The National Physical Laboratory is the national measurement standards laboratory for the United Kingdom, based at Bushy Park in Teddington, England. It comes under the management of the Department for Business and Industrial Strategy; the National Physical Laboratory was established in 1900 at Bushy House "to bring scientific knowledge to bear upon our everyday industrial and commercial life". It grew to fill a large selection of buildings on the Teddington site. NPL procured a large state-of-the-art laboratory under a Private Finance Initiative contract in 1998; the construction, being undertaken by John Laing, the maintenance of this new building, being undertaken by Serco, was transferred back to the DTI in 2004 after the private sector companies involved made losses of over £100m. The laboratory was run by the UK government, with members of staff being part of the civil service. Administration of NPL was contracted out in 1995 under a Government Owned Contractor Operated model, with Serco winning the bid and all staff transferred to their employ.

Under this regime, overhead costs halved, third party revenues grew by 16% per annum, the number of peer-reviewed research papers published doubled. It was decided in 2012 to change the operating model for NPL from 2014 onward to include academic partners and to establish a postgraduate teaching institute on site; the date of the changeover was postponed for up to a year. The candidates for lead academic partner were the Universities of Edinburgh, Southampton and Surrey with an alliance of the Universities of Strathclyde and Surrey chosen as preferred partners. In January 2013 funding for a new £25m Advanced Metrology Laboratory was announced that will be built on the footprint of an existing unused building; the operation of the laboratory transferred back to the Department for Business and Skills ownership on 1 January 2015. Notable researchers at NPL Researchers who have worked at NPL include: D. W. Dye who did important work in developing the technology of quartz clocks; the inventor Sir Barnes Wallis did early development work there on the "Bouncing Bomb" used in the "Dam Busters" wartime raids.

H. J. Gough, one of the pioneers of research into metal fatigue, worked at NPL for 19 years from 1914 to 1938. Sydney Goldstein and Sir James Lighthill worked in NPL's aerodynamics division during World War II researching boundary layer theory and supersonic aerodynamics respectively. Dr Clifford Hodge worked there and was engaged in research on semiconductors. Others who have spent time at NPL include Robert Watson-Watt considered the inventor of radar, Oswald Kubaschewski, the father of computational materials thermodynamics and the numerical analyst James Wilkinson. NPL research has contributed to physical science, materials science and bioscience. Applications have been found in ship design, aircraft development, computer networking and global positioning; the first accurate atomic clock, a caesium standard based on a certain transition of the caesium-133 atom, was built by Louis Essen and Jack Parry in 1955 at NPL. Calibration of the caesium standard atomic clock was carried out by the use of the astronomical time scale ephemeris time.

This led to the internationally agreed definition of the latest SI second being based on atomic time. NPL has undertaken computer research since the mid-1940s. From 1945, Alan Turing led the design of the Automatic Computing Engine computer; the ACE project was floundered, leading to Turing's departure. Donald Davies took the project over and concentrated on delivering the less ambitious Pilot ACE computer, which first worked in May 1950. Among those who worked on the project was American computer pioneer Harry Huskey. A commercial spin-off, DEUCE was manufactured by English Electric Computers and became one of the best-selling machines of the 1950s; the National Physical Laboratory is involved with new developments in metrology, such as researching metrology for, standardising, nanotechnology. It is based at the Teddington site, but has a site in Huddersfield for dimensional metrology and an underwater acoustics facility at Wraysbury Reservoir. Beginning in the mid-1960s, Donald Davies and his team at the NPL pioneered packet switching, now the dominant basis for data communications in computer networks worldwide.

