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Original poster

If you could go back in time and witness any big event in history, which one would it be

235 replies

MyPithyCat · 19/11/2025 22:32

For me it'd be the first commercial radio broadcast on 2nd November 1920. That's the best type of radio (even though it'd adverts every 15-20 minutes) but I'd love to see how it all began

OP posts:
locket2009 · 20/11/2025 22:22

VE Day or live aid

raspberryberet2020 · 20/11/2025 22:20

MorrisZapp · 20/11/2025 22:20

Aberdeen in the 1950s, when my parents were children.

Oh, I like that.

StartupRepair · 20/11/2025 22:20

Watching the pyramids or Stonehenge being built would involve decades of watching people milling around and workers being treated terribly.

MorrisZapp · 20/11/2025 22:20

Aberdeen in the 1950s, when my parents were children.

JennyChawleigh · 20/11/2025 22:11

Bloatstoat · 20/11/2025 21:01

Great thread.

Mine would be the Duchess of Richmond's ball in Brussels on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo.

Mine too!

Elsvieta · 20/11/2025 22:05

First performance of any Shakespeare play. Or anything that would let me know the truth about the sonnets. Though I suppose that would have to be a few different events at least...

WestwardHo1 · 20/11/2025 22:04

Wouldn't it be amazing to see all the wildlife that existed pre industrialisation? Apparently grey whales used to swim through the Straits of Dover, until the Brits and the Dutch killed them all. Eagles, bears, wolves, wildcats, turtle doves, nightingales, those vast seabird cities including great auks....in fact I've made my choice. This is what I'd like to see.

dynamiccactus · 20/11/2025 21:56

Inthebleakmidwinter1 · 20/11/2025 06:48

Mine wouldn’t be a famous event but I would love to go back to before the war and walk around the countryside and see what it was like before modern agricultural improvements. Just to see what it was
like when the fields were full of flowers and bees and corncrakes and skylarks and the skies were full of swallows butterflies and and insects.

Yes I live near a canal and it would be nice to walk along it when it was built!

Ritasueandbobtoo9 · 20/11/2025 21:53

NamelessNancy · 19/11/2025 22:37

The Great Exhibition 1851

My great grandfather exhibited there.

Browniesandcustard · 20/11/2025 21:49

Nelson Mandela being released.

raspberryberet2020 · 20/11/2025 21:28

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PauliesWalnuts · 20/11/2025 21:14

Like others I’d like to have seen the Frost Fairs (I was obsessed with a story of these in a Blue Peter Annual decades ago). I’d also like to go back to where I live in a northern mill town during the height of the Industrial Revolution to see how different it was. Where I live has a reputation for unemployment, sink estates, grooming, all kinds of horrible things, and it would be interesting to see how different and busy it was.

WestwardHo1 · 20/11/2025 21:07

Arlanymor · 19/11/2025 23:18

It sounds great, I will definitely put it on my list, thank you. If you haven't read it - Ghost Map is a really good account of the Cholera Epidemic in London.

Show quote history

Loosely on the subject, for sheer shock value, I'd like to see how truly awful Haworth was at the time the Brontes were living and writing in the Parsonage. I was reading something the other day about how unspeakably horrific conditions in the village were, and how is was known as the Village of Death. Patrick Bronte himself outlived all his children (imagine that) and worked tirelessly to improve sanitation. Stomach churningly, the wells and the pumps were located near the graveyard, and mortality was so high, more and more bodies were being piled into the ground and the ooze was infecting the water supply. It beggars belief.

I know it sounds weird to want to see it, but sometimes these details grab me.

Bloatstoat · 20/11/2025 21:01

Great thread.

Mine would be the Duchess of Richmond's ball in Brussels on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo.

Toddlerteaplease · 20/11/2025 20:59

NamelessNancy · 19/11/2025 22:37

The Great Exhibition 1851

That would be amazing!

JaninaDuszejko · 20/11/2025 20:58

Sinkingfeeling952 · 19/11/2025 22:40

To be in Berlin for the fall of the Berlin Wall

I was a student when the wall fell and a couple of years later had a German flatmate who was there. She said everyone she knew went there because they knew history was being made.

Squirrelsnut · 20/11/2025 20:56

So many! Maybe Princess Elizabeth Tudor getting the news that she was now queen.
I'd love a wander through Dickens' London, too.

WestwardHo1 · 20/11/2025 20:54

MrsSkylerWhite · 19/11/2025 23:02

The great mortality.

I know it sounds awfully morbid but me too. Or the plague of St Justinian.

Not that I'd have wanted to catch either of course. Just be a kind of ghost, observing.

Squirrelsnut · 20/11/2025 20:52

Sinkingfeeling952 · 19/11/2025 22:40

To be in Berlin for the fall of the Berlin Wall

My colleague was there! She hired a car and drove there from Oxford.

MadameSzyszkoBohusz · 20/11/2025 20:36

BlueEyedBogWitch · 19/11/2025 22:34

I’d like to go to the premiere performance of Macbeth at Shakespeare’s Globe.

Same!

SpottyAardvark · 20/11/2025 20:25

I could nominate something culturally esoteric or of major global historical importance, so you would consider me to be a person of learning & discernment. But I’m not going to because that wouldn’t be the truth.

The honest answer is that I would like to go back to 30 July 1966 and to Wembley Stadium. “Some people are on the pitch, they think it’s all over. It is now!”

MrsScrubbingbrush · 20/11/2025 20:18

NormasArse · 19/11/2025 23:22

Not as highbrow, but I would’ve loved to have seen David Bowie live in the 70s. I did see him in the 80s though.

Definitely worth it. I saw him in 1972 at Southampton Civic Centre. Totally amazing.

Terrytheweasel · 20/11/2025 20:12

Sinkingfeeling952 · 19/11/2025 22:40

To be in Berlin for the fall of the Berlin Wall

This was my first thought too

BorgQueen · 20/11/2025 20:10

Not a major event.
September 5th 1885, the wedding of my Great Grandparents on my maternal Grandfather’s side.
They married in the newly built village church that I got married in 100 years later, without even knowing that they had lived here.
I would love to walk the village streets back then, I’ve seen maps but no photos exist, not online anyway, and see my GGrandparents in the church, I’ve seen the book with their signatures and that was magical, they both died years before I was born, him 1900, her 1935 and there is nobody left alive now to remember them, my Mum would have been a young teen when her Grandma died.

Fishingboatbobbingnight · 20/11/2025 20:10

I would like to have been a the construction of the Kennett and Avon canal - specifically in Bath , specifically around 1790/1800.. with an inexhaustible supply of muslin and more invites to balls than I know what to do with .