The grand tour

Past and present entwine at the Black Country Living Museum, where history is close enough to touch and stories of the past unfold

Whether it is adding contemporary paintings to a gallery of Old Masters or branching out into territories as diverse as Modernist chairs, Iranian tiles or Churchill memorabilia, the passion for collecting seems to run in some families, as Eleanor Doughty discovers

One of the things I miss most from the current railway scene is our locomotive workshops. They were such fascinating places to visit, because they illustrated perfectly the life story of locomotives f

When I was a child, we had a tortoise called Winnie who had belonged to my father when he was a boy in the 1950s. He called his pet Winston after Churchill, but this name had to be changed when he dis

It has become fashionable today for critics of major western museums to call for a ‘reckoning’ or ‘coming to terms’ with the imperialist and racist histories of some institutions. This approach is roo

The connection between nature and creativity comes in many forms. Here, artists, writers and musicians talk about the different ways in which they take inspiration from the outdoors - and share the places that fuel their imagination