Last Friday evening was our eldest son’s school ‘s Christmas fair. Like many people there, I was keeping half an eye on the mince pies, the tombola, and the craft stalls, and half an eye on my phone, checking for texts from my brother who was watching the draw for the 2010 World Cup. When the news came through that England had landed with Algeria, Slovenia, and the USA for the group stage, I wasn’t the only one celebrating and passing the news on to others. The Sun caught the mood with a neat acrostic headline the next morning: 'EASY', standing for England, Algeria, Slovenia, Yanks. The script is, apparently, written. England will stroll through this group and then head all the way to the final. Some bookies have already made England second favourites to win the Cup, tabloid journalists are getting their historical clichés ready for the possible second round match with Germany, and even England’s manager, Fabio Capello, went from ‘It’s not so bad’ to ‘We have to win’ in the space of a single interview.

Two themes run through these simplistic readings of the situation that are of interest to the historian. The first is that the press, and many England fans, seem to have fallen back into an almost colonial contempt for Algeria, Slovenia, and the USA. There is a real belief that the three opponents are new footballing nations, and that they will be so in awe of England’s traditions that they will curl up and be beaten. Some of the media language reminded me of ideas that were current as far back as the 1908 Olympic Games, when journalists, administrators, and politicians simply assumed that England led the world in sport, and that the natural order of things was for the English to win and the foreigners to be grateful at being taught a lesson. The fact that England have played Slovenia only once (a 2-1 victory earlier this year) and have yet to meet Algeria adds to this sense of novelty. Forget the fact that England were relatively ordinary against Slovenia and won by only one goal; and forget the fact that Algeria have beaten both Uruguay and reigning African champions Egypt this year: England’s group matches are, according to the popular press, going to see a restoration of historical supremacy.

The second theme is, of course, the troubling matter of 1950. England have played the USA nine times, winning seven and losing two, but it’s the first of those games that historians are going to be recalling. In June 1950, England travelled to Brazil to take part in their first World Cup, having studiously ignored FIFA’s competition in 1930, 1934, and 1938. They beat Chile 2-0 in their opening group match, before meeting the USA at Belo Horizonte on 29 June. With such stellar names as Alf Ramsey, Billy Wright, Wilf Mannion, Tom Finney, and Stan Mortensen on the pitch, and a squad that included Stanley Matthews and Jackie Milburn, this really was a match that England couldn’t possibly lose. Joe Gaetjens, the USA’s Haitian-born forward, thought otherwise, and it was his goal that settled the match. Defeat against Spain a few days later sent England home. Forget England beating the USA 6-3 in 1953, 8-1 in 1959, 10-0 in 1964, and 5-0 in 1985: it will be the ghost of 1950 that the media and the fans will have to look out for in South Africa next year.

Back in the early 1990s, I worked at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office as a historical research assistant. The department I worked in was responsible for publishing books of primary documents about different aspects of British overseas policy, and our time was spent reading thousands of documents and selecting the key papers that told the story. It was a great experience that helped me to get a feel for weighing up evidence and sifting out the gems from the dross. That experience, combined with my own immersion in the archives for my PhD on the British government’s involvement in sport, confirmed me as something of a primary source addict.

Over the years since then, in line with the refreshing growth of what’s known as ‘the visual turn’ in historical research, I’ve increasingly used visual evidence as well as more traditional written documents. This is great in teaching, where paintings, engravings, photographs, and film can encapsulate themes for students in a very accessible way. The book I’m writing at the moment – a study of the history and heritage of the Olympic Games for English Heritage – is heavily visual, with archive pictures and new photographs featuring throughout. And it’s through this work that I’ve rediscovered my love of historical maps.

I think I became sold on the fundamental need for historians to study maps soon after I started teaching. A student in my modern European history class claimed that Hitler invaded France in 1940 because without that conquest, Germany had no access to the sea. Even the most cursory glance at a map of Europe would have corrected this claim. In my sports history research, which is becoming increasingly concentrated on local events, looking at historical maps of the places I’m studying is a basic method. Allowing for the developments in mapping technology over the centuries, and appreciating that maps are subjective accounts of landscape and townscape – someone chooses which buildings to label and which to leave blank, for example – there is nothing else that can give us knowledge on distances and relationships between sporting sites and the rest of the community.

