Category: History

Charles Dickens created some of the world’s best-known fictional characters but a little known fact  is that Thornton Heath played such an integral part in his fortunes and misfortunes!Hablot Knight Browne, nicknamed Phiz, who...

My parents and I immigrated from Jamaica to England in the mid 1950s, writes Thornton Heath resident Beulah Coombs.  Every year, on Remembrance Sunday, my mother would watch the TV broadcast of the Cenotaph commemoration...

In a moving service at St Paul’s Church the names not just of those who lost their lives in the First World War but World War Two were read out including the civilians – among them six children – during bombing raids...

My first experience was that after a week, I wanted to go back home,’ says Leonora, a retired traffic warden and care-worker who arrived from Jamaica in the 1960s.  But now: ‘When I’m here I’m home. When I’m in Jamaica I’m...