🎀 Heidi 🎀

[Vinnie Sullivan @VinnieSull1van]

If things really were so much "worse" in the past, then why do they look so much better?

[RECOVER BRITAIN 🇬🇧 @recoverbritain]

here was a time when almost everything closed on Sundays.

The roads were quieter, the shops were shut, and life slowed down.

Should we bring that back?

[Vinnie Sullivan @VinnieSull1van]

No amount of governmental gaslighting will ever convince me that Britain is better today than before I was born. ⏳️🌹

[Old England in Colour @englandincolour]

1930s London.

[Wholesome Side of 𝕏 @itsme_urstruly]

may you always be the type of person who points out cows in a field, watches bees on flowers and gets excited when the moon looks extra big.

[BabelColour @StuartHumphryes]

I've pieced together this incredibly rare & precious Edwardian colour movie, filmed 118 years ago at Upton Manor Farm in Southwick, England. This is the Autumn Harvest of 1908, showing rural life in the UK just 7 years after the end of the Victoria Era, when our life and work was considerably less mechanised.
This is amongst the earliest British colour films, which was made via Kinemacolour, developed by George Albert Smith in 1906. It employed a spinning 2-colour filter system of red and green filters to replicate "full colour". The separate colour frames line up pretty well, except fo shots of lateral movement, such as the horse's legs where the individual coloured filters become much more apparent.
The music I've used is the Largo movement from Dvořák's Symphony No. 9, "From the New World", which is rather ironic considering the film shows us scenes of the Old World long gone.
Watch until the end, which leaves us a charming little love story. Though perhaps she waved her fellow off to War on the Western Front 6 years later...
(One of my hobbies is to collect old colour film footage, and if you enjoy this example I might share a few extra videos on my account)

[RECOVER BRITAIN 🇬🇧 @recoverbritain]

I was talking to a workmate the other day. He's 32, and he started reminiscing about when he was at primary school.

He said that back then, the town centre was packed every Saturday. You could spend the whole day there. WHSmith, Woolworths, Topshop, Dorothy Perkins, M&S, Argos, Burton, Officers Club, Original Shoe... the list went on.

"It was always busy," he said. "You'd go into town and it had everything. Clothes, shoes, somewhere to grab a bite. It just felt like the heart of the community."

Then he shrugged.

"Now? Half the shops are boarded up. Loads of empty units. It just feels dead. There's no atmosphere anymore."

He wasn't just talking about the shops. He was talking about how the heart of the town, the place where people gathered and felt connected, has disappeared.

[SaveOurChurchesUK @SaveukChurches]

Imagine walking into a church that's older than England itself.

Escomb Saxon Church was built around AD 675 and remains the oldest complete Saxon church in the UK.

From its Roman stonework to its tiny Anglo-Saxon windows, it's one of Britain's greatest historic treasures.

[Will Tanner @Will_Tanner_1]

These videos from the past are immensely radicalizing because they show that we're living in the collapse

A different world used to exist, one characterized by refined beauty and vitality painstakingly cultivated for centuries

That took a great deal of work. Cultivation is difficult. It requires intentionality, no small degree of expense, and glorifies greatness while eschewing equality--after all, what is the point of cultivating mediocrity?

That is what made the world of the past work, particularly the world of the pre-Great War period, but even the last glimmers of it that were still barely around in the 80s, having survived the Cultural Revolution of the 60s and 70s

The enchanting beauty and dignity that can be seen in these videos existed because they knew equality was as false a god, and so they rejected it, and instead showed through their dress, manners, and habits that there was something higher than mere existence

Such is why everyone in these videos is well-dressed, whether rich or poor. The working class of those days, though far poorer than that of today, was guided by the elite into understanding the importance of showing one was also on the ascent through dress, manners, etc., and so did so. Even the working men wore suits, particularly when about town on their time off. They were married, had kids, and dressed well, as that is what civilized people did

All of that was destroyed. It didn't just decay, or rot, or fall apart. It was destroyed, intentionally. That glorious world was crushed by the preachers of equality

So now we have Brutalist architecture, a slovenly populace, and legislation that demands equality in outcome and opportunity

To those who lived in the world of even century ago, but particularly a century and a half ago, it would be self-evident that the world had already fallen, the collapse and end of times has already come, and we are living in the Rome that followed the Visigoths

[Old England in Colour @englandincolour]

London's Euston Road and Pancras Road in 1898.

