Amberley Publishing strana 11 z 20

While bus services in Britain have generally been in decline since the heady days of the early 1950s, there has been one area of bus operation that has seen significant growth. There has been a boom in overseas tourists to Britain’s historic towns and cities with the advent of cheaper long-haul flights and budget European airlines, along with the Channel Tunnel.Bus companies started to offer tours of these towns and cities, often using open-top buses. This idea was not new. London Transport had an existing Round London Sightseeing Tour which had been started in 1951 for the Festival of Britain. In 1972 open-top buses were hired in as an experiment, this proving successful and services were expanded rapidly.In Scotland, Edinburgh Corporation Transport had a long tradition of sightseeing tours. Elsewhere, sightseeing tours took off in such locations as Bath, York, Oxford and Cambridge. As tourists came all year round it became viable to operate separate vehicles and even invest in new buses. New developments included Hop-on-Hop-off tours and tours with taped commentaries in a variety of languages. New specialist companies began to emerge. Guide Friday started up in a small way at Stratford-upon-Avon and spread nationwide. They were replaced by the City Sightseeing brand started by Ensignbus which operates internationally.Malcolm Batten offers a fascinating photographic tour of the sightseeing buses of Britain.

The archaeological evidence for the wide-ranging uses of magic in Roman Britain is explored here. Amulets harnessed the power of supernatural creatures; arcane words, and strange and uncanny materials to provide powerful protection to their users. Roman Britain provides evidence for amulets that protected pregnant mothers, soldiers on the frontier, sufferers of stomach ailments, and teething infants. Curses by victims of theft aimed to bring physical ruin on criminals and love charms aimed to help the unlucky in love. Lavishly illustrated throughout, this accessible books offers a fascinating insight into the secret magical history of Roman Britain.

Railway disasters were a new phenomenon in early Victorian England. One of the first to be investigated by the Railway Inspectorate was at Howden, a month after the Hull & Selby Railway opened, in which five people died in a derailment in 1840. Signalling and safety procedures have developed over the years and the railways have become much safer, but even in recent times accidents have happened. Yorkshire, the largest historic county in England and encompassing densely populated towns and cities, heavily industrialised areas, remote rural areas and coastal settlements, has seen its fair share of railway disasters over the last two centuries, including several at Penistone in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the worst accident on Britain’s network in the twenty-first century at Great Heck.Author Richard M. Jones reveals the stories behind the railway accidents in Yorkshire from the early days of the railways in the 1840s to the twenty-first century. Illustrated throughout, it will appeal to all those with an interest in railway history as well as those who would like to know more about this part of England.

The military aircraft featured in this book range from the monoplanes and bi-planes of the early twentieth century to the hi-tech supersonic jet fighters used by air forces across the world today. These aircraft include not only planes, but also gyrocopters and helicopters. They can be seen giving displays at air days and airshows or as static exhibits at a wide variety of locations – military and aviation museums, airports, airfields and aerodromes – sometimes on an almost daily basis as they are still serving with the relevant air forces.Some aircraft are also found at military establishments around the country, where they are plinthed and act as gate guardians, or in the hands of private individuals, more often than not a section of the craft being displayed – cockpits, nosecones or part of the fuselage.The photographs in this book feature a broad range of military aircraft from the First World War right up to the modern day which can be seen on display in the skies and on the ground in Britain.

Part personal memoir, part cultural history, West is a compendium of ‘tales’, telling the story of a unique geographical and literary landscape – the western Midlands of England. It is a magpie’s nest, a melange of anecdotes, folk legends, ghost stories and fairy tales. But more than this, it is a record of a land and its people, told over 2,000 years of history – a land that birthed both industrial and cultural revolutions.A native of the area, Martin Wall takes us on a search for lost time in the Lost Lands of the west, charting the liminal energies which have so influenced our literature – and himself. Shamelessly nostalgic, sometimes tender, sometimes brutal, these tales invite us to immerse ourselves in the past, present and future, to become ‘unstuck in time’.How were the lands ‘lost’? The author laments the decline and fall of a succession of cultures, from the Celtic principality of Pengwern and the mighty kingdom of Mercia to the end of heavy industry in the late twentieth century. With a thoughtful foreword by Robert Plant, West takes history to a new imaginative edge.

