Other Edens Podcast
1) 5: The Ballad of Reading Services
Christmas Day, 2021. I stop at Reading motorway services and find graffiti on the wall of a toilet cubicle: two locals, Gavin and Chelsea, are hacking brains using their iPhones. This Christmas specia...Show More
2) 4: A History of the English Village
What makes the quintessential English village? A church? A pub? A post office? A cricket pitch? Everyone knows the English village, whether it's from real life or via The Vicar of Dibley or Midsomer ...Show More
3) 3: The Maunsell Sea Forts: Iron islands in the Thames
In 1942, an engineer named Guy Maunsell constructed a series of audacious defensive towers out where the Thames estuary meets the North Sea. These structures – known now as the Maunsell Sea Forts – re...Show More
4) 2: Lewes: a town of smoke and flame
Remember, remember the fifth of November. Gunpowder, treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot. Well, in the East Sussex town of Lewes, that 1605 assassination att...Show More
5) 1: Pluckley: England's most haunted village
Nestled away in Kent is the small village of Pluckley. It looks charming and chocolate boxy: a pub, a butcher, a post office and a churchyard. But scratch that veneer and you find a place that has bec...Show More
6) Coming on Halloween... Other Edens
All things must change. As surely as winter bursts into spring life, spring into bountiful summer, summer into the falling leaves of autumn and autumn back into the denuded branches of winter, so too ...Show More
7) The Town That Knew Too Much: The Doughnut
The Doughnut. A giant circular low-rise office block in west Cheltenham; it is, jokingly I'm sure, said to look from above like a giant bullseye. Here, the men and women of GCHQ go to work every day....Show More
8) The Town That Knew Too Much: The Black Abbot
Where do the dead go when they die? Do we file them away in obituaries? Or celebrate them at a memorial service and slowly forget their day-to-day existence? This is a story of death. It is a story o...Show More
9) The Town That Knew Too Much: Time of Trial
Geoffrey Prime, Soviet spy at GCHQ, has been arrested on sexual offences against children. But that was just the start of his world unravelling. And as the Prime affair came to a boil, the grubby comp...Show More
10) The Town That Knew Too Much: The Wishing Fish Clock
There's a clock in Cheltenham that hangs above a shopping arcade. Below its face a magnificent golden fish rotates and, on the half hour spews bubbles. It is a singular work from a singular mind: that...Show More