Working as a Blue Badge Tourist Guide in I often show my guests – especially if they have young children - the bust of the William Buckland in the south aisle of Westminster Abbey. He may hardly be a household name but Buckland is memorialised for his appointment as Dean of the Abbey in 1845 and his work as an early palaeontologist and undergroundologist (geologist). He excelled at two of the new sciences that would enthral Britain in the nineteenth century.

I was once asked to do a walking tour of Croydon, my borough in London and also where the composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor lived for most of his life. He was a man of mixed heritage who studied music and composed the Hiawatha Wedding Feast inspired by Hiawatha, written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.