Shire Publications

London's many cemeteries, churches and graveyards are the last resting places of a multitude of important people from many different walks of life. Politicians, writers and military heroes rub shoulders with engineers, courtesans, artists and musicians, along with quite a few eccentric characters. Arranged geographically, this comprehensive guide describes famous graves in all the major cemeteries and churc...

Sheep have been farmed in Britain for hundreds of years and more than thirty million sheep now inhabit these islands. The many breeds developed over this time have been carefully matched to their surroundings - from the hardy, seaweed-eating North Ronaldsay to the tough hill-dwelling Swaledale and the docile Dorset Down of the lowlands. Susannah Robin Parkin here explains the main differences between the va...

From prize-winning historical novelist Louise Allen, this book presents nine walks through both the London Jane Austen knew and the London of her novels! Follow in Jane's footsteps to her publisher's doorstep and the Prince Regent's vanished palace, see where she stayed when she was correcting proofs of Sense and Sensibility and accompany her on a shopping expedition - and afterwards to the theatre. In mode...

Half-timbered houses, cottages and barnes are a familiar feature of the landscape, but only rarely do we have an opportunity to see below the surface and understand how they were planned and constructed. Timber-framed buildings catch the imagination of those who work with them because of their beauty, their strength and the quality of the material of which they were made: English oak. Many thousands of buil...

From the Edwardian golden age of steam to the present, no mode of travel has captured the hearts of the British people like the railways. In wartime and peace, along major routes and minor, steam, diesel and electric trains have moved goods, taken commuters to work or families on holidays - a constant presence in an always-changing way of life. A Century of Railway Travel tells the story of one hundred year...

Written by the acclaimed historical novelist Lee Jackson, this book recreates the sights and sounds of "Dickens' London" and provides a detailed itinerary for those keen to follow in the footsteps of 'The Inimitable Boz'. Each of the eight walks conjures up forgotten scenes of London life - stage-coaches racing through the Borough; herds of cattle driven through suburban streets to reach Smithfield market; ...

From the original horse-drawn caravan to the sophisticated and well-appointed luxury leisure vehicle we know today, this book follows the dynamic evolution of the touring caravan from the 1900s to the present day. Using a selection of images from his archive library, expert Andrew Jenkinson reveals how technical advances as well as interior design revolutionised the touring caravan in the United Kingdom, an...

The famous son of a famous father, Isambard Kingdom Brunel was acknowledged in his own lifetime as the greatest engineer in an era of engineering titans. He helped drive the first tunnel under a navigable river, built the first all iron ship, bridged the Tamar and Avon, constructed the first railway to run express services and launched the world's first true luxury liner - a vessel five times bigger than an...

Garden Cities: the phrase is redolent of Arts and Crafts values and nineteenth-century utopianism. But despite being the culmination of a range of influential movements, and having global influence themselves, in fact there were only ever two true, self-contained Garden Cities in England - far more numerous were Garden Suburbs and Villages. Crystallised in England by planning visionary Ebenezer Howard and e...

For much of the twentieth century travel by air was a luxury available only to the wealthy, and accordingly the airlines - Pan Am, BOAC, TWA, BEA and many others - offered premium services that connected far-flung parts of the world with con trails of glamour. This book looks back at the golden age, from the 1920s to the 1970s, when well-appointed airliners whisked the rich and famous around the world on ho...

London Transport was created in 1933 to coordinate the shambolic, overlapping transport systems of the capital, and for decades has striven to meet the challenges of organising London travel. Now operating as Transport for London (TfL), it continues this demanding work. In this fully illustrated volume, Michael H. C. Baker presents the complete story of the organisation from its origins, through the upheava...

With over two-thirds of the globe covered by water, the ability to navigate safely and quickly across the oceans has been crucial throughout human history. As seafarers attempted longer and longer voyages from the sixteenth century onwards in search of profit and new lands, the tools of navigation became ever more sophisticated. The development of instruments over the last five hundred years has seen some r...

Britain's towns and cities were famously transformed in the nineteenth century by the coming of the railways, turning their fortunes around and giving urban dwellers new opportunities to travel across the country - yet the effect on the rural population was arguably far greater. Whilst some of the initial trunk lines were designed to link major cities, the network of smaller cross-country and branch lines t...

More poeple than ever are visiting churchs, but they are often baffled by the architectural and technical terms that abound in guidebooks.This book helps to identify ecclesiastical architecture. It is a dictionary explaining in simple language over 600 terms likely to be encountered on a church visits and is illustrated with more than 300 drawings.

Boaters who lived and worked on the narrowboats of the canals were, like the rest of mankind, people who tried to make their homes as comforable and decorative as they could. The boat cabins were small but were bright with paint, and the and the 'roses and castles' decorations of the canal boats are a true English folk art. The boatwomen were competent at needlework, embroidery and crochet and used all of t...

Lavinia Mitton follows the changes in hospital treatment that took place during the Victorian era and explores the different types of hospitals that were available, from the celebrated specialist institutions served by famous surgeons to the appalling workhouse infirmaries where the patients were looked after by untrained pauper nurses. Illustrated with black and white drawings and photographs of the buildi...

Well over half a century after it first appeared in 1948, the Morris Minor has become a much-loved classic car. It is as popular now as when in production. During the Second World War, when Alec Issigonis and his team began to design a prototype small car for the post-war era, few could have foreseen that it would become the first British car to sell a million or that the revolutionary design features would...

"Bathing Houses and Plunge Pools".

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the long-established Rover company of Solihull was fighting to survive. It needed a vehicle that would give it an advantage over its rivals. Taking the American Willys Jeep as inspiration, Rover designers came up with a four-wheel-drive utility vehicle that would become an all-time classic. The Land Rover has undergone a number of facelifts in its sixty-year life, b...

The name Lancelot 'Capability' Brown has become synonymous with the eighteenth-century English landscape garden: between 1751 and 1783 his consultancy handled over 170 major commissions. Ruthlessly efficient, he could stake out the 'capabilities' of a particular terrain within an hour on horseback. Rising to the position of Master Gardener to George III, his trademark features included bald lawns, clumped t...