Since I recently moved to the Dallas area, I found the fact that Texas used to have an embassy in London particularly interesting! St. James Street is probably the most prestigious retail address in the world. Alongside the venerable wine merchants Berry Bros. & Rudd, a short passageway leads to a tiny hidden square called [...]

Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, invented the idea of a Great Exhibition of the Arts and Sciences to promote British trade. Joseph designed the gigantic Crystal Palace of iron and glass; it was built for eighty-thousand pounds and was 1,851 feet long and 408 feet wide, and covered nineteen acres of Hyde Park, which is [...]

Piccadilly is a bizarre-sounding name–even to the British. Many theories abound as to the origin of the word, but the current consensus is that a young Somerset lad named Robert Baker came to London in the sixteenth century and made his fortune as a tailor. One of his talents was making pickadils, the ruched borders [...]