This week, I’ve been taken back to my primary source addiction by the acquisition of a map. My Olympic book will include a chapter on the 1948 London Games, which were based at Wembley but had other events spread across the capital, and I’ve managed to get hold of an original copy of the map that London Transport issued for overseas visitors to the Olympics. It’s a wonderful period piece, giving us a snapshot of Wembley as it was then, with the Stadium and the Empire Pool marked out for the Olympic events, along with its Methodist and Roman Catholic churches, its Regal Cinema and the Greyhound pub, and its bus, tram, and train connections. Alongside the central map, we have public transport directions to all of the other Olympic locations, ranging from Finchley Lido in the north to Selhurst Park in the south, and from Brentford in the west to Ilford in the east, both homes to Olympic football matches. On the reverse, we have a central London underground map, along with the essential information that overseas visitors in 1948 needed: addresses of embassies and consulates, tourist information on such places as Buckingham Palace, Kew Gardens, and London Zoo, and directions to London’s cathedrals. The whole document, from its naively unbranded Olympic rings to the 6d admission price to see the Crown Jewels, is an evocative way in to the mood of the 1948 Olympic Games. Although it is only sixty years old, it feels aeons away from contemporary Olympic materials. It’s a great reminder that, however objective the information on a map, it will always be relative to the time and circumstances of its creation.

The BBC has recently been showing a season of programmes about Scotland. Alongside some great documentaries, they’ve shown Gregory’s Girl, Bill Forsyth’s 1981 feature film about secondary school children in Cumbernauld, a Scottish new town. Although the film is all about growing up, it has an important place in sports history because one of its central themes is about Dorothy, on of the girls at the school, wanting to play football for the school team. As the only girl playing the game, this gives rise to a lot of the film’s comedy, from the moment the stereotypical male PE teacher realises that she is by far the best player in the school, through the headmaster’s concerns about her bringing her own soap for the showers, and to the opposing players lining up to kiss her after she scores a goal against them. Her displacement of a boy from the team, and the affect her presence has on all those raging hormones, forms one of the key themes in the film: the uncertainties and confusion of teenage years.

When I first saw Gregory’s Girl at the cinema in 1981 – as part of a memorable double bill with Chariots of Fire – it was clearly a contemporary movie, particularly when juxtaposed against the recreated 1920s of Chariots. Although I was living in suburban west London, there was enough that was recognisable – not least the teenage kicks and the teenage confusion. A few years later, when I first studied feature films as historical sources on my undergraduate degree, a movie like Gregory’s Girl would not have crossed my mind. We were concerned with historical classics like Battleship Potemkin, or with feature films about historical events, such as Zulu or Gandhi. Gregory’s Girl resurfaced for me when I started researching sport, providing light relief and lots of cringes of recognition when I watched it for what it told me about sport’s social side alongside Raging Bull, Chariots of Fire, and – surely the best bad movie ever made about sport – Escape to Victory.

Watching Gregory’s Girl now, nearly thirty years on, it has acquired a certain patina. It has become a historical source with all sorts of interesting angles. First off, it tells us about a time when girls wanting to play football were rare, rare enough to be of comic value. Women’s football has come on hugely since 1981. Dorothy wouldn’t make sense now, at a time when girls have the chance to play football from primary school onwards, and when the women’s FA Cup final is televised live. Of course the women’s game is still seen as marginal to the men’s, and we all know that inequalities exist at every level, from players' wages to changing facilities a small clubs: but things have moved on an awful lot from the days of the film, where the boy dropped from the team to make way for Dorothy complains that women weren’t meant to play football: ‘It’s too tough, too physical’. I like to think we live in a relatively more enlightened age, and that Gregory’s description of how Dorothy’s presence in the team is a positive sign – ‘modern girls, modern boys’ – was prescient.

Gregory’s Girl is also interesting for the other cultural examinations of sport and gender that it has inspired. The Manageress, the BBC’s drama series from the early 1990s in which Cherie Lunghi played a tactically-savvy woman who takes over as manager of a professional club; Bend It Like Beckham, Gurinder Chadha’s 2001 movie which shifts the contestation from one of gender to one of culture by exploring a British Asian girl’s experience of playing football: these and many others owe a debt to Gregory’s Girl, and there is a great project waiting to happen on the portrayal of women’s football in film and drama.