Scottish railway history began in 1722 when William Dickson commenced work on the Tranent–Cockenzie Waggonway. Built entirely in wood and designed to carry coal from pits at Tranent to salt pans at Cockenzie, it was the first railway to be built in Scotland. Developing first in the most industrialised parts of the country, in the Lothians and later around Glasgow, wooden and iron railways flourished in no small part thanks to the work of Robert Stevenson. Ed Bethune and Anthony Dawson of the 1722 Waggonway Project present a century-long tour of the earliest of Scottish railways, beginning in 1722 and ending with the Garnkirk & Glasgow Railway of 1831, the first ‘modern’ railway in Scotland. The 1722 Waggonway Heritage Group was established in 2017 to preserve, promote and enhance the history of the Tranent–Cockenzie Waggonway through research, archaeology and community heritage initiatives. Thanks to the work of the group, much is now known about how early wooden railways were constructed and how early nineteenth-century fish-bellied rails laid on stone blocks worked, as well as the 1833 Robert Stevenson-designed harbour at Cockenzie.Brand-new information from the archival and archaeological work into Scotland’s earliest railways is showcased alongside fascinating and rare images, all serving to set the scene for the beginnings of the Scottish railway network as conceived by trailblazers William Dickson, William Adam and Robert Stevenson.

Henry VIII’s relationships with women in his adult life famously did not go well. He was the Tudor king who had six wives, two of which he murdered. But what of the three powerful Tudor women that surrounded Henry VIII in his early life? The ones that saw him before the marriages, before the beheadings, before the tyranny? One was Queen of England, one was Queen of Scotland and the other was Queen of France – but for Henry VIII these women were his mother and two sisters.Henry’s Roses explores the life of these three women, shining a spotlight and telling the story of how their fate was entwined with the most infamous monarch of them all.

Medieval Macclesfield was a small market town in Cheshire but industries, particularly button manufacturing, started to develop in the Tudor era. The town’s later wealth and rapid expansion was built on the silk industry that followed, with its first mill being built in 1743. In the first half of the nineteenth century Macclesfield became one of the largest producers of silk in the world and the population quadrupled in the first fifty years, over half of whom were employed in the silk industry, there being nearly 100 mills in the town. Alongside the mills, large numbers of houses, schools, churches and other institutions were built to accommodate this growth, many of which remain today. Although silk manufacturing declined, other industries developed which have left their mark, including the bread maker Hovis. The town has continued to evolve, reflected in new buildings and repurposed old ones.Macclesfield in 50 Buildings explores the history of this town in Cheshire through a selection of its most interesting buildings and structures, showing the changes that have taken place over the years. The book will appeal to all those who live in Macclesfield or who have an interest in the area.

In the late Middle Ages, Walsingham in Norfolk was the most important pilgrim destination in England. Pilgrims travelled here to the shrine to the Virgin Mary from all over the British Isles and Europe, often via Norfolk’s two other great pilgrim places, Norwich and King’s Lynn. Other routes ran within the county, linking other significant pilgrim points including Bromholm Priory, St Benet’s Abbey and Binham Priory. There were also paths from pilgrim ports such as Great Yarmouth, Cromer, Wells and Hunstanton. Along these routes were numerous hermitages, wayside crosses and hostelries catering to pilgrims. When Henry VIII banned pilgrimage and outlawed the veneration of saints, the pilgrims stopped coming and the paths they used were forgotten. Now those paths are being re-established, the pilgrim places rediscovered, and increasing numbers of pilgrims are walking those routes.This book describes those pilgrim paths and places, including the main feeder routes that pilgrims would have taken across the country to reach Norfolk. It features priories and abbeys, pilgrim churches, hostelries and crosses, holy wells, chapels and hermitages as well as stories of historic figures such as the mystics Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich. Norfolk’s Pilgrim Routes: A History of Paths, Places and People will appeal to all those who enjoy walking and exploring Britain’s heritage. Through this book readers and walkers today can explore the full breadth of Norfolk’s rich pilgrim history and the fascinating history to be discovered en route.

Brighton and Hove is one of England’s most recent cities and also one of its most colourful and eccentric. It developed as a fashionable resort in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, becoming inextricably linked with the extravagant behaviour of George IV and his fantastical Pavilion. In Quirky Brighton author Chris Horlock delves into lesser known but fascinating tales from Brighton’s past. Readers will find stories of the man who walked round the world wearing a medieval iron helmet, a shark attack straight out of the film Jaws, the time Brighton built its own version of Nelson''s Column, plus when the streets were full of hundreds of marauding zombies. And it also includes that notorious naked bike ride that takes place each year... Quirky Brighton celebrates the unusual and bizarre history of Brighton and its characters over the years. This fascinating insight into Brighton (and occasionally Hove) will interest all those who want to know more about its curious history.

Traffic congestion has become a major problem in many of England’s towns and cities. Historic locations in particular have road layouts that predate the internal combustion engine and are not suited to the volume of traffic from residents, delivery trucks and tourists. Parking space is at a premium and competing for land with offices, shops and housing use. An added consideration in recent years has been air quality.Many places have introduced Park & Ride schemes with out-of-town car parks served by frequent bus links to the centre. These are usually sponsored by the local authority and the vehicles used on the services will frequently have a dedicated livery to promote the service.This book takes a look at some of the Park & Ride buses that have worked in selected English towns and cities since the 1970s.

