If you could live in any time in history...

[SillyBeardyDaddyman]

which one would it be and why?

What would you want to see and experience, and was there a particular event that you wished you were part of?

1900-1930. I know its not very long ago, but how I 'd have loved to have been a Suffragette and then to kick up my heels during the roaring twenties.

Now!!!
And the time I would defintiely notlike to be living is the 14th century.
Just reading 'Hawkwood' by Frances Stonor Saunders - unputdownable - as good as the other masterpiece of that period, Barbara Tuchman's 'The DArk Mirror'

I'd only like to go as a visitor but I'd love to go back to Rome at the time of the five good emperors to see whether it was as brilliant as Gibbon said. Not Marcus Aurelius though, don't fancy catching the plague! I'd also like to sample life as a Regency lady too, trips to 'town' and Bath, or balls at my country house. Possibly read too much Jane Austen...

Don't think I'd last five minutes any time Victorian or earlier TBH, the smells, heads on spikes, casual violence and poo-filled streets of many historical periods would mark me out as an outsider in no time

the 1970s- I love flares and men with hair

Good thinking Margery. Go back to an era when there are antibiotics.

Celtic times (pre-Roman invasions, when it all went horribly wrong). Small farming communities, women playing a strong role in society-as far as we can gauge- and I'd like to know what the Druids reallygot up to.

Mid-Victorian era. I would love to go back to 1850s. I have studied the period at length and I wonder if I would actually feel quite at home! I also think I'd be surprised at how familiar everything was.

Second choice: a century earlier. Georgian times. I think it would be quite different to Victorian.

1920's America Would quite like to be a flapper - experience the Charleston, dancing contests and cocktail dresses . Plus of course the feeling that we were changing something

Forwards in time, probably, if permanent.

If a visitor: hang around the Tower to see what happened to the princes.

Regency times, but not some boring Jane Austen husband-hunter; I'd like to be a Luddite!

I think I'd just go back in time to when my Mum and Grandmother were raising kids the same age as mine and try and spend time with them - and see how parenting has changed

Victorian London fascinates me. All the real down and dirty stuff though. None of m'lady and smelling salts malarky. I want to be in the middle of Spitalfields with all the poor souls (as a visitor only).

Otherwise fling me back to the middle ages to the damp, cold and plague.

Besides the usual smells and unsanitary conditions the people's teeth would make me boak (lack of hygiene and dental care).

Some of us saw Freddie Mercury in concert without needing to time travel.

I wouldn't want to live permanently in any historical era because of all the infectious diseases and lack of antibiotics. I wouldn't mind visiting a few, as long as I'd had all the vaccinations and could leave if it looked like getting hairy. But I'd mostly go for the social history, rather than events at court. I'd like to see London at different periods in history.

I'd love to go to late Tudor/early Stuart London and see one of Shakespeare's plays performed for the first time. Then I'll fast forward, please, and see London pre-Blitz.

After that, I'll go back a few decades to the shtetls of the Russian empire around the middle of the 19th century, before the pogroms got going in earnest. I'd absolutely love to experience something of the culture and way of life that (for a lot of reasons, including some terrible ones) had so much influence on the development of 20th-century Western culture, but has now largely vanished.

Finally I'll drop in on the Tolpuddle Martyrs to thank them for what they did for us all, and finish up with a night-time raid along-a Lord Ludd.

not sure really. It was probably better to have been born in the 1940's rather than much later. They have had it all, in terms of women's suffrage, welfare state, NHS, medical advances, social mobility & opportunities. Shame its all gone to pot recently. For those born in the 1970's and later, things haven't been as good, and are getting worse. Perhaps in another couple of hundred years, the mid 20th century will be regarded as the best ever for improving people's general quality of life.

If I had to go back in time, I wouldn't really mind any time after about 1300, as long as I was aristocracy. Being lower class was probably too much hard work!

Would love to be around in the mid 16th C to find out what happened to my ancestor's lands & money after he was attainted for treason for his part in the 1569 Northern Rebellion (and to ask them to make sure they documented the family tree appropriately!)