Phlegm's mausoleum of the giants - Sheffield

Sheffield’s adopted son Phlegm has created work on a new grand scale. Taking over the Eye Witness Works, Milton Street with his murals and changing the entire field of view with his visuals, he has produced an incredible installation. Massive sculptures occupy halls, corridors and rooms of an abandoned factory with their cumbersome bodies.

The Mausoleum of the Giants is a thrilling extension of Phlegm’s ongoing efforts to intertwine his surreal and highly imaginative work with existing deteriorating structures in Sheffield.

See mausoleumofthegiants.co.uk for more details

Bletchley Park, once the top-secret home of the World War Two Codebreakers

Bletchley Park is a nineteenth-century mansion and estate near Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, constructed during the years following 1883 for the English financier and politician Sir Herbert Samuel Leon in the Victorian Gothic, Tudor, and Dutch Baroque styles, on the site of older buildings of the same name. It has received latter-day fame as the central site for British codebreakers during World War II, although at the time of their operation this fact was a closely guarded secret. During the Second World War, the estate housed the British Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), which regularly penetrated the secret communications of the Axis Powers – most importantly the German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers; among its most notable early personnel the GC&CS team of codebreakers included Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman, Hugh Alexander and Stuart Milner-Barry. 

According to the official historian of British Intelligence, the "Ultra" intelligence produced at Bletchley shortened the war by two to four years, and without it the outcome of the war would have been uncertain. The team at Bletchley Park devised automatic machinery to help with decryption, culminating in the development of Colossus, the world's first programmable digital electronic computer. Codebreaking operations at Bletchley Park came to an end in 1946 and all information about the wartime operations was classified until the mid 1970s.

An emotional 75th anniversary flypast marking the loss of WW2 bomber Mi Amigo.

On the 22^nd Feb 2019 10,000+ people gathered in Endcliffe Park in Sheffield to pay tribute to the 10 American airmen who lost their lives when their aircraft crashed into the park on this day in 1944. 

The B-17 Flying Fortress – known as Mi Amigo – plunged into woodland in the park and there were no survivors. Mi Amigo crashed 75 years ago today.

The World War Two aircraft was of the 364th Bomber Squadron and was based at Chelverston on Northamptonshire. On that fateful day in 1944 the plane and its crew were on a mission over Denmark when it was badly damaged by a German fighter plane. The stricken plane, piloted by the heroic Lt John Kriegshauser, made its way back to UK with the hope of finding somewhere safe to land. 

It is believed the crew identified the large field in Endcliffe Park as a possible landing spot. Eyewitnesses say the plane circled the park for a time and it is believed the pilot sacrificed the lives of himself and his crew to avoid a group of children in the field. 

Lt Krieghauser's heroic actions that day earned him a posthumous US Distinguished Flying Cross for his courage. 

A number of trees were uprooted in the crash and in 1969 a grove of American oaks was planted in 1969 as replacement trees to honour the crew. 

There is also a memorial to the crew in the park and Sheffield man Tony Foulds,  who was one of the boys in the park at the time of the crash, has personally tended to the memorial for decades. 

Today's memorial flypast is a direct result of a campaign led by 82-year-old Tony.