No easily accessible book which lists the emperors (of which there are very many, thanks to the vicissitudes of the empire itself) in alphabetical order for easy reference and in which a reasonably full biographical account of each, with references, has been available. Here it is.This biographical dictionary runs from Caesar’s seizure of power in 49BC to AD602, when the dynasty of Justinian and his successors ended (rather bloodily in a mutiny) and the true Byzantine, much more entirely Greek, character of the empire finally emerged. It includes an account of the way the empire evolved constitutionally. Up to the settlement of Augustus powerful men were almost sleepwalking into monarchy and trying to stretch the constitutional envelope to enable power to be wielded without a naked revival of the hated institution of kingship. From that time, Roman politics became highly fractured, and men bent on gaining control of the levers of government emerged with increasing frequency. Hereditary succession became the norm and then disappeared. In Rome, unlike Medieval Europe, the natural succession of son to father became a rarity and, when it did occur, was usually a disaster. It was only in its Byzantine mutation after 610 that dynastic succession became more standardized, but even then it was mediated by assassination. Of the 198 figures featured here, 101 were killed. Julius Caesar observed: ‘Which death is preferable to every other? The unexpected.’

The nineteenth-century craze for building pleasure piers around the coast of Britain has left a legacy of seaside fun unmatched around the world. Although some of Britain’s piers have succumbed to fire and storm damage over the years, over fifty of these remarkable structures are still standing today. A number were built with railways and tramways to convey holidaymakers to the end of the pier, several of which survive today. These include the longest pier, at Southend-on-Sea, which opened an electric railway in 1890, when the pier was rebuilt to its present extent; the oldest seaside pleasure pier, at Ryde, which has a railway from the pier head that links to the rest of the network on the Isle of Wight; and the Hythe Pier Railway, which takes passengers to and from the ferry link at the end of the pier.Martin Easdown has been researching Britain’s piers and their railways for many years and presents a photographic survey of them around the UK and Ireland. The photographs show both self-contained pier railways and tramways and pier railways connected to the National Rail Network. As well as the vehicles, pier stations are illustrated, including those that were not actually on the piers but the shore beside them. With many rare and fascinating photographs, this book will be of interest to railway enthusiasts and those nostalgic for the quintessential British seaside holiday.

The London & Birmingham Railway was the first intercity line in Britain to travel from London. Superbly engineered by Robert Stephenson, this pioneering early achievement of the railway age in Britain linked England’s second city Birmingham to the capital at Euston station and became part of what later came to be known as the West Coast Main Line. En route, the line travelled through Rugby and Coventry and terminated at Curzon Street station in Birmingham but by 1854 passenger services stopped at Birmingham New Street instead. The route soon became part of the London & North Western Railway, later absorbed into the London, Midland & Scottish Railway at the Grouping in 1923, before becoming part of British Railways in Nationalisation in 1948. In this book author, modeller and railway historian Robert Hendry draws on his extensive collection of historical images to present a photographic portrait of the Euston to Birmingham route through the years up to the Rail Blue era of British Rail which ended in the 1980s.

Pennine hills, unspoilt moorland, dramatic dales, picturesque villages, market towns and a magnificent coastline are all part of the scenery of County Durham. The history is equally rich, from early farming settlement, conquests, rebellion and mining to industrial development, and always present through these times have been the churches. The earliest churches in the county date from the Anglo-Saxon era and the Norman Prince Bishops of Durham instituted a new building programme, including several churches dedicated to the local saint, Cuthbert. Later events all left their mark on the county’s churches, from the Reformation and Civil War to the rise of dissenting groups such as Quakers and Methodists. Industrial development and the growth of densely populated urban areas required a new church building programme by the Victorians and in the last century the story of County Durham’s churches has continued.In Churches of County Durham, author Colin Wilkinson explores a cross-section of historical churches throughout the county, both the well known and those waiting to be discovered by a wider audience. This fascinating picture of an important part of the history of the county over the centuries will be of interest to all those who live in or are visiting this splendid area of England.

Few people realise that King Charles III is a direct descendant of the Romanovs, the dynasty who by 1917 ruled one sixth of the surface of the earth. Their story encompasses great wealth and unlimited power, palace coups and murders, as well as at least one heir allegedly killed by his own father.The direct line then passes through the royal family who ruled Greece from 1863 and whose later members spent their lives in and out of exile. The first Greek monarch, Charles’s great-grandfather, was assassinated. Charles’s grandfather was tried by a kangaroo court and, members of his family believed, only saved from execution by the swift action of Britain’s King George V.This is a remarkable story of Royal intrigue, European scandal and international co-operation. By looking at the Romanov past of King Charles III, Coryne Hall offers a fascinating insight into the history of Britain’s monarchy.