Legacy

Who decided that the sea — cold, dangerous and full of smugglers — was somewhere you went for fun?

What kind of doctor prescribes plunging into the Channel naked in the dead of winter, and then drinking it?

And how did the towns Britain built to enjoy itself end up among the most deprived places in the country?

The holiday — the whole idea that ordinary people are owed one — starts with a Brighton doctor, a shed on wheels and an Act of Parliament, and Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch follow it from there to the boarded-up promenades of the present.

Dr Richard Russell published a book in the 1750s arguing that seawater cured everything from scrofula to melancholy, and that you ought to drink it by the pint, with milk or port to take the edge off. The elites followed him to a fishing village called Brighthelmstone, the Prince Regent built a pleasure palace there, and once the railways arrived the whole thing belonged to everybody. Then cheap flights took it away again. What the Victorians left behind is a coastline of magnificent architecture standing in some of the poorest wards in England — and, lately, the first signs of something coming back.

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[0:00] From the Grand Tour to the stick of rock — the moment travel stopped belonging to the rich
[8:52] Before the deckchairs: smugglers, pirates and a coastline you kept well away from
[9:51] Dr Richard Russell, the eighteenth-century wellness influencer who told Britain to drink the sea
[13:17] Peter jumps into the Antarctic in his swimming trunks, shamed into it by a woman in her eighties
[17:57] The steam train, the Bank Holidays Act, and the week the mills shut down
[20:53] The bathing machine: a shed, a horse, and a strong local person to dunk you
[29:54] Clacton, Jaywick, and what happened to the towns Britain built to enjoy itself
[35:09] Margate, Dreamland, and whether hipsters can fix a structural problem

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
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Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
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Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Why does every dictator, sooner or later, want to host the World Cup?

What did a military junta that never wanted the tournament discover once the goals started going in?

And when a hundred thousand people are dancing in the street, who is that actually working for?

Peter Frankopan sits down with investigative journalist Karim Zidan, who has spent a decade tracking how autocrats turn football into propaganda — and who found his own way into the story as a teenager being dragged out of a stand by Egyptian riot police.

Mussolini wrote the blueprint in 1934 and nobody has much improved on it since: host the tournament, invest in the team, let the collective joy do the rest. Videla's junta inherited a World Cup it didn't want and got away with it. Putin raised the pension age while Russia were in the quarter-finals. Qatar ended a Gulf blockade without conceding a thing. Zidan's argument isn't that you should stop watching. It's that escapism and willful ignorance are not the same thing — and that the people buying your club are not your friends.

Karim Zidan's podcast series Power Plays, presented by the Human Rights Foundation, is at powerplays.xyz. His newsletter is at sportspolitika.news.

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[0:00] Why the world's game keeps ending up in the hands of people who don't much like the world
[4:14] Cairo, 2007: a teenager in the Ultras section watches the police move in
[8:36] Mussolini's blueprint, and why he preferred boxing to football
[15:33] Argentina 1978: the junta that inherited a World Cup it never wanted
[26:19] "A monstrous, cancerous, corrupt patronage system" — Zidan on FIFA
[35:24] A message for Newcastle fans, and everyone else who welcomed the money in

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more.
legacy.supportingcast.fm

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What happened when the people written out of the Grand Tour wrote their own account of it?

What did an eighteenth-century Bengali diplomat see in London that made him call the British a conceited race?

And how did a man from Bihar end up as shampooing surgeon to the King of England?

Afua Hirsch and Peter Frankopan follow the travellers the Grand Tour left out — enslaved servants, Black abolitionists, Indian intellectuals — and find them looking back at Europe with a colder eye than Europe ever turned on them.

Frederick Douglass and Sarah Parker Remond met in Rome in 1868, two free Black Americans taking in the ruins of one slave society while campaigning against a living one. Mirza Abu Talib Khan toured Britain and reported home that its true religion was money. I'tesamuddin filled a notebook with the wonders of Europe and the conceit of its inhabitants. And Sake Dean Mahomed opened a vapour bath in Brighton and gave English the word shampoo. The Grand Tour was never only white men learning Latin — it was the moment the world started looking back.

