Take the road up on the moors above the Northumberland town of Alnwick, and you’ll be driving across some of England’s wildest, most barren countryside. But just before you reach the village of Rothbury, everything briefly changes. An extensive stretch of woodland opens up to reveal an attractive lake. Above it to the right, largely hidden from view by more trees, perches a large house. This is Cragside, the remarkable home of William Armstrong (1810–1900), one of the richest industrialists in Victorian Britain, and the first scientist to be raised to the peerage.
Armstrong had originally trained as a solicitor, but his true love had always been engineering. In 1847 he completed the move from law to industry, buying the land at Elswick in Newcastle that he would develop into the hub of a vast manufacturing empire. At its height Armstrong’s company employed around 25,000 people, producing hydraulic cranes and machinery (including the mechanism that operates London’s Tower Bridge), armaments, and warships.
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The Long Road Back - The Election Was Tough for the Conservatives but the Past Holds Clues on How Parties Can Return From the Brink
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A Pole apart
ROGER MOORHOUSE is absorbed by a little-known but politically significant Polish princess whose life encompassed the major events of the later 18th and 19th centuries
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From Magna Carta to parliament, taxation to the law courts, the 13th and 14th centuries laid the foundations for the modern British state
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Æthelstan is one of the greatest of all Anglo-Saxon monarchs. So why, asks Michael Wood, does the first king of the English remain so fiendishly elusive?
