BBC Radio 4 LW

Making History podcast compressed

Making History

Factual: Life Stories

Factual: History

Popular history series where the past connects with the present.

Making History 

Making History: Dark tourism, World Cup 1938, The mobile library

Dark tourism, World Cup 1938, The mobile library

BBC Radio 4 - Making History, Dark tourism, World Cup 1938, The mobile library

Helen Castor presents stories from the past with a bearing on issues today.

Helen Castor presents stories from the past with a bearing on issues today, including dark tourism, the politics of the 1938 World Cup and the start of the mobile library service.

Helen Castor presents the popular history magazine. She's joined by Dr Jane Hamlett from Royal Holloway University of London.

It's 140 years since the UK prison system was nationalised and Iszi Lawrence visits Shrewsbury with Professor Alyson Brown from Edge Hill University to discover why a change in organisation was needed. Today, paying customers are experiencing life here at Her Majesty's pleasure - and all over the world people seem to want to visit places which have a grim and troubling past. So what's the appeal and the purpose of so-called "dark tourism"? Tom Holland talks to Dr Philip Stone from the University of Central Lancashire. 

The 2018 World Cup in Russia came at a time when President Putin's stock was high at home, but on the floor abroad. Not for the first time, football was seen as having the potential to offer a political leader a global platform. We go back to France '38 which was held against a backdrop of a growing global diplomatic crisis. Sports writer Julie Welch is joined by Professor Simon Martin and football journalist Jonathan Wilson to explain how, with civil war in Spain, the merging of the Austrian and German teams after the Nazi Anschluss and Mussolini promoting his brand of fascism through football, this really was a tournament with all to play for.

Council budget cuts, E-readers and on-line delivery are all presenting challenges to Britain's library service, and mobile libraries in particular have been badly affected. But when did the library van first start doing its rounds? Author of Mobile Library, David Whitehouse, heads back home to Nuneaton and the mobile library his mother used to clean.


A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

BBC Radio 4

BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

Radio 4

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

Making History

Dark tourism, World Cup 1938, The mobile library

Genres

Brand

BBC Radio 4 LW

About BBC Radio 4