The other striking historical aspect is the film’s location. Filmed in the new town of Cumbernauld, the film paints a generally positive picture of new town life, free from industrial grime, and with a country park, pleasant housing, modern shops, and no crime to worry about. Cumbernauld now still boats many of these features, and has above average income, but the new town experiment that Gregory’s Girl celebrated – another part of its modernist agenda – has lost much of its stock. The town’s underpasses suffer from graffiti, like anywhere else, and its architecture has lost much of its appeal – so much so that in 2005 the town centre was voted ‘the worst building in Britain’ for Channel 4’s Demolition programme. Gregory’s Girl captures the time before that, when there was an optimism in the new town experiment.

Feature films don’t need to be true, but that doesn’t invalidate them as primary sources for historians. Study them for what they tell you about sport and the society it was played in, and always connect between the action and the context.

I'm currently researching and writing a book on the history and heritage of the Olympic Games in Britian, and this is taking me into the pre-de Coubertin events that called themselves 'Olympic', 'Olympick', and 'Olympian'. It's misguided to think that the Olympic Games went from their classical Greek dissolution straight to de Coubertin's revival without anything in between, and a lot of those in between events took place in Britain. A couple of important ones are still going on: Robert Dover's Olympick Games at Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds; and the Much Wenlock Olympian Games in Shropshire. I've been to both this year: nothing beats visiting a living event with deep historical roots to get a sense of the event's history and identity.

The Much Wenlock Olympian Games were held in late July, and rather than just visit and watch this year, I grabbed my chance to take part in a piece of history. The 7 -mile open road race was my chance to compete. I used to run a lot, including half marathons and twenty milers, so the distance should not have been a problem. But I haven't raced for ten years, and I only managed to train over 6 miles, so I was aiming to just get round. It went well enough. I started nice and steadily alongside the 100-odd other runners, but got a nasty cramp in my calf after only two miles, and so managed a semi-run, semi-hobble for the rest of the hilly course. My time of 62 minutes was not particularly respectable in my personal history, but I like to see it as a new chapter and look forward to a bit more racing now.

The Games themselves were full of history this year. It's the bicentenary of the birth of William Penny Brookes, the man who started these games in 1850 and who was such a big influence on de Coubertin. All competitors in all events got a commemorative medal to mark this milestone - the closest to any kind of Olympic/Olympian silverware I'm ever going to come, and a nice artefact of my own to balance the historical medals and trophies that are such important relics of the early Games. In addition, the Games are now fully recognised by the Olympic movement, and this year's guests included Olympic medalists Anne Packer, Robbie Brightwell, and Tommy Godwin. The diversification of the Olympics was also represented by the torch relay for the Special Olympics, which are being held in Leicester this year.

The great thing about Much Wenlock is that it doesn't attempt to be a reenactment of the Victorian original. It's not a kind of sporting equivalent to a Sealed Knot battle. It's a real modern sporting event, with a serious take-up from athletics clubs all over the Midlands. The history and heritage that are there are deeply embedded, but the games are also about now. It is a perfect blend of history and modernity, and it was a pleasure to get out of the archives and live the moment.

Two years ago I wrote a rather miserable blog about supporting a football team that was facing relegation. Dear old Brentford duly went down that year, and have played in the bottom division – Rebranded League Two, Division Four, whatever – for two seasons. These years saw matches against teams we had never played before, like Dagenham and Redbridge, as well as reunions with some old regulars also fallen on hard times, like Luton, Northampton, and Grimsby.

Those two years saw a major revival, though, and in a season that saw other teams – Luton, Bournemouth, Rotherham, and Darlington – burdened with points deductions for financial mistakes, some of the usual pressure was removed. From facing relegation from the League back at Christmas 2007, Brentford exceeded expectations and won the League with room to spare this year. They certainly exceeded the bookies’ expectations: my £5 each way at 16/1 before the season started certainly felt like a good investment after the final whistle at Darlington, my only regret being that I hadn’t risked a little more.

Supporting a lowly team like Brentford always means that the highs, when they come, are extremely high. In my 30-odd years of supporting them, whoever has to keep the honours board up-to-date has not exactly been inundated with work: the real Third Division title in 1991-92, the rebranded Third Division title in 1998-99, and … er, that’s it. Sure, this is better than the experiences of many teams, but it’s not the kind of thing that would keep a supporter of one of the currently natural Premiership teams happy. I try not to fall into the cliché of attributing too many life lessons to what we do in sport, but I’m sure that following a small team is healthier than following a big one: expecting success and assuming that failure can’t happen has never struck me as very helpful way of behaving, as witness this season’s wails from Newcastle that their club is too good to be relegated from the Premiership. And Brentford’s fixture list for next season is littered with some of those recently big teams – Leeds United, Nottingham Forest, Southampton, Norwich City, and Charlton among them – for whom these days must still feel like slumming it. Indeed, the fickle nature of the game was underlined by our opponents in that last match: Luton Town, Wembley regulars in the 1980s, slipped quietly out of the League while Brentford celebrated.

