Follow the Great Western Railway from Penzance to Paddington with its ‘perishable’ trains which carried fish and flowers to market from the 1860s, transforming the landscape and fortunes of the temperate Scilly Isles.

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.

Step into a Sunday School ‘Flower Show and Industrial Exhibition’ from 1889 in Peckham to hear a rather disparaging newspaper report on the children’s exhibits.

The laboratory of 2 Plough Court, hub for Quaker scientists and inventors, and an ancestor to today’s Glaxo Smith Kline.