On 23 April - St George's Day - I will be walking 40 miles from one side of London to the other in aid of 3 homelessness charities: @PassageCharity, @18_keys & @AMARLondon.
Just one episode in what is undoubtedly the biggest sports story of the year: my @AuthorsCC benefit.
Details of how to sponsor me, and help to slay the dragon of homelessness, both here in the UK & in northern Iraq, are here: givergy.uk/tomholland/?co…
All your help & support is massively, massively appreciated. Thank you!
Today, having already done tours of Roman, Anglo-Saxon & Medieval London, I am going to take the obvious next step. Yes, folks – it’s #TudorLondon!
“The town which Brutus sought,” as Sir Thomas Wyatt put it…
The 16th century was a time of seismic change in the capital, fuelled above all the impact of the Reformation. Monasteries & abbeys across & beyond the capital were dissolved, sold off, converted or demolished. The fabric of London was profoundly transformed.
“Fair houses in London were plenteous, and very easy to be had at low and small rents, & by reason of the late dissolution of religious houses many houses in London stood vacant, & not any man desirous to take them.”
Tudor London was a good place to be investing in real estate.
RIP Prince Philip: a cricketer who always called Istanbul Constantinople, had a fascination with UFOs, & who was - as the Queen still is - a living link to the heroism of the generations that lived through the Second World War.
I love this photo! The best one of the Queen & Prince Philip together I think I’ve ever seen.
This is wonderful news! Over the course of the walks I've been doing round London, I've kept coming back to @AllHallowsTower: a church I had never visited before this past year, but which is as moving & fascinating a building as any in the capital.
Here are the details of the visit I made a few weeks back, when I was doing a tour of Anglo-Saxon sites across London. @AllHallowsTower has what I think is the city's only physical remnant of the Anglo-Saxon period on open display.
A new book I know nothing about, except that it arrived in the post today, looks right up my street, & I am now going to curl up & make it my Easter read...
Anne Wroe’s ‘biography’ of Pilate is a book I absolutely loved - so am definitely on for another about the man who, in the Creed, serves as the representative of all earthly power
"The writer of Luke - like the other gospel-writers - is totally uninterested in 'redeeming' the Roman prefect. That Pilate declares Jesus innocent deepens his guilt."
Dusenbury stimulatingly taking on the exegetical consensus there...