Free Thinking

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Free Thinking: Travel, pleasure and peril

Travel, pleasure and peril

BBC Radio 4 - Free Thinking, Travel, pleasure and peril

From preventing strangulation on the railways to guide maps and the art of travel posters.

From horseback to sailing ship, train to car, Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough looks at the dangers and delights of travel over the past 400 years.

Going on a trip? Get ready to get uncomfortable, pack grease to treat your sore bum, and laudanum for the inevitable travel sickness -  and perhaps you might also be in need of an anti-strangulation collar to ward off those potential murderers? 

We’re delving into the perils of travelling in the past. Back in the 1700s there was no such thing as a relaxing weekend break, travelling could be a fraught and even deadly undertaking. Such was the danger, making a will before you set off seemed reasonable.

Emily Stevenson, Lecturer in Renaissance and Early Modern Literature at the University of York, is researching women travellers as far back as the 1550s. Some set out on religious pilgrimages, others on trade missions, smoothing the way for their husband’s wheeler-dealing.  It’s a picture of heroines and hardship.

Alun Withey, lecturer in History at the University of Exeter is opening the suitcases of the time, what did travellers take with them and why ? How have the accoutrements of travel changed or remained the same over the last 400 years? 

Art Historian Rebecca Savage from the University of Birmingham, looks at the artistic legacy of travel poster designers from before the second world war. Many were artists in their own right and many were women. Their iconic images of country picnics and modernist landscapes evoke a sense of rural Britain lost in time. 

And as we move from the era of the railway to the car, Social Historian Tim Cole from the University of Bristol takes us on a journey inspired by paternalistic travel guides and maps given out freely as part of the 1951 Festival of Britain. How relevant are they now, how much of what they describe is lost in the past or still with us? 


Producer: Julian Siddle

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Free Thinking

Travel, pleasure and peril

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