How Accessible is Winchester?

Hi everyone, I am Nicole, a university student studying Film. While I am interning at Travelusion Tours, I have been working on creating accessible guides for the tours and updating the website and blog.

I have been living in Winchester for about three years and have been exploring the area when I can. Since being in university, my mental and physical health has significantly declined. Therefore, I have started to look at everyday things and assess how accessible they can be and have to adapt to my own conditions. So, if you are considering visiting Winchester, you can prepare for how you can get around here and what you can do. I am basing this on my experiences and disabilities as well as research on how other disabilities and conditions would be affected. Let us know your thoughts on Winchester in the comments and what to look out for!

Pros:

Let us start with the positives. What does Winchester do well to make the city accessible for everyone?

Transport:

Public transport around Winchester is alright. The trains are frequent, and you can get to most places in a direct route – London is only an hour away! The buses here go to essential stops like the big supermarkets, city centre, hospital, university, and there are lots of taxi stops too. The good thing about Winchester being a small city is that most of your travelling should not take too long to get to, and most roads are one-way systems to limit the traffic. But the majority of Winchester is very walkable: even at a leisurely pace you can get from one end of the city centre to the other in 30 mins tops.

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To New Beginnings!

Long time no see! (Or read in this case!) Hope you are all keeping well. You will probably be wondering what is all the fuss about. Well, I finally finished all my studies, got that PhD that cost me blood, sweat and tears and…it turns out the world I had been promised didn’t exist any more. Or at least not in British academia in the humanities. So, I decided to become master of my own fate and carry on with my mission of educating the public, My Way.

Me doing a virtual tour in Winchester (UK)

So I started my own company mixing my historical background and my tour guiding passion. In case you didn’t know, I started tour guiding at the same than the blog (W.U Hstry days!) in 2010 as a cathedral tower tour guide in Winchester. I love talking to people and sharing all the random bits of knowledge, thoughts and ideas I’ve accumulated throughout the years (PhD and beyond!). And let me tell you: it is just so very refreshing to be able to exercise history in front of people. Being a historian allows me to deconstruct places almost to a molecular cultural level. And that, it seems to me, is what actually allows people to make meaningful connections to places and things beyond the “let’s take a selfie for Insta” moment.

Me just finishing a Roman Re-enactment Tour Experience with James from Leg II Avg

And that is what I am here for. Still me. Still history. Just a new perspective. So, I hope you are ready for the new things coming our way. *Spoiler Alert: there will be More travel history articles*. Aside from that, it is just more of the same sweet content I’ve been putting on the table for you guys for over a decade. You’ve been part of this journey so far, so, surely, you didn’t think I’d abandon you, right?

Thanks a lot for sticking with us. I really, really appreciate it. Now take care and see you on the next post!

Nu History Podcast – 12 – Totalitarianism

In our latest episode Lilly and Alex are joined by Jackson from History with Jackson to talk about his specialization in Totalitarianism, and how to define the term in an ever changing world.

Find links to Jackson’s content and work here: linktr.ee/HistorywithJackson

You can listen through Spotify below, or head to Anchor for links to follow on Apple, Google and wherever else you get your podcasts.

Slovenia: Alpine Slavs of the Migration Period

For my next contribution to the ABC of world history I’ve drawn S for Slovenia! For which I decided to take the chance to look into my favourite era of Slavic history: the migration period.

When compared with its other south Slavic neighbours, Slovenia definitely has some differences, most of which can perhaps be attributed to its geographical location and features. Being situated on the very eastern edge of the Alps is certainly a significant feature in Slovenian history, as is being on the very western edge of the Balkan region. Unlike the rest of their south Slavic cousins, who spent much of their history under the rule of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, the Slovenes instead found themselves within the Carolingian, and then the Holy Roman Empire. Despite the differences in history, Slovenia is certainly a south Slavic country, with a language very closely related to that of Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia, and there are distinctly Slavic indigenous Slovenes in neighbouring regions of Italy and Austria.

