Show Notes
All things must change. As surely as winter bursts into spring life, spring into bountiful summer, summer into the falling leaves of autumn and autumn back into the denuded branches of winter, so too does my podcast change. Since I started making documentaries about England’s towns and villages, we’ve had three cycles through these seasons, three spins around the sun, and three Prime Ministers. Everything changes.
I’ve spent the past year travelling around the country, collecting stories from its towns and villages. History, folklore, mysticism. This England is full of extraordinary people, doing extraordinary things, extraordinarily.
In the coming days, a change will come over this feed. It will be come Other Edens – a series of documentaries about strange corners of this nation, and why they matter. Don’t be alarmed – if you’ve listened to my podcasts previously, you can expect more of the same. Just more of it. Forever and ever until you get bored of me (or I get bored of you) Other Edens will tell these stories.
Stay subscribed. Encourage others to subscribe. Tweet or Instagram your enthusiasm using @thetownpod (I was too late to get @otheredens, sorry). On Halloween, the stories start.
Written and presented by Nick Hilton. Visit podotpods.com for more information.
More from Other Edens
Christmas Day, 2021. I stop at Reading motorway services and find graffiti on the wall of a toilet cubicle: two locals, Gavin and Chelsea, are hacking brains using their iPhones. This Christmas special episode of Other Edens is the story of Reading motorway services, toilet graffiti, and the strange native poetry that binds them together.
What makes the quintessential English village? A church? A pub? A post office? A cricket pitch?
In 1942, an engineer named Guy Maunsell constructed a series of audacious defensive towers out where the Thames estuary meets the North Sea. These structures – known now as the Maunsell Sea Forts – remain to this day, rusting and abandoned. But they also had a strange, eerie afterlife, from pirate radio to the micronation of Sealand.
Remember, remember the fifth of November. Gunpowder, treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.
Nestled away in Kent is the small village of Pluckley. It looks charming and chocolate boxy: a pub, a butcher, a post office and a churchyard. But scratch that veneer and you find a place that has become famous over the past century as England's most haunted place. Ghosts and apparitions, strange sights and noises. Murder, mysteries and the macabre, all haunt this Kentish village.