Britain’s net zero construction workforce is already at risk of being burnt out: Kittirat Roekburi/Shutterstock The pressure of decarbonising industrial sectors is weighing on workers. The UK’s Labour government seeks a low-carbon and homegrown energy supply by 2030. The scale and pace of this transformation is unprecedented in the country’s power sector, and will involve …
Most of Britain’s peat bogs could stop forming new peat as the climate changes – new study: Joe Dunckley / shutterstock By the 2080s, climate change will mean most of Britain’s peatlands could be too dry to form new peat. That’s the stark warning from a new academic study my colleagues and I just published in …
Just Stop Oil’s harsh sentences are the logical outcome of Britain’s authoritarian turn against protest: Lengthy prison sentences have been imposed on five Just Stop Oil activists for coordinating direct action on the M25, the main ring road around London. For a non-violent protest, there is no equivalent in modern times. The five years for …
Renewables now generate more of Britain’s electricity than fossil fuels – but what happens next?: David Falconer / Shutterstock At the start of 2016, in an article noting some exciting changes in British energy, The Conversation published the following paragraph: Wind, solar and hydro – the weather-dependent renewables – together generated 14.6% of Great Britain’s …
A brief history of Britain’s obsession with the hot water bottle: Last winter, UK retailers reported record sales of water bottles as consumers look to cut their heating costs as the average household energy bills soared. Boiling a kettle to fill a hot water bottle uses less energy than an electric blanket or turning on …
The Shepherd: Disney’s ghostly new Christmas tale evokes the eerie qualities of Britain’s abandoned second world war airfields: From Charles Dickens to M.R. James, Christmas has a long association with ghost stories. In The Shepherd – part of Disney+’s festive fare for this year – we have an evocative addition to the genre. Based on …
The Great Escaper: Michael Caine’s final film is Britain’s answer to Saving Private Ryan: The Great Escaper is an engaging exploration of love, loss, memory and trauma. It’s also the final film for its star, Michael Caine, as he has recently announced his retirement. The film tells the real story of Royal Navy veteran, Bernard …
Our new map reveals the effects of 20th century land-use and climate change on Britain’s wild species: Brian A Jackson/Shutterstock Under the stewardship of geographer Sir Dudley Stamp, thousands of volunteers (including many schoolchildren) came together in the 1930s on a mission that sounds relatively simple on paper: to record how British land was being …
Britain’s new Faith Museum is the ideal place to set aside your preconceptions about religion: The new Faith Museum in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, faces three problems. First, “religion” is an explosively controversial subject on which it’s almost impossible not to stir up anger. Yet it’s also a subject that a great many modern British …
Senghenydd colliery disaster: how Britain’s worst mining tragedy revealed the true price of coal: Miners working at the Universal Colliery in Senghenydd, south Wales, were in the middle of their morning shifts 2000ft below the ground when a massive explosion ripped through the deep pit at 8.10am. A spark from an electric bell had ignited …
How Sunak’s back-pedalling on net zero could damage efforts to decarbonise Britain’s homes: Clare Louise Jackson/Shutterstock Rishi Sunak, the UK prime minister, has announced his government will scrap or delay a number of measures designed to help the UK reach net zero by 2050, with a particular focus on housing. This includes getting rid of …
Tory MP’s historic family links to slavery raise questions about Britain’s position on reparations: “Reparations have been paid for other wrongs and obviously far more quickly, far more speedily than reparations for what I consider the greatest atrocity and crime in the history of mankind: transatlantic chattel slavery.” So noted the eminent Jamaican international jurist …
Don’t just wait for the water firms – three things we can do right now to clean up Britain’s rivers: Simon Corrall / shutterstock Britain’s rivers and coasts are polluted – there’s no escaping that fact – and water companies are coming under more and more pressure to fix things. Most recently, a law firm …
Britain’s next election could be a climate change culture war: A byelection in a London suburb has placed environmental policy at the centre of political debate in the UK, and could make it a key battleground in the next general election. The Conservative party narrowly held former prime minister Boris Johnson’s seat in Uxbridge and …
Would better buildings help fix the NHS? The story of Britain’s hospitals, from grand designs to counting the costs: When St Helier Hospital in Carshalton opened just before the second world war, it was regarded as the last word in modernist design. Imperial War Museum Archives via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC Outpatients at St James’ …
Five reasons Adam Smith remains Britain’s most important economist, 300 years on: June 5 2023 marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Adam Smith, the 18th-century British economist widely hailed as the father of modern economics. Born in Kirkcaldy, on the east coast of Scotland, Smith studied at the University of Glasgow and at …
How online grocery shopping is making Britain’s urban-rural inequality worse: Jan Kopriva/Unsplash Before the pandemic, online grocery shopping was typically something younger and more affluent people living in cities indulged in. When COVID hit, though, the market exploded. In the first week of the first UK lockdown, demand for Ocado home deliveries was reportedly ten …
How archaeologists reconstructed a Roman gateway to tell the story of Britain’s invasion: Visitors to Richborough Roman fort near Sandwich in east Kent will now find a major new addition to the site: a reconstructed Roman fort gateway in timber, flanked by stretches of an earthwork rampart. The gate has been built on the site …