Karl Whitney is the author of Hidden City: Adventures and Explorations in Dublin. Hit Factories: A Journey through the Industrial Cities of British Pop will be published in 2019.
In the spring of 1801 a young man called Hans Jonathan left the mansion in Copenhagen where he worked as a slave. Going for a walk was allowed: despite his status, he had a degree of autonomy within the walls of the city, then a thriving port with around one hundred thousand inhabitants. But this time he didn’t return. His owner, Henrietta Cathrina Schimmelmann, reported his escape...
The golf course was on fire, but no one knew how long it had been burning. The first sign that something wasn’t right was when a groundskeeper on the course, which is a few miles west of Newcastle, noticed that the soles of his boots were heating up. The surface of the ground was hot. That was in November 2014. At that point there wasn’t much to see – until it rained and...
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