I’ll be at the Essex Book Festival on Sunday 29th June, 12,00pm to tell story of Wallis Simpson’s controversial year in China, 1924-1925. The event will be in the amazing Layer Marney Tower near Colchester, built as a statement house by Henry, 1st Lord Marney, Henry VIII’s Lord Privy Seal, in the 1520s.
But I find wherever I got to talk there’s a Wallis link – Baltimore (born there), DC (lived there), NYC (partied there), Hong Kong (lived there too), Shanghai (of course), Beijing (lived there as well) and of course London. I’ve blogged before on Wallis’s links to Felixstowe in Suffolk (here, and I’m speaking there on the 28th) but what about Essex?
Well apparently one of the Prince of Wales’s little bolt holes with Wallis was Monkhams Hall, near Waltham Abbey in Essex, owned by one of Edward’s equerry’s. Sadly it’s been hacked up into apartments now (and is now private, which doesn’t matter as the interiors have all been thoroughly sterilized aesthetically) now but back then the house, built in 1824, was approached along a private, tree-lined driveway that eventually revealed a three winged stately home with gardens and an ornate fish pond.
This coming Saturday (June 21, 2025 – 2pm), it’s the City of Devils tour with Historic Shanghai….
Based on my book City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir, you’ll be taken on a walk through the places and traces of the wild and wonderful story of Jack Riley, Joe Farren, and interwar, underworld Shanghai.
To get you in the proper frame of mind, here‘s Historic Shanghai’s 2020 interview with me on City of Devils, all about gangsters, Old Shanghai’s soundscape, rumor and gossip, and reading recs.
Wow! Some people take on big projects!! A World History Encyclopedia!! And here’s my interview with them…. here (and if you can’t find time to read, there’s an audio link too….
The Open House Festival takes place throughout August in Bangor, near Belfast, Northern Ireland.
More than just a festival… It’s a month long music and arts festival in August and the vintage-themed Seaside Revival Festival on Bangor seafront but we also recently opened our very own multi-purpose venue, The Court House. In addition, we promote one-off shows in Belfast on a year round basis and as we are an independent non-profit arts charity, any surplus generated from these events is used towards our community projects.
I’ll be talking Wallis in China on August 9th (click here for details and tickets) at the beautiful Court House in Bangor (below)…
Mark O’Neill will talk about his book ‘Liang Sicheng – The Guardian of China’s Architectural History’. Liang Sicheng ( 梁思成) was the Father of Architecture in China. During the 1930s and 1940s, he and his wife travelled to more than 200 counties in the interior and found 2,738 ancient buildings. The two discovered the richness and diversity of China’s architectural heritage and, through their books and drawings, made them available to the world, both Chinese and non-Chinese.
Photographer Heinz von Perckhammer, Peking, 1928, Published by Albertus-Verlag GmbH of Berlin with a foreword by Arthur Holitscher (Hungarian playwright, novelist, essayist and travel writer)….
