Local History

Featuring a range of picturesque vistas, from freshwater lochs and wooded glens to majestic mountains, granite cities and medieval castles, each stunning scene is full of intriguing detail sure to fire the imagination and make you reach for yourcolouring pencils.

Compelling street photography from Manchester and Salford during the slum clearances of the 60s

Fascinating vintage photos of Hong Kong have been matched with the same viewpoint today to show the amazing growth and development of this unique city.

Featuring a range of picturesque vistas from around Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, Wiltshire and Worcestershire, including rolling hills, thatched cottages and stately homes, each stunning scene is full of intriguing detail sure to fire the imagination and make you reach for your colouring pencils.

London is a city of markets: markets in meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, money, insurance, shipping and, occasionally, in stolen goods.

Featuring eyewitness accounts from a haunted room, sealed up for forty years at the Blue Boar pub, to the ghostly female resident at the Old Duke and the Westhoughton poltergeist, this book includes pulse-raising narratives that are guaranteed to make your blood run cold.

Since it was first broadcast on British television in 1997, Midsomer Murders has become one of the most-beloved detective dramas on television, instantly recognisable for its attractive backdrop at the heart of rural England.

Featured here are chapters on the village itself, the community, schools, seashore and fishing industry, high days and holidays and local events. It is sure to evoke many happy memories of yesteryear.

The story of Golborne's history told through archive photographs

World of William Morris

A visual journey into Middlesbrough's past - that will delight resident and visitor alike

Covering the villages and landscapes of West Yorkshire, this guide suggests 30 walks of varying lengths and difficulty but all offering unrestricted access to the West Yorkshire countryside.

Sheffield troublemakers

Just as Peter Ackroyd's bestselling London is the biography of the city, Thames: Sacred River is the biography of the river, from sea to source.

A guide to the 'living' medieval churches of Norfolk, helping the church visitor to understand both the universal features of churches and the unique aspects of those in different areas.

Teddington, Twickenham and Hampton past and present

Once part of Lancashire, Droylsden and Audenshaw are now part of Tameside Metropolitan Borough of Manchester. The varied histories of both towns see the transition from farming to an industrial community. With over 200 photographs, this book gives us a glimpse of the streets of the two towns and the people who lived there, at work and leisure.

An oral history of Kent hop pickers

A fascinating account from award-winning author, Adam Nicolson, on the history of Nicolson's own national treasure, his family home: Sissinghurst.Sissinghurst is world famous as a place of calm and beauty, a garden slipped into the ruins of a rose-pink Elizabethan palace. But is it entirely what its creators intended? Has its success over the last thirty years come at a price? Is Sissinghurst everything it could be?The story of this piece of land, an estate in the Weald of Kent, is told here for the first time from the very beginning. Adam Nicolson, who now lives there, has uncovered remarkable new findings about its history as a medieval manor and great sixteenth-century house, from the days of its decline as an eighteenth-century prison to a flourishing Victorian farm and on to the creation, by his grandparents Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, of a garden in a weed-strewn wreck.Alongside his recovery of the past, Adam Nicolson wanted something else: for the land at Sissinghurst to live again, to become the landscape of orchards, cattle, fruit and sheep he remembered from his boyhood. Could that living frame of a mixed farm be brought back to what had turned into monochrome fields of chemicalised wheat and oilseed rape? Against the odds, he was going to try.Adam Nicolson has always been a passionate writer about landscape and buildings, but this is different. This is the place he wanted to make good again, reconnecting garden, farm and land. More than just a personal biography of a place, this book is the story of taking an inheritance and steering it in a new direction, just as an entrepreneur might take hold of a company, or just as all of us might want to take our dreams and make them real.