So what is the story of the first Slavs that settled in the region that was to become Slovenia? To begin with let’s go back to the first Slavs in general. The original term used for Slavs in the region “Sclavenes” was used in sixth century Byzantine sources as an umbrella term for a multitude of groups living north of the Danube frontier which could not otherwise be classified as either Huns or Gepids. They were also mentioned as having appeared at the Byzantine borders along with the “Antes”, another Slavic group which would become known as East Slavs. To these Byantine, largely military authors the Sclavenes were essentially seen as a new kind of enemy to be aware of to the extent that their forms of warfare were different from other barbarians. This likely means that a general Sclavene or Slavic ethnicity was initially an invention of the early Byzantines. But invention does not mean pure fiction, as Byzantine authors seem to have used “Sclavene” to make sense of a process of group identification which was taking place under before their eyes on the frontier of the Empire. An identity did certainly seem to take form during this time, with evidence in distinct styles of material culture spreading amongst these communities north of the Danube. This was perhaps as a direct result of the isolation lack of movement that the fortified frontier caused, as political and military mobilization was the response to the conditions that various groups of proto-slavs took, and increased social competition led to the rise of leaders among them.

Dacia: A Look at Ancient Romania

For the letter “R” this week, I will be talking about a period of history that is the most special to me. The country is Romania, and for Romania I want to again explore the ancient past of the country – most notably the Kingdom of Dacia, the king Decabalus, and the series of events that let to war with the Rome and the source of one of the most iconic monuments in Rome today.

Qatar’s Early History.

For this week’s letter – Q – we will be exploring Qatar. The previous places I’ve written about have been more modern history, but my specialism is in Ancient History, so I want to return to this period while exploring Qatar. In this blog, I’ll be looking into Qatar’s earliest history through to the withdrawal of the Seleucid Empire in the region.

Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea (PNG), like much of the world came into the main fold of recorded history through European discovery and colonialism, and only in recent history has it gained national independence.

Oman in the Paleolithic: Migration and Desertification

For my second contribution to ABC world history I have found myself with O for Oman! Having never significantly looked into the history of the Arabian Peninsula, let alone the region that modern day Oman covers, I decided to go early with it, and take a general overview of the different Paleolithic periods important to this part of the world leading up to the Neolithic revolution.

The present-day Sultanate of Oman lies in the south-eastern Arabian Peninsula, but there are different definitions for Oman, Oman traditionally included the present-day United Arab Emirates, though its prehistoric remains differ in some respects from the more specifically defined Oman proper which corresponds roughly with the current central provinces of the country. Oman is surrounded by the vast Rub Al-Khali desert to the west and the Arabian Sea and Sea of Oman to the south and east. The country is naturally divided into three geological zones: the Al-Hajar Mountains in northern Oman, the Huqf depression in the interior and the Dhofar Mountains in the southwest. Many wadis (valleys or dry riverbeds) cross the plateaus of the central region that once would have flowed with ancient rivers that led into perennial lakes in the lowlands. There is plenty of evidence that this would have once been a fairly productive landscape of grasslands before the region became the very arid place it is today.

Dhofar region cave art

The Birth of North Korea

For this week and the letter ‘N’, I will be giving a brief history on possibly one of the most infamous (if not the most infamous) modern-day political anomaly that is North Korea. North Korea is a byword for oppression, modern-day dictatorships, mass poverty, corruption, and any other negative connotation relating to politics and culture – to the extent that the term “this is like North Korea” is used to immediately express unfairness, personal depravity, and sometimes just commercial inconvenience. But how did North Korea come about? This blog will look at the years between the Second World War and the Korean War and how the political power and state of the land that still exists today originated and grew.

Mozambique: Sofala & Chibuene

Welcome once again dear readers to another entry in our ABC of World History. Today I am taking you back to Africa to the area of Mozambique in yet another effort to make this blog less eurocentric. I really hope the importance of this area comes across because as I was doing my research I still found so many sources about Mozambique and the Swahili coast of Africa that seem to ignore anything noteworthy before the European colonialists swinging by. So today I am bringing you some details about the development of Mozambique in the middle ages and the importance of this area for the development of trade.

As you may know, the Indian ocean key for trade in Africa since ancient times, and Mozambique is an important enclave. Evidence suggests however that since the collapse of the roman empire, sea trade may have declined for people living on the east coast of Africa and this may have powered the growth of the interior of countries such as Mozambique. But changes again with the arrival of Islam into Africa in the 7th century when the Indian ocean becomes again a prime hub for the exchange of goods, people and culture. Although it has been debated for a very long time how much interaction and mingling was between the Bantu and Swahili peoples of Mozambique and surrounding areas, it seems to transpire that there was a fair interaction and integration between the Arab newcomers and the natives. Briggs and Edmunds argue that the best evidence of this is in the language. Although Islam triumphs in terms of religious conversion, Swahili became the language used overall, even if with some Arabic borrowings. Now that you have some context I would like to use the following sections to 2 different enclaves in Mozambique that highlight the importance of trade and that show how active this part of the world has been for such a long time: