleasure garden. She explains how Robert Bartholomew’s 1750s improvements and famed hot rolls and butter made it a London destination, noted by Oliver Goldsmith, and how resident organist James Hook began his career there.
In the 1780s the adjacent White Conduit Fields hosted the aristocratic White Conduit Club; disruptions from a public right of way helped prompt Thomas Lord to secure a private ground in Marylebone, leading to the MCC and cricket’s codified laws.
The venue later rebranded with spectacles but declined as urban building and nearby gasworks spoiled the air, and it was demolished in 1849, with fragments remembered in names, gardens, plaques, and a surviving façade.
Show Notes

Hazel Baker hosts a London History Podcast episode with author and Lambeth tour guide David Turnbull exploring the musical legacy of the 1951 Festival of Britain and how, 75 years on, music again anchors South Bank celebrations with Danny Boyle’s “You Are Here.” They discuss the Royal Festival Hall’s symbolic opening night and its British-focused programme, the festival’s nationwide reach through choral competitions, mass singalongs and the HMS Campania tour, and the Arts Council’s opera commissions and controversies, including Alan Bush’s Wat Tyler.
The conversation traces how the festival’s optimism and internationalism helped shape later British sounds, spotlighting calypso’s unofficial anthem by Lord Kitchener, the arrival of the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra, and popular dance culture at Battersea Pleasure Gardens, alongside details of Turnbull’s limited-time walking tour.
Show Notes

Hazel Baker hosts a special bonus edition of the London History Podcast celebrating over 500,000 streams and downloads and continuing a “London’s firsts” theme with a slightly harder, play-along quiz.

Listeners get 12 questions with 15 seconds to think, then the show shares the answer and a short story behind each landmark “first,” spanning Norman and medieval London through the Georgian era and beyond.
The topics range across royal power, religion, law, theatre, newspapers and magazines, West End planning, docks and trade, botanic gardens, and public art exhibitions.
Hazel invites listeners to keep score, compare results with the first bonus quiz, share the podcast, and send in scores via Spotify Q&A or social media.