The last game this year was comfortable, as we had already secured the title the week before. There was a line-up with fireworks before kick-off, although 3.00 pm on a May Saturday isn’t the most effective time to light up the sky. After the game, despite the MC’s heartfelt protests, there was a huge pitch invasion, and the awarding of the trophy, complete with a podium on the pitch and Queen’s ‘We Are The Champions’ echoing predictably round the ground. As well as enjoying the moment, the celebrations sparked memories of other promotions: hugging Herman Hreidarsson after we secured promotion in 1999; going to Peterborough with low expectations in 1992 and coming home with a huge grin after a handshake with that year’s hero, Dean Holdsworth – I asked him not to leave the club but he didn’t listen; and drinking my first beer after winning promotion in 1978 (I hope there’s a statute of limitations on this as I was only 13, but I only had a few sips – honest). My brother somehow blagged his way into the dressing room that day and came home with striker Andy McCulloch’s shirt. Memories like this – the kind that never usually get written down – are part of the tradition that lies at the heart of all sports fandom. These key moments form the high points in the narrative of our relationships with our clubs.

I’ve always loved using newspapers for primary research. It’s true that some sports historians over-rely on them, and ignore other types of evidence. It’s also true that we sometimes don’t make as much effort to find out about a historical paper’s affiliations – political and economic – as we do with contemporary papers. This is particularly true of the local press, where we are often just so glad to have some evidence that we sometimes forget to ask some basic contextual questions. However, there’s no denying the allure of fading newsprint and their stories of old sport.

My research has been taking me into old papers a lot recently. I’m working on a history of the Olympic Games in Britain, and of the various events that were called ‘Olympic’ – or variants such as Olympian and Olympick – that took place before the International Olympic Committee established itself in 1894. Newspapers are crucial here, especially local newspapers for the various places that hosted these events, such as Liverpool, Much Wenlock, and Morpeth. While some papers are now available online in full texts pdfs back to the late eighteenth century, many remain accessible only in hard copy or microfilm in local libraries or at Colindale in the British Library’s Newspaper Library.

I spent quite a bit of time at Colindale when I was doing my PhD in the late 1980s, and going back there recently was a real pleasure. The place has hardly changed: institutional art deco architecture, airless and lightless microfilm rooms that leave me feeling like a nocturnal creature, and 1930s reading desks with their frames for holding the bound volumes. The real joy is in handling the newspapers in hard copy, not on microfilm, and turning the pages much as the original audiences would have done. The local slants on sporting events are always good value: the Hampshire newspaper that reported on the 1948 Olympic torch relay with a focus on a runner from Eastleigh, for example, or the Northumberland newspaper of the same year that compares – favourably, it must be said – the attendance at the wrestling at the Morpeth Olympic Games with the crowds in London for same sport in the Olympic Games. The heartbreaking way in which the pages flake in every reader’s hands as they are turned convinces us all that digitisation is the answer, but something will be lost when the switch happens and Colindale closes.

I’ve been using newspapers in teaching this week, too, and it’s been good to see students getting used to the conventions of the press from the last two centuries. They were particularly struck by the way in which more attention was paid in late eighteenth century cricket reports to gambling than to who the players were, and by the huge sums of money involved – like the 1000 guineas in a 1799 match between Surrey and eleven of England. They were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of detail in late Victorian local newspapers, with their news of athletics and swimming clubs’ annual events running into columns of close-set broadsheet pages. And they were drawn – as so many sports historians are – to looking at the football scores and league tables to laugh at how the mighty have fallen or how the minnows have arisen. A 1989 newspaper, for example, which showed Chelsea in the Second Division, and Norwich and Millwall in the top five of the League, seemed almost as unbelievable as the eighteenth century cricketers with more money than sense. Elvis Costello may have claimed that ‘yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper’: but it was a great feeling to pass on a critical respect for the press as a primary source to the next generation.

