Portillo's Hidden History of Britain

Discover the hidden history of Britain through the stories of its 'lost' or abandoned places and buildings.

Portillo’s Secret History of Britain presents a compelling and wonderfully evocative history of Britain through the stories of its ‘lost’ or abandoned places and buildings. The chapters cover a variety of historical themes: Crime and Punishment, Health and Medicine, Defence and Warfare, and Entertainment and Leisure. Using a combination of his own investigations and archive research, plus memories and quotations from the contributors he interviewed for the series, Michael Portillo explains what the buildings were used for and by whom, why they were abandoned, and what they can tell us about our past. For example:

* Learn what the ruins of London Road Fire and Police Station in Manchester reveal about the history of the emergency services in the last 100 years

* How Bradford’s art deco Odeon cinema encapsulates a century of film-making and movie-going

With evocative text that brings each location vividly to life, Michael Portillo describes the building and its activities in its heyday and compares this past life with its faded grandeur or melancholic abandonment seen today. Filled with fascinating insights and observations, his narrative provides a compelling and original perspective on Britain’s social and military history.

Portillo's Hidden History of Britain features deserted villages, abandoned prisons, closed-down cinemas, empty hospitals, derelict military bases, sewers and much more. Complementing the text are 32 pages of atmospheric and informative photographs, including ‘then’ and ‘now’ images of the locations, which pointedly juxtapose their former glory with their present-day destitution.

The Beginning and the End of Everything

'Prepare to have your mind blown! A brilliantly written overview of the past, present and future of modern cosmology.' – DALLAS CAMPBELL, author of Ad Astra

The Beginning and the End of Everything is the whole story as we currently understand it – from nothing, to the birth of our universe, to its ultimate fate. Authoritative and engaging, Paul Parsons takes us on a rollercoaster ride through billions of light years to tell the story of the Big Bang, from birth to death.

13.8 billion years ago, something incredible happened. Matter, energy, space and time all suddenly burst into existence in a cataclysmic event that’s come to be known as the Big Bang. It was the birth of our universe. What started life smaller than the tiniest subatomic particle is now unimaginably vast and plays home to trillions of galaxies. The formulation of the Big Bang theory is a story that combines some of the most far-reaching concepts in fundamental physics with equally profound observations of the cosmos.

From our realization that we are on a planet orbiting a star in one of many galaxies, to the discovery that our universe is expanding, to the groundbreaking theories of Einstein that laid the groundwork for the Big Bang cosmology of today – as each new discovery deepens our understanding of the origins of our universe, a clearer picture is forming of how it will all end. Will we ultimately burn out or fade away? Could the end simply signal a new beginning, as the universe rebounds into a fresh expanding phase? And was our Big Bang just one of many, making our cosmos only a small part of a sprawling multiverse of parallel universes?