On the evening of Monday 8 December 2025, join writer, historian and museum curator David Rooney for History at The Hall – The Big Hop: Adventures in the Workshop and the Air.

The Big Hop is the powerful true story of the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean - eight years before Charles Lindbergh's solo flight of 1927. The airmen who made the pioneering flight in 1919 - a Manchester mechanic and an engineer from Glasgow - had devoted their lives to turning a dream into practical reality, as had so many other pioneer aviators. Their work, begun as ambitious teenagers before the First World War, coupled technical precision and the mastery of materials with creativity, imagination and a relentless pursuit of excellence. In the sheds and aircraft hangars of 1919, as in the workshops of goldsmiths through history, craft skill and innovation combined to remarkable effect.