Last week, I went to Southampton City Art Gallery for opening of A Century of Olympic Posters, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s touring exhibition. I caught it last year at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green, since when it has been Ironbridge in Shropshire, close to the historical home of the modern Olympic Games at Much Wenlock, and to Beijing. The preview evening was well-presented, with the organisers clearly recognising the opportunity for art/sport crossovers that such exhibitions can foster: as well as being able to see the exhibition, we were entertained by displays by local boxing and trampolining clubs, a rare chance for people to make a lot of noise and jump around in the usually hushed atmosphere of an art gallery.

The items in this excellent exhibition range from an 1851 advertisement for Robert Dover’s Olympick Games at Chipping Campden to posters from the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Most of the IOC’s Olympic Games are represented, including some of the Winter Olympics, with a thematic arrangement working alongside the more obvious chronological one. Apart from wishing that I had some of the posters for myself, three things struck me about the collection.

First, there is the old dilemma of presenting what is ultimately advertising material in an art gallery. The old distinctions between fine art and commercial art have probably been irrelevant since at least Toulouse-Lautrec. Even so it can still be odd to walk, as I did at Southampton, past a painting by James Tissot and a sculpture by Antony Gormley and into a quiet space devoted to bits of paper that were designed to be glued to billboards. The reverence that we are supposed to feel in art galleries clashes with the memories that the posters evoke. Some of them are great pieces of commercial art, and established artists including Roy Lichtenstein (LA 1984) and David Hockney (Munich 1972 and LA 1984) do for the Olympics what Lautrec did for Parisian nightclubs. Others, however, have little artistic merit – sorry, Athens 2004, but your piece here looked far too much like a standard Greek holiday poster. Either way, there is still something incongruous about looking at adverts that are framed and labelled as pieces of art.

My second impression was about just how unolympic the early posters were. The exhibition serves as a reminder that certain aspects of the Olympic Games that we now take for granted – the five ring logo, for example, and other aspects of the brand – simply didn’t exist in the competition’s early years. The fencing poster for the 1900 Paris Olympics makes no reference to the Olympic Games, for example, while the rings do not feature on any of the posters here until Los Angeles 1932, despite being used as early as Antwerp 1920. The exhibition is thus a great place to visit for anyone wanting an object lesson in the invention of tradition, or a reminder of how organisations are always evolving.

Finally, I was impressed that the exhibition’s curators had included some oppositional and alternative Olympic posters. The anti-Beijing 2008 designs, with the Olympic rings rendered in barbed wire or as the wheels of tanks, are not included, but a powerful Mexican poster from 1968 stands for the many anti-Olympic campaigns. In this, the campaigners for freedom of speech drew a man with his lips sealed with the Olympic rings. A Terrence Higgins Trust poster from the 1980s renders the rings as a collection of five coloured condoms. A colourful poster for the 1936 Workers’ Olympiad in Barcelona shows one of the forms that opposition to the Berlin Olympics took. The fact that the Barcelona poster includes a representation of a black competitor, something the official posters do not manage until 1960, suggests another interesting avenue for analysis.

The posters thus serve as a visual record of a changing aesthetics in the Olympic movement, and as views of what the Olympics – and their forerunners – were like at different moments in their history. This exhibition is not overly corporate, and is happy to make uncomfortable comparisons and contrasts. It also confirms the importance of visual artefacts as primary sources for the sports historian.

Sports history, in line with many other types of history, is currently experiencing a strong ‘visual turn’, with historians increasingly using visual sources as well as verbal ones. This is taking many forms, with everything from advertising and packaging through to fine art and architectural drawings being used to supplement and complement the more traditional documents that we use. I’ve had an interest in visual sources for a long time, having supervised a PhD on propaganda posters, and I’m doing two projects at the moment that rely heavily on visuals. The first is based on knitting patterns, those ephemeral glossy leaflets that carry all sorts of information about class, gender, and family structures in their stilted photographs. The second is for a book on the Olympic Games for English Heritage’s Played in Britain series, where visuals are going to tell a lot of the story.

