2024 was a barren year for the blog, with a lack of free time leading not only to fewer posts, but much less opportunity for research. This also led to a change in tack, with posts focusing more on discussions or showcases rather than deep dives.
The dangerous world of politics featured prominently this year, with the General Election prompting a full quarter of posts in 2024, drawing on historic elections in Harwich to make observations and predictions, with surprisingly reasonable success.
Showcases included a rare glimpse into the renovations at Harwich Town Rail Station, from seven years ago now, and also a piece on the Birds of a Feather 1989 Christmas Special which was partially shot at Parkeston Quay – now seems the perfect time to check it out if you haven’t already!
Certainly the one standout post of the year, in terms of detailed research, was A King and His Many Heads, a discussion of the “King’s Head” name, and its usage in Harwich history. The part towards the end in particular, about Harwich House, is the sort of methodical disassembly this blog was built on, and hopefully there will be a return to this in the future.
We leave this blog for this year with a paragraph from the first post of the year: The Role of Lived History in Old History. One of the more observational posts on the blog, and hopefully one of the more thought-provoking, this paragraph is perhaps my favourite from it:
Victorians didn’t have social media, TV, or radio, but they did have authors, poets, bands, musicals, plays, newspapers, periodicals, artists, historians, and good old local gossip. They had shared culture, and diverse culture all the same. When a dark joke about Calcraft did the rounds, people knew the context. Of authors, Besant, Braddon, and Bulwer-Lytton were almost as familiar as Dickens. Going even further back, Shakespeare added more words to the lexicon than even the most influential TikTokker, and it was up to educated Stuarts to play catch-up.
Harwicensis 