Meet Us
We are John and Loretta - two teachers who have spent a lifetime visiting historical places in the UK and abroad on holidays, school trips and any time we’ve had spare. Now in retirement, we love nothing more than to make the most of our National Trust and English Heritage passes to visit those places that are often left in the shadows of the more famous attractions.
We still have a passion for learning, travel, drinking a good coffee and wielding a shockingly big camera lens to ensure you can see that carving on the roof of Westminster Abbey (or so the excuse seems to be). Inspiring people to take an interest in a country’s history is something we love and we created Seeing The Past with the idea of making the past more accessible and enjoyable, especially for kids (sorry, that’s the teacher in us!).
We have lived in the South of England and have been lucky to be in close proximity to a huge range of amazing places that we’d love to share. We would love to hear from you about your favourite hidden gems, what your thoughts are on anywhere we write about or simply any recommendations you have for us.
What is Seeing the Past?
Our website is dedicated to bringing historical buildings, events and stories back to life for all the family. We created Seeing the Past as we often found that some of our favourite sights did little to engage anyone other than really passionate historians and relied on long audio guides or lengthy plaques of text which require a huge amount of motivation after the first 5 to keep reading.
Seeing the Past will do the hard work for you, cutting through the endless information to bring out the fun stuff - the stories, the little details you may not notice and the highlights of every place we write about, transforming a trip to a castle, a museum or a church with fun activities for the kids and into an itinerary of the most fascinating aspects of our favourite places in the UK and abroad.
This website will also categorise places you can visit and help you find similar places if you (or your children) are interested in Tudor England, the Second World War, the Romans or the Victorians. We will also create trips of our top recommendations - the famous, the hidden gems or simply an unusual place which we think is something worth seeing.
We hope that Seeing the Past conveys our love of history to bring to life our favourite places to visit.
