It wasn’t all bad

As of Wednesday, Britain had gone a record-breaking two months during which no electricity from coal-powered plants was fed into the grid. The last time this occurred was in 1882 – just before a coal-fired station opened in London to power street lights. The coalfree run was partly enabled by a steep fall in energy demand during the lockdown; and May’s sunny weather. The 61-day streak since 9 April is more than triple the previous record of 18 days set in June 2019.

The first American woman to walk in space has now become the first female explorer to reach the deepest known point on Earth – and the first person to do both. Former Nasa astronaut turned oceanographer Kathy Sullivan, 68, made the 6.8-mile journey down to Challenger Deep, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific, on Sunday. She spent an hour and a half at her destination in a specially designed deep-sea research submersible, before embarking on the four-hour ascent. “‘Moonscape’ was the word that kept coming back to me, like I was seeing the Moon right here on our own planet,” she said.

The country’s first purpose-built playhouse, which became a prototype for the theatres where Shakespeare’s dramas were first staged, has been uncovered in Stepney, in east London. Archaeologists from University College London are confident that what they unearthed on the site of a housing redevelopment last year is the Red Lion playhouse, which “marked the dawn of Elizabethan theatre”. Its exact location was a mystery until clues emerged in 16th century legal papers detailing a dispute between the proprietor and the carpenters who built it.