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[0:00] The Grand Tour you think you know — powdered wigs, Roman ruins, enough marble to fill a museum
[3:01] The servants who weren't servants: enslaved Africans on the road to Italy and France
[4:29] Frederick Douglass, viral superstar, meets Sarah Parker Remond in Rome
[8:36] Ira Aldridge plays Shakespeare to the aristocrats who came for the ruins
[13:40] Bihar to Brighton — and the word that came with him
[17:54] Europe judged: spiritually hollow, morally compromised, excessively fond of luxury
[25:24] The Maharajas whose Cartier and Rolls Royce orders kept European luxury solvent
[36:24] What actually killed the Grand Tour, and whether Magaluf is its heir

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more.
legacy.supportingcast.fm

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What's a garnet mined in Sri Lanka two and a half thousand years ago doing in a silver hairpin dug up near Bruges? Why are the Duke of Burgundy and the conqueror of Constantinople staring each other down for the first time in history? And, how did most of Belgium forget that its own counts once sat on the throne of Constantinople?

Afua turns interviewer as Peter opens the doors on Bigger Picture, the exhibition he has spent four years building to reframe Bruges as one of the great connected cities of the medieval world.

It's the opening show at BRUSK, Bruges' vast new exhibition hall — 250 objects from 90 lenders, among them a Memling released from Turin, a Vatican portrait of Alexios I Komnenos that has never been lent before, and Gentile Bellini's Mehmed II brought face to face with Philip the Good. Along the way: a very Belgian silence, a wall of Bruce Springsteen memoirs, the price of medieval pepper — and Peter greeting visitors as a hologram.

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[0:00] Afua opens the Legacy inbox on Peter's four-year secret project
[3:04] A very Belgian silence, a coffee break, and the job is Peter's
[9:13] Asked to pick one object, Peter picks three
[12:20] Philip the Good meets Mehmed the Conqueror, five centuries late
[16:14] How the counts of Flanders ended up emperors of Constantinople
[27:42] Hologram Peter, and how to see the show before 8 September

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more.
legacy.supportingcast.fm

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What actually turned a teenage aristocrat into a "finished" gentleman in the 1700s? Why did one incredibly long, incredibly expensive holiday end up inventing the whole idea of "the West"? And why can you still trace a straight line from that holiday to Frankenstein, the contents of half of Britain's country houses, and this year's tenth anniversary of the Brexit vote?

Send a nineteen-year-old aristocrat to Europe for three years with a credit line and a chaperone paid to keep him out of trouble, and what comes home is part fashion victim, part looter, part accidental philosopher — the invention of modern Western identity, Frankenstein, and a culture war about "the Continent" that's still running.

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[0:00] Peter admits his own anti-aging anxieties before Afua reveals what the new series is really about
[3:34] Meet "The Original Gap Year" — and the ex-priest travel blogger who coined the term
[13:51] The bear leader — the 18th-century minder whose entire job was damage control
[15:51] The macaronis — home from Italy in silk and powder, mocked as "un-British"
[21:19] Standing where Gibbon stood — how one ruin becomes an entire theory of civilisation
[24:56] A wrecked holiday, a volcano, and a ghost story that becomes Frankenstein
[25:37] Ten years since the Brexit vote — and the Grand Tour's fingerprints are still on it
[31:09] Where Chatsworth's marble busts actually came from

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas:
Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Join Legacy+ for bonus episodes, early access, Q&A's, fewer adverts and more.
legacy.supportingcast.fm

Stay connected with Legacy:
Instagram: @originallegacypodcast
TikTok: @legacy_productions

Explore more from Peter and Afua — essays, sources, and ideas: Substack: peterfrankopan.substack.com | afuahirsch.substack.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.