Davies designed and proposed a national data network based on packet switching in his 1965 Proposal for the Development of a National Communications Service for On-line Data Processing. Subsequently, the NPL team developed the concept into a local area network which operated from 1969 to 1986, carried out work to analyse and simulate the performance of packet switching networks, their research and practice influenced the ARPANET in the United States, the forerunner of the Internet, other researchers in the UK and Europe. NPL was involved in internetworking research. Davies and Barber were members of the International Networking Working Group which developed a protocol for internetworking. Connecting existing networks creates a "basic dilemma" since a common host protocol would require restructuring the existing networks. NPL connected with the European Informatics Network by translating between two different host protocols. While the NPL connection to the Post Office Experimental Packet Switched Service used a common host protocol in both networks.

NPL research confirmed establishing a common host protocol would be more efficient. The EIN protocol he

Judith Karen "Judy" French is a British Anglican priest. Since 2014, she has been the Archdeacon of Dorchester in the Diocese of Oxford. French was educated at a United Reformed Church boarding school, studied theology at St David's College and trained for ordination at St Stephen's House, Oxford, she served as a parish deacon in the Diocese of Portsmouth, as an assistant curate in the Diocese of Coventry. She was a Vicar in the Diocese of Oxford from 1997 until her appointment as Archdeacon. In 2012, she was made an Honorary Canon of Christ Church Cathedral. French was born on 18 November 1960 in Portsmouth, England, she spent her childhood living in England and the Middle East, as the family moved during her father's career as a telecom engineer. Her mother was a Sunday school teacher, she was educated at an English "boarding school, set up for the daughters of United Reformed Church ministers". She therefore attended a URC church with her school, but soon began attending the local Church of England church.

She was confirmed at the age of 14, having attended the church near her grandparents’ home in Portsmouth for preparation. After finishing school, French moved to Portsmouth where she began working as an accounts clerk at an insurance firm, she became a member of the church she was confirmed at, a "middle of the road church with an Anglo-Catholic vicar". She joined its parochial church council at the age of 19. After completing a history A-Level at night school, French became the first member of her family to attend university when she took up a place to study theology at St David's College, Lampeter in Wales. During her time at Lampeter, the university chaplain was a woman and there had been female deacons in the Church in Wales since 1980, she felt the call to ordination while at university. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1989, she was selected for ordination in the Church of England, matriculated into St Stephen's House, Oxford, an Anglo-Catholic theological college, in 1989.

She was one of only two women in her year, but became the only woman when the other left shortly after starting her studies. After two years of training, she left St St Stephen's House to be ordained as a deacon. French was ordained in the Church of England as a deacon in 1991. From 1991 to 1994, she was parish deacon at All Saints Church, Botley in the Diocese of Portsmouth; as Bishop of Portsmouth, Timothy Bavin, was conflicted about women priests, she would have to move dioceses to join the priesthood. French was ordained as a priest in 1994, the first year that woman were ordained to the priesthood in the Church of England, during a service at Coventry Cathedral. From 1994 to 1997, she served as an assistant curate at St Mark's Church, Bilton in the Diocese of Coventry. In 1997, French was appointed Charlbury in the Diocese of Oxford, she was Area Dean of Chipping Norton between 2007 and 2012. She was made an Honorary Canon of Christ Church Cathedral in 2012. In March 2014, she was announced as the first Archdeacon of Dorchester, an appointment created by the division of the Archdeaconry of Oxford.

She led her last service as vicar on 25 May after 17 years in the role. On 19 June 2014, she was collated as archdeacon during a service at Christ Church Cathedral

A Vision of Battlements is a 1965 novel by Anthony Burgess based on his experiences during World War II in Gibraltar, where he was serving with the British army. It is Burgess's first novel. While not published until 1965, Burgess wrote it in 1949; as he explains, "I was empty of music but itching to create. So I wrote this novel...to see if I could clear my head of the dead weight of Gibraltar." The story draws from Burgess's experience of being stationed in Gibraltar during World War II and satirizes traditional notions of battle heroism by parodying the Aeneid with antihero Richard Ennis taking the place of Aeneas. The title, in addition to its Gibraltarian associations, contains a reference to the appearance of certain objects in the eye of one who suffers from astigmatism