My interest in history was never tidy, academic, or well-behaved.
It was visceral.
From a young age, I was gripped by the Second World War — not the timelines, but the physical residue it left behind. Bunkers half-buried in dunes. Abandoned airfields. Ships rusting where they fell. History that refused to stay in books.
I built Airfix kits obsessively — especially the German ones. Not out of ideology, but because the engineering fascinated me. Machines designed under extreme pressure tell the truth about a society far more honestly than its slogans ever do.
Even then, I understood something instinctively:
history makes the most sense when you can touch it.
Years later, when I finally stood in Königsberg, in what had once been East Prussia, that instinct was confirmed. Walking through a place that had been erased, renamed, and repurposed was unsettling in the right way. This wasn’t history as story — it was history as absence. A reminder that entire worlds can vanish, leaving only fragments behind.
That stayed with me.
Castles and Holding Ground
Alongside war came castles.
My childhood holidays took me through the great castles of Northumberland — structures that didn’t exist to impress, but to endure. They followed the land. They commanded sightlines. They assumed conflict, not comfort.
Of them all, Dunstanburgh remains my favourite.
Half-ruined, exposed to wind and sea, uncompromising in its position — it never tried to be charming. It was built to hold ground, and even in decay it still does.
That appealed to me deeply.
It taught me early that permanence is not about polish.
It’s about intent.
Old Houses and Lived History
My fascination with history was never limited to ruins or artefacts.
I’ve always been drawn to old houses — not as investments, but as containers of lived time. Places where generations moved through rooms, made decisions, argued, reconciled, and aged.
Over the years, I carried that instinct into ownership.
I lived in houses built in 1926, 1895, and finally Montana, built in 1905 — a house that felt less like a property and more like a responsibility.
Montana wasn’t restored as a showpiece.
It was understood.
I dressed it according to its era and proportions. I learned its architectural language and responded to it rather than imposing myself on it. Furnishings, colours, materials, even tableware were chosen to suit the time the house came from — not out of nostalgia, but coherence.
I did much of the work myself.
There is something grounding about repairing and furnishing an old house with your own hands. You stop thinking in trends and start thinking in decades. You develop respect for craftsmanship, for restraint, and for the way spaces were designed to be lived in, not photographed.
For a time, I lived inside history rather than merely studying it.
And then, when the chapter was complete, I let it go.
The house.
The contents.
The accumulated weight of things.
Selling Montana — and everything in it — was not loss. It was completion. History doesn’t ask to be hoarded. It asks to be understood, honoured, and then released.
That experience taught me something quietly important: you can love history deeply without being owned by it.
Lines, Ghosts, and the Ground Beneath Us
As I grew older, my interest narrowed rather than expanded.
I began walking towns instead of passing through them. Following street layouts. Noticing which routes made sense and which didn’t. I became drawn to old railway lines — tracing where tracks once ran, finding bridges that now span nothing, stations reclaimed by weeds.
That instinct began early, playing around Knitsley station as a child. Even then, I knew I was standing inside something that once mattered enormously and now barely registered.
Infrastructure leaves ghosts.
Metal detecting grew naturally from that. History encountered not by looking, but by listening. Coins. Buttons. Buckles. The debris of ordinary lives — not famous men, just people moving, trading, losing things.
That kind of history interests me most.
Lineage, Loss, and the Weight Men Carried
In 2007, I turned the same curiosity inward.
Using the early internet, I researched my family tree properly — not casually, but rigorously. Every line. Every census. Every parish record. Nothing assumed.
What emerged wasn’t pride.
It was sobriety.
Children dying young — names that appear briefly, then vanish.
Men taking enormous strain and dying in their twenties, leaving wives and children behind with little protection and no safety net.
Families fractured not by drama, but by exhaustion, illness, and quiet endurance.
That kind of grief rarely makes it into official history.
But when you trace lineages carefully, it becomes impossible to ignore. You see how fragile life was, and how much weight was carried silently — especially by men who did not live long enough to see any reward.
That work changed how I understand resilience.
It also changed how I view modern complaints.
History stopped being something I observed from the outside.
It became something I was embedded in.
Ipoh, Empire, and the Lines That Remain
My travels have always followed this same thread.
I’m not interested in novelty.
I’m interested in places with weight.
Places that have seen extremes.
Ipoh is one of those places.
It is a barometer — a town that experienced extraordinary inflows and outflows of capital, both monetary and human. Tin wealth, imperial attention, migration, abandonment, decline. Boom and bust, layered over one another.
That kind of history leaves an intensity behind.
What deepened my interest was travelling through Malaya by train — on the very lines established by Great Britain. Lines built to extract, connect, administer, and control. Infrastructure laid down with long horizons, much of it still doing its quiet work.
Moving through that landscape by rail made the colonial project tangible in a way no book ever could. The stations. The towns that existed because of them. The trade routes fossilised into steel.
In Ipoh, for the first time in my life, I felt full of history and entirely present at the same time. Not nostalgic. Not detached.
Grounded.
Stamps, Coins, and Lost Worlds
Alongside all of this ran a quieter obsession: stamps and coins.
Small objects. Vast implications.
Names of places that no longer exist. Borders that shifted. Empires that vanished. Lives intersecting through trade, letters, obligation.
I collected them obsessively.
They taught me that history isn’t linear. It’s transactional. Messages sent. Money exchanged. People moving without knowing what would come next.
That understanding has shaped how I see the world far more than any formal study ever could.
Why History Matters to Me
I don’t engage with history out of reverence or nostalgia.
I engage with it because it trains pattern recognition.
You see how incentives work.
How power centralises — and collapses.
How infrastructure outlives ideology.
How ordinary lives leave traces long after narratives fade.
History has made me sceptical of permanence, suspicious of abstraction, and attentive to what actually endures.
I don’t study history to escape the present.
I study it to inhabit it properly.