I’ve also been using visuals in class, with my second year sports history students looking at different artistic representations of sport as a way onto what sport looked like in different cultures. I chose the illustrations for the different types of sport and play that they show. Pieter Breugel’s Children’s Games of 1560 is a good one for getting a sense of spontaneity in play, or people using their landscape and the townscape rather than anything purpose-built, and of a play culture that is free from adult observation or any other external social control. William Hogarth’s The Cockpit of 1759 took us into a different kind of sports culture, one based on nature but taking place in a purpose-built space, and with all sorts of people – the trainer, the bookmaker, and aristocrat, the landlord – having a say in the sport’s progress. Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte of 1886 provided an insight to a calmer recreational culture, with the rowers and the angler providing the only real action for the bourgeois promenaders on their weekend stroll. Finally, L.S. Lowry’s Going to the Match, a naïve rendition of Burnden Park on match day, took us into modern organised football in its industrial heartlands.

This was a challenging and rewarding seminar. So much of the methodology that sport studies and management courses involve is scientific and empirical in approach, with an emphasis on things being provable or not: the ball is in, or the ball is out; the intervention makes the athlete perform better, or it doesn’t. Using paintings and engravings, where the creator’s intentions in depicting sport can’t be exactly recovered, where there is a representation of a truth but no pretence at telling the truth, and where so much depends on subjective judgements, is quite a leap.

The subjective judgements involved for the students were at least threefold. First, some students have a mistrust of using art, based on their scientific preferences. Second, there is the aesthetic judgement of whether or not they liked the picture. Some people found that static nature of Seurat’s painting simply boring, for example. Third, there is the ideological reaction to what the picture shows, which came over strongly in relation to Hogarth’s engraving of a cockfight: most people, understandably, found it cruel and degrading. Everyone got beyond these obstacles, though, and we had a fruitful and constructive discussion about each picture’s context and content, and about how what the artists didn’t show – the lack of policemen in Going to the Match, for example – could tell us as much as what they did show.

Fine art, advertisements, photographs – if we ignore the visual then we deliberately miss out so many potential primary sources, and we refuse to engage with what sport in the past looked like. However posed, however contrived, or however idealised these representations might be, they have just as much to tell us as minute books, newspapers, and other documentary sources.

Like many other people, my New Year resolution was to get fitter. After a few injuries, and with the pounds beginning to creep on as my fortieth birthday recedes ever further, it felt like a good time to get more active. Reading Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running has also been an inspiration. His descriptions of how running and writing balance each other in his life, and his honest acceptance of the gradual slowing down that comes with age, is better than any motivational sloganeering you can get from more mainstream books about staying active. So I joined the local gym here in Winchester, and so far it’s going nicely. I have been a member of the same gym before, on and off since 1993, although I haven’t been for a few years now.

A local authority gym in a pretty ordinary leisure centre might not seem a promising subject for a historian, but I think too much when I’m on the treadmill and there is a lot of material there.

First off, there is a personal history. I can trace some large parts of the past 15 years of my life through remembering about my gym membership – or its lapses – and what I was doing there. I can link it to training for certain events, like a half marathon I ran in 1995, and I can link it to rehabilitation after a couple of operations. I also remember going a lot during the final stages of writing my first book. I can link my lapses to the times when our children were born, and leisure time – however worthily spent – just dried up. The networks of people I have known at the gym have changed in line with changes in my life. When I worked at the local university, I used to see some of my students there, but now that I’ve moved to a university in another town and they have graduated and moved on, I don’t have that link. Now I know lots of people through our children’s school networks. Then there’s the way that I’ve slowed down as I’ve got older – back to Murakami again. Things that seemed easy years ago now take far more effort. The trade off, though, is that my sense of achievement has increased, especially as now, just one month into my current membership, I can already feel the benefits of exercise. I’m not trying to get all Nick Hornby about it: a council-run gym can hardly inspire the same emotional responses as other sporting allegiances. However, I can easily relate important phase of my life to membership and its lapses, and to what I did when I was here.

Just as its place in an autobiography might be overlooked, so the gym’s place in local history is easy to see as marginal. The building itself is early 1990s post-modern lite, a pretty characterless functional space with a few pastel touches. In a city like Winchester, where anything built since the English Revolution is seen as modern, it’s not the kind of building to excite historians. The most notable thing about it is that it replaced an older swimming pool that burnt down. Inside, the gym is placeless – I could be in any gym anywhere. However, coming back after a few years out I’ve been struck by some physical changes. The gym has grown, colonising rooms that used to be used for functions and group classes. The number of television screens has increased from one to six, all playing different channels that users can listen in to on their earphones through the jacks on every exercise machine. A hits-based radio station fills in the gaps between the machine noises and the grunts and groans. The machines themselves – treadmills, bikes, rowers, cross trainers – have become more advanced, able to tell users more about their bodies and their regimes. The type of people using the gym has remained pretty static – an interesting mix of ages, abilities, and sexes, with a smattering of poseurs – while their numbers have increased. More people have personal trainers now than they did when I first joined. In all, the compare and contrast picture I get when I look back from today to my first membership in 1993 is one of an increasing interest in exercise and well-being, as witness the gym’s physical expansion, along with an increasing personalisation of the exercise experience, as people with personal earphones or personal trainers perform to improve the personal data on their machine’s display.

