Victoria Borwick

The capital is ranked above Paris and New York for its large, quality, accessible cultural scene ➡️ bbc.in/4d7AEfy

Old Cambridge New Cambridge Then people wonder why people fight development

Celebrate #NationalWalkingMonth by exploring Britain’s history on foot 🥾 From blue plaque trails and historic city walks to routes past castles, cathedrals, and UNESCO World Heritage Sites, every step uncovers a story. 👉 visitheritage.co.uk/days-out/walks… 📍Hadrian’s Wall

Design legend Margaret Calvert is 90 today. Look at that cake! If you've ever admired a road, rail or metro sign in Britain it's likely she had something to do with it. One of Britain's design heroes. Photo by: @oshgallerylondon (IG) Cake by: mybaker.co

So the @MandHShow Awards are kicking off after a wonderful reception and delicious dinner. So we’re off!

Back in Norwich after 15 years! 🎉 Thank you for a wonderful dinner at Norwich City Hall. Here's to many more years of friendship!

Delighted to share my @alva_uk insights with a huge crowd at today’s @MandHShow - everything from visitor levy, weather, cost of living, staycation, premium experiences at premium prices, to marketing & Paddington. Great questions in the session & for over half an hour afterwards

Living with a disability or long-term health issue can make travel challenging, but @MayorOfLondon is committed to making our transport network as accessible as possible for everyone – including this new campaign to mark @TfL #PrioritySeatingWeek

And the parliamentary robes you see on state occasions!

To get a license to drive a black cab in London, you have to memorize 25,000 streets, 20,000 landmarks, and the fastest route between any two points in a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. It takes most people three to four years. A British neuroscientist asked the obvious question nobody had thought to ask. What does that actually do to a human brain? Her name was Eleanor Maguire. The study changed neuroscience forever. The exam is called The Knowledge. It was introduced in 1865, and the format has barely changed since. Applicants ride a moped around London for years with a clipboard strapped to the handlebars, tracing every possible route between every possible pair of points in the city. They get tested in person by an examiner who can ask them, on the spot, for the shortest legal route between any two addresses in a database of tens of thousands. Half the people who attempt it fail. The ones who pass have spent an average of four years studying full time and have taken the test 12 times before getting through. Maguire was watching a TV movie about it in 1995 when she had the idea. These were not ordinary people. They were people running one of the most extreme spatial memory training programs that exists anywhere on Earth. If the human brain could be reshaped by experience, this was the cleanest natural experiment anyone was ever going to find. She put 16 of them in an MRI machine. Their posterior hippocampi were significantly larger than the brains of matched controls. The longer a driver had been working, the bigger the difference got. A 40-year veteran had a measurably more developed hippocampus than a 5-year veteran, and both had more than someone who had never driven a cab. Here is why that finding broke a century of consensus. Until 2000, every neuroscience textbook in the world taught a version of the same idea. The adult brain is essentially fixed. You are born with a set number of neurons. Childhood is the window where the wiring gets laid down. After puberty, the structure freezes, and the rest of your life is just slow decline. Maguire's study was one of the first pieces of human evidence that this was simply wrong. Adult brains physically remodel themselves in response to what you ask them to do. Not metaphorically. Structurally. With grey matter you can measure on a scan. The skeptics had an obvious objection. Maybe people with bigger hippocampi were just more likely to become taxi drivers in the first place. The brains were not changing. The job was selecting for brains that already looked that way. So Maguire ran the experiment again. Properly this time. She recruited 79 trainees who were just starting to study for The Knowledge and 31 controls who were not. She scanned all of them at the start. Then she waited four years. Of the 79 trainees, 39 eventually passed the exam and 20 failed. She scanned them again. The trainees who passed had grown larger posterior hippocampi over those four years. The trainees who failed had not. The controls who never studied had not. The brain change was not selection. It was construction. The act of memorizing the city had physically rebuilt the part of the brain responsible for spatial memory, and the rebuild only happened in the people who actually did the work. There is a quieter finding from this research that almost nobody quotes, and it is the one I cannot stop thinking about. The drivers had a bigger posterior hippocampus, but they had a smaller anterior hippocampus. The brain had not magically expanded. It had reallocated. Tissue that was being used for one type of memory had been compressed to make room for another. When Maguire ran follow-up cognitive tests, the cabbies were measurably worse than controls at certain visual memory tasks unrelated to navigation. They had paid for The Knowledge with something else. The trade was real. She also ran a second control experiment that is the part of the story most people never hear. She scanned London bus drivers. Same hours behind the wheel. Same city. Same traffic. Same stress. The only difference was that bus drivers follow fixed routes. They do not have to navigate. Their hippocampi looked completely normal. The cab drivers had not grown bigger hippocampi from driving. They had grown them from the constant, active, effortful retrieval of spatial information from memory. That distinction is the entire study. Then in 2020, McGill researchers ran the inverse experiment. They tracked 50 regular drivers and measured how often they used GPS. The participants who relied most heavily on turn-by-turn navigation had measurably weaker spatial memory. When the researchers retested a subset of them three years later, the heavier GPS users had declined fastest. The hippocampus, the same region the cabbies had built up by ignoring shortcuts, was being slowly hollowed out in everyone else by accepting them. The mechanism Maguire spent 25 years documenting works in both directions. Brains grow what you make them grow. They lose what you stop asking them to do. The taxi drivers were running the most intense spatial memory training program on Earth. Most of the rest of us are running the opposite program without realizing it. Maguire died in early 2025. UCL's tribute described the cabbie study as a stroke of creative genius. She had spent her entire career on a single question. What does it physically take to remember something, and what changes inside a person who remembers a lot of it. The answer is the part that should change how you live.

