#architecture

Lost photographs from a 2007 trip to Bulgaria bring back Plovdiv, Bachkovo, a global conference and a suitcase misrouted to Tirana.In 2026, while looking for photographs for a completely different blog, I found an old compact camera. I had assumed that whatever remained on it had disappeared from my life years ago, yet its memory card still contain

I was staying in Fes, but Meknes gave me my first medina — and the first lesson that Morocco is rarely as simple as the guidebook version.My first serious day of sightseeing in Morocco did not begin in Fes, even though that was where I was staying. It began about fifty-five kilometres away, in Meknes.Read "Fes — I Walked Through a Gate and Left the

Seven years after my first visit, I returned to discover what Oxford keeps behind its gates Had apparition been allowed inside Hogwarts, I could have travelled directly from the Gloucester Cathedral cloister where Mrs Norris was found petrified to the hospital wing in Oxford’s Divinity School. Unfortunately, it was not. So I had to take a train.

A cheap flight from Nice, a newly reopened Marriott, free public transport and a freezing first encounter with Europe’s most understated capital Some journeys begin with one destination. This one began with a sequence. My New Year trip had started in Nice and would continue through Luxembourg, Brussels, Bordeaux and Paris. New Year’s Eve itself w

Hamlet’s castle, a brilliant royal tax, two queens and the grave of a man who never existed - “Gentlemen, you are welcome to Elsinore!” London, Rome and Paris sell themselves. Helsingør needs a story. Fortunately, it has one of the most famous stories ever written. Shakespeare placed Hamlet in Elsinore, the English name for the Danish town of Hel