I’m not criticising this: I’m part of it, after all. While I feel some smugness that I walk to the gym and don’t rely on a car, I’m still someone who is choosing to run on a machine rather than make the more natural and less cluttered act of cross-country running, and someone who likes the globalised experience of a sauna at the end of a session. What I am doing is trying to stress that these everyday bits of contemporary life have a history, a history that is personal, social, economic, scientific, cultural, and political. Never take the easy option of ignoring the recent in history: it can be just as telling about continuity and change, and about communities, as the older stuff.

Now, what was my PB for 5km with a 2.5 incline on the treadmill again? Pass me a heart monitor, someone, I’ve got some personal data to upload.

I found a gem in a second-hand bookshop in Beverley, East Yorkshire, last week. It was a complete set of four-volume Encyclopaedia of Sport and Games, edited by the Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire and published in London in 1911. I’ve done a fair amount of work on late Victorian and Edwardian sporting literature in the past, and it was a pleasure to get this set. Between them, the four volumes contain hundreds of entries on the whole of the Edwardian sporting world.

It is sometimes tempting to expect reference books like this to be objective as well as authoritative, but dealing with historical sources alerts us to the subjectivities in all writing. These texts are certainly authoritative. They cover, in meticulous detail, everything from bowling techniques in cricket to advice on how to bait a hook to catch a trout. Alongside this authority, the subjectivities – the features that place it in its time and in the culture of its authors – come through in many ways. First, there is the subject matter itself, which shows up how ‘sport’ meant an awful lot more than just team games. While the first volume goes somewhat tamely from ‘A to Cricket’, things hot up with Volume 2, ‘Crocodile to Hound-Breeding’. Volume 3 keeps up the pace from ‘Hunting to Racing’, with the equally exotic Volume 4 running from ‘Rackets to Zebras’. This isn’t simply a set for the country sports brigade, but also for big game hunters – or, at least, those who liked to read about shooting wild boar in Europe, elephants in Africa, and grizzly bears in north America. As such, the books serve as a great reminder of how relative the word ‘sport’ is.

Beyond the subject headings, the assumptions and subjectivities of the authors come through in the text itself. Class-based assumptions run through the sniffy discussion of Northern Rugby Union and professional football. Women are left on the sidelines. Cars and motorboats, the preserve of the richest, are coming into sport alongside horses and boats. Royals and aristocrats from various nations are shown exploring the world’s wilder zones and killing its wilder animals, with indigenous people there simply as servants to help the white men do the shooting. Information about expanding railways in Africa and north America is there for people to plan their trips, an interesting piece of evidence about how the globalisation of sport has an imperial history based around travel, exploration, and hunting. Any belief in the objectivity of the encyclopaedia as a form is made irrelevant in the face of such social and cultural positioning.

Indeed, the frequent use of first person narratives to explain points makes some of the entries read like travelogues. My favourite here is the section on African elephants, written by the famous soldier and explorer Frederick Selous, large parts of which are dedicated to the ‘narrative of our pursuit’ of elephants with a Hottentot hunter and a team of ‘Kaffirs’ in Matabeleland. This kind of writing, full of exciting details about the hunt, and observations about the behaviour of both the animals and his companions, would never make it into an encyclopaedia today, but it fits perfectly here. The first person voices bring with them a sense of expertise and experience which readers would have found reassuring, and which give us a real sense of what these events were like.

It is important to stress that this is all useful. To criticise a historical source for using a writing style that we no longer consider appropriate, or to be written from a perspective which we do not share, would be ludicrous. Instead, you need to recognise the ideologies and assumptions that underpin the text, and work with them. Think about the language that the authors use, and how that positions them. Think about what they leave out of texts as well as what they put in. Think about how contemporary audiences would have received them. Never dismiss an old reference book just because its information and its attitudes are out of date: instead, use it as way into the sport and the society of the time from which it comes.