[Bobbie @bo66ie29]

A lovely old film of Blackpool around 70 years ago. A perfect window into British seaside life in the mid 1950s.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

This is real footage of Dublin from the 1890s

[RECOVER BRITAIN 🇬🇧 @recoverbritain]

A mesmerising glimpse of Southampton High Street in 1900. Watch a tram glide beneath the medieval Bargate and through a bustling Victorian town.

Then look at our high streets today... what happened?

[Heroes Of Britain @HeroesOfBritain]

British Expeditionary Force troops at Redhill Station after returning from Dunkirk, 1 June 1940.

🇬🇧

[Old England in Colour @englandincolour]

Blackburn school children in 1905.

[History Girl @HistoryGirlBW]

A rare window into a vanished London. Locals at Tower Bridge Road market stare, captivated by the camera in 1931.

[History Nerd @_HistoryNerd]

Major Frank Prentice was 18 years old when he dropped over a hundred feet off the stern of the Titanic into a sea full of ice.

He survived. This is what he saw.

Prentice worked in the Purser's office.

He was in his cabin at midships when the collision happened. He describes no chaos, no impact, nothing dramatic:

"It was just like jamming your brakes on my car. There was no great impact you couldn't feel. Just a bit of a shudder and she stopped."

That quiet did not last.

As the ship began to sink, Prentice moved through it.

He helped stewardesses into lifeboats who did not know where to go. He helped a woman named Mrs. Clark with her lifejacket. She did not want to leave her husband. He told her the husband would follow on later.

He would not.

On his way back from the lifeboats, Prentice heard the band. They were playing "Nearer My God to Thee" and singing.

He kept walking.

When the end came, he made his way to the stern. He describes it as quiet up there.

By the time he let go, the ship was nearly vertical. He had been hanging onto a board that read "Keep Clear of Propeller Blades."

At the very last moment, he let go and fell.

"I just missed the propellers on the way down."

The drop was over a hundred feet. The water was packed with ice and chunks of berg.

His watch stopped at 2:20 am.

He was not alone in the water at first. Then he was.

"I gave it a long thought when I was on my own and everybody else seemed to be dead round me."

He had two life jackets and a cushion.

He paddled toward a light he could still see from the rockets the bridge had fired. He reached a lifeboat and climbed in.

Mrs. Clark was already there. She wrapped a blanket around him and tried to keep him warm.

Her husband had drowned.

When asked who was responsible for the disaster, Prentice did not hesitate.

He blamed the bridge. He blamed Bruce Ismay, chairman of the shipping line, for pushing Captain Smith to maintain speed through waters they had been warned were full of ice.

"We had warnings that there was ice. We had it from ships and shore, and we went straight ahead as if there was nothing there in our way."

His verdict was simple:

That ship was thrown away.

Prentice was interviewed decades later.

Asked if the memory still haunted him, he said:

"When I'm alone tonight, I still think a lot about it. Can't help it, can you?"

—

Source: @BBCArchive – The Great Liners (1979)

[Vinnie Sullivan @VinnieSull1van]

Despite the hardships of the time, all I see in this clip of West Bromwich in 1902 are stoic, well-dressed characters and sea of smiles. These hopeful lads would have been callously sent to WW1 a few years later (1914), where they'd perish or return in depressive despair. ⏳️

[The English Remnant @Englishremnant]

Today we remember one of the bloodiest and most tragic days in British military history – 1st July 1916, the opening day of the Battle of the Somme.

At 7:30am, whistles blew and tens of thousands of brave British lads went “over the top” across no-man’s-land, expecting to find a shattered enemy line. What followed was a massacre. Nearly 60,000 British casualties in a single day – with 20,000 killed outright. Whole towns and villages across England were torn apart as their local “Pals Battalions” were wiped out in minutes.

They weren’t professional soldiers. They were miners, potters, steel workers , farmers, and market traders. Ordinary Englishmen who answered the call, not for fame or reward, but out of loyalty, honour, and love of country.

And they stood. In the fire, the mud, the hell of the Somme, they stood for each other, and for England.

Their sacrifice wasn’t in vain. It was a grim but noble chapter in our story, a testament to the grit and resolve of our people, forged in the trenches of northern France. The Somme became more than just a battlefield, it became a symbol of British courage.

We remember them not just as names on a memorial, but as part of an England that was still England. Before globalism, before self-loathing, before our traditions were cast aside. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧

[Vinnie Sullivan @VinnieSull1van]

1950s Birmingham, despite being in post-war Britain, looks like a paradisial safe haven.