Caroline Shenton

Archivist, historian and writer

The Day Parliament Burned Down: Live!

By

Sunday 16 October 2011 is the 177th anniversary of the 1834 fire. Today I’m tweeting a ‘live’ feed of events from 1834 in real time on Twitter. I’ve prescheduled the tweets so I can watch as the come through: it will be fascinating to experience it myself in real time, rather than just writing about it. You can follow my feed even if you don’t tweet yourself, by googling ‘Dustshoveller’ and ‘Twitter’.  And next year, I hope, today will be the day The Day Parliament Burned Down is published.

If you’ve arrived here today as a result of seeing the story unfold on Twitter, you can find out more about the fire from the short 2009 BBC Parliament film on it here and here.

About Caroline Shenton

Dr Caroline Shenton is an archivist and historian. She was formerly Director of the Parliamentary Archives in London, and before that was a senior archivist at the National Archives. Her book The Day Parliament Burned Down won the Political Book of the Year Award in 2013 and Mary Beard called it 'microhistory at its absolute best' while Dan Jones considered it 'glorious'. Its acclaimed sequel, Mr Barryís War, about the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster, was a Book of the Year in 2016 for The Daily Telegraph and BBC History Magazine and was described by Lucy Worsley as 'a real jewel, finely wrought and beautiful'. During 2017 Caroline was Political Writer in Residence at Gladstone's Library.