Join me on a visit to a working people’s flower show, held in the quiet square of Dean’s Yard in Westminster in 1883, to find out why window-gardening was encouraged by social reformers in the Victorian era.

Discover the fields and glasshouses of the Walker farm at Ham in Richmond, a farm which exported its quality flower bulbs to Holland in the 1890s…

Discover the work of Miranda and Octavia Hill’s Kyrle Society, and their mission to ‘bring beauty home to the people’ in the late-nineteenth century.

London’s walls may have been built by the Romans, but when the Vikings encountered them in the tenth and eleventh centuries ‘they suffered’, as the anonymous Anglo-Saxon chronicler put it, ‘more harm and injury than they ever imagined that any town-dwellers would do to them’.