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Wymering Manor: Portsmouth’s oldest domestic building

In this blog, the fourth in a series of posts looking at sites of historical interest in Portsmouth, Dr Katy Gibbons, Senior Lecturer in History, discusses the significant but often overlooked history of Wymering Manor, the oldest domestic building in the city of Portsmouth. Katy’s research specialisms focus on the religious and cultural history of early modern England, and specifically on the Catholic communities living under Protestant rule. This connects to her teaching at Levels 4 and 6 of the History curriculum, particularly specialist modules on religious identity in Elizabethan England. For a place rich in heritage, Wymering Manor, on the outskirts of Portsmouth, is one of its often-overlooked gems. […]

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(Un)safe heritage?

In this post, the third in our series of blogs looking at sites of historical interest in Portsmouth, Mike Esbester, Senior Lecturer in History at Portsmouth, explores what might be learnt from an apparently unexceptional piece of the city’s built environment. Mike’s research and teaching focus on the everyday, including ideas about mobility and accidents in modern Britain. Not far from my office, there’s yet another mundane object that for most of the time, most people don’t notice – for 140 years it was part of the background to life around Burnaby Road. For a week or so earlier this year, however, it became very noticeable – particularly its absence, […]

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Going to the cinema? The changing uses of Portsmouth’s cinema buildings

In this blog, the second in a series of posts looking at sites of historical interest in Portsmouth, Dr Rob James, Senior Lecturer in History, discusses the changing uses of the city’s cinema buildings. Rob specialises in researching society’s leisure activities and teaches a number of units on film and the cinema, including, as part of the Problems and Perspectives unit, ‘History at the Movies’ in the first year, ‘The Way to the Stars: Film and cinema-going in Britain, c. 1900-c. 2000’ option in the second year, and a Special Subject on ‘Cinema-going in Wartime Britain, 1939-1945’ in the third year. Going to the cinema was an important leisure pastime […]

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Enriching the learning experience: Exploring Tudor heritage in Southampton

In this blog, Dr Katy Gibbons, Senior Lecturer in History at Portsmouth, reports on a field trip undertaken as part of her Special Subject Module, ‘Conflict, Conspiracy, Consensus: Religious Identities in Elizabethan England’. One of the challenges of researching a society that is several hundred years removed from our own is in understanding the physical and material aspects that seem so different – the places in which people lived and interacted with each other, the clothes they wore, the objects they owned, and the meanings that were invested in them. This might be particularly challenging when thinking our way into religion and religious experience, and grasping the ways in which […]

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Forlorn remnant of a runaway King

In this blog, the first in a series of posts by the History team looking at sites of historical interest in Portsmouth, David Andress, Professor in Modern History at Portsmouth, reveals the fascinating history of King James’s Gate, an almost-unique monument to a monarch who fled the country he ruled. Dave specialises in the history of the French Revolution, and of the social and cultural history of conflicts in Europe and the Atlantic world more generally in the period between the 1760s and 1840s. He teaches across the undergraduate degree, and currently delivers core teaching on methodologies, as well as contributing his specialist knowledge of eighteenth-century and revolutionary France to first- and third-year modules. […]

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