Bad, Mad & Northern

What would you do if you were told your village had to disappear so a city could have water?(Content note: this episode includes a fatal explosion and the exhumation of graves.)In the first half of the twentieth century, three northern valleys were flooded to make reservoirs. This episode tells the story of each of them. Mardale Green in the Lake District was drowned beneath Haweswater to supply Manchester. Fernilee in the Goyt Valley, near Buxton, was home to a gunpowder works that lost three men

How long would your grave stay yours?In the 1820s, the answer might have been a matter of days. Anatomy schools needed bodies, the law supplied very few, and across the north of England a trade grew up to fill the gap. Bodies moved like freight, with paperwork, addresses and paying customers at the end of the line.This episode follows that trade across the North: a trunk at Newcastle's Turf Hotel, casks in a Liverpool cellar, Resurrection Cottage in Leeds, a case in Hull, and the watch house built

Who was digging up the dead of the North? What would you give up so a city a hundred miles away could turn on a tap? And how did a holiday in Whitby create the most famous toothed monster in the world?In this short voice note, Lucy says a heartfelt thank you for taking Bad, Mad & Northern into the UK history charts within days of launch, and previews a properly dark October.Coming up this spooky season:The body snatchers. Burke and Hare were just the tip of the iceberg. This is the whole

Content note: this episode includes violence against children and teenagers, including the deaths of two boys under eighteen.For more than thirty years, from 1870 to the early 1900s, the streets of Manchester and Salford belonged to the scuttlers: teenage gangs armed with belts, bricks and clasp knives. They fought for territory and pride, and for the coveted title of King of the Scuttlers. Some of them were fourteen years old.This episode follows the scuttlers from a mass street fight inspired by a

Content note: this episode includes descriptions of executions and exhumed human remains.In May 1660, Charles II rode back into London to cheering crowds. For the men who had signed his father's death warrant, the celebrations meant something else: it was time to run.In the second of two episodes, we follow what happened next. We cover the Act of Oblivion and the men it left out, the October 1660 trials, and the grim January of 1661, when Cromwell and others were dug up to face a punishment their

Content note: this episode includes descriptions of war and a public execution.On 30 January 1649, King Charles I stepped out onto a scaffold in Whitehall. Fifty-nine men had signed his death warrant, and a striking number of them came from the North.In the first of two episodes, we follow the road to the regicide. It starts with a gate slammed shut at Hull and runs through Marston Moor, the largest battle ever fought on English soil, to a trial Westminster had never seen the like of. We meet four

Content note: This episode includes discussion of murder and human remains.In 1949, detectives searching a builder's yard in Crawley uncovered fragments of evidence that should not have survived: bone, dentures, a handbag clasp, and tiny gallstones.Their discovery would unravel the crimes of John George Haigh, later known as the Acid Bath Murderer: a charismatic fraudster who believed he had found the perfect way to erase his victims and escape conviction.This episode follows Haigh's path from West