Dad's House #Foodbank #Lunchclubs helping and supporting #dads #mums #families who need practical support especially as the #costoflivingcrisis #familybreakdown continues to take its toll on so many #parents. Thank you @felixprojectuk @earlscourtdevco @SolidaritySport

Braving the blustery showers 🌦️🌦️ this morning on the 'Lock to Lock' hike in Reading Walks Festival. Thank you Clare for leading the group and everyone for coming along. #nationalwalkingmonth #readingwalksfestival #thamespath30 @visitrdg

I'm in Norwich!!

V proud of @leedscastleuk Curatorial Team who presented at @MandHShow today on new interactive Queen Eleanor of Castile AI Avatar. Great insight into costume & appearance research & (limited) ‘lens’ we put onto responses. Come visit! Also great to meet with @DominicJonesUK

If you are in the area, Chelsea in Bloom takes place 18 May – 24 May. This years theme is out of this world. Here are previous pictures from Londoner guide on Instagram.

Cricklade is proud of its status as the 'First Town on the Thames'. For @GrossoMatto it's the last town on the Thames as he walks upstream towards the source of the river.

Our 2026 Awards for Excellence are just around the corner! Join us @BristolAero on 3 June. You might even recognise this standout venue from the TV series #Rivals. To find out more & for tickets visit: bit.ly/4dxZLbk 2/2

Lovely day in London with dear @UniofBradford friend Andy Duffy. Early grapefruit G & T on Southbank, Tracey Emin exhibition @Tate then cracking curry down Brick Lane. Late afternoon coffee & people watching at Coal Drops Yard before heading back to Kent.

Brilliant to see the splash @DailyMail with Anthony & Larissa Duffey whose Sunnyside B&B in Southport won our 2025 awards for 'Best B&B in England'. Awesome showcase also of how our awards support tourism businesses across our regions to drive growth. 1/2 bit.ly/4wzL4wa

Happy 100th birthday Sir David Attenborough!!!🎂👏👏👏 Thank you so much for your gift of being in harmony with nature ❤️