Hello and welcome to the History Extra podcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's best-selling history magazine. I'm Ellie Corthorne. We often focus on the views that we can see through windows.

But what about the windows themselves? As cultural sociologist Rachel Hurdley explored in her recent BBC Radio 4 documentary, The Hidden History of the Window, they're an element of buildings that can reveal much about our pasts, from living conditions and architectural styles to wider issues of defence, politics and social change.

This is a subject that Rachel recently wrote about for the November issue of BBC History Magazine,

and our deputy editor, Matt Elton, caught up with her to find out more.

We're talking on a particularly depressing early autumn day.

How did the decision come about to focus on the thing that we can see all this

weather through the window, if you like? I suppose it's the way in which all these strange

ideas come about, you know, on a day like this, looking out of the window, looking at the

view, and then suddenly realizing actually, there's something

between me and that view, and I don't know very much about it. So the producer Louise

Adamson and I had one of our little chats that we have about our crazier ideas and did

some research into the history of windows and thought, wow, you know, like all of

these rarely noticed spaces, there is so much to think about when it comes to the history of

windows and what's happening with windows today. I think that's really interesting, because we

might think about the house itself, we might think about the view through the window, but we don't often spend a lot of time thinking about the window itself.

In terms of tracing this history, is there a point at which we can sort of mark the first use of the window?

Is that to an abstract a concept?

Well, way back, there was the idea of the wind eye,

which comes from the Vikings,

where there would be openings, obviously, from houses,

but they'd be very drafty, they wouldn't particularly let light in.

And one of the reasons for having these

...