9780752446202 - Tring 1951 - 2000: Images of England de Fowler, Jill (6 resultados)

Condición: Very Good. 1780296336. 6/1/2026 6:45:36 AM.

Paperback. Condición: Very Good. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Paperback. Condición: Good. There is a very particular sort of British magic contained within books like Around Tring . Not magic in the dragons-and-prophecies sense, obviously. More the magic of discovering that a completely ordinary lane once had a blacksmith, three pubs, a hat shop and a bus service that vanished sometime around 1974, leaving behind only fading memories and one deeply argumentative letter to the local paper. Mike Bass and Jill Fowler have assembled precisely the kind of local history volume that sneaks up on you. At first glance it appears harmless enough: photographs, snippets of history, perhaps a mildly enthusiastic caption about a church restoration. But before long you find yourself completely absorbed in vanished petrol stations, long-demolished cottages and the shocking revelation that people once dressed formally to stand beside tractors. The title itself is wonderfully understated. Around Tring . Not The Epic Transformation of Western Civilisation . Not Empires at War . Just? around Tring. A gentle promise that somewhere in these pages are roads, villages, shopfronts and human beings quietly existing while history thundered elsewhere. There is something deeply reassuring about that. And what a world these books preserve. Britain before every high street acquired the exact same coffee chain. Before new-build estates were named things like ?Foxglove Meadow? despite containing neither foxgloves nor meadows. Before everyone communicated entirely through glowing rectangles while pretending this counts as progress. The photographs are the true stars, of course. Local history books operate on the dangerous principle that every image becomes fascinating if enough time passes. A slightly blurry picture of a butcher?s shop in 1958 suddenly acquires immense emotional weight. Men in flat caps leaning against railings begin to look like guardians of a lost civilisation. A delivery van outside a bakery becomes accidental art. And then there are the details nobody intended future generations to obsess over: shop signs, bus liveries, old advertising hoardings, the peculiar geometry of post-war street furniture. The human brain is apparently incapable of resisting this material. One moment you are casually flipping pages, the next you are loudly informing innocent bystanders that ?they used to have proper grocers back then.? The Tempus formula works beautifully here. These books were produced before publishing fully surrendered to celebrity memoirs and algorithmically generated self-help titles. They have sincerity. Enthusiasm. The unmistakable sense that someone genuinely cared about documenting these places before they disappeared beneath retail parks and identikit housing developments named after trees they bulldozed to build them. Condition-wise, this copy is listed as Good, which feels exactly right for a local history book. Such volumes are not meant to remain untouched in climate-controlled vaults. They are meant to be repeatedly opened by people saying things like, ?I remember that garage,? while slowly drifting into unexpectedly emotional recollections about old post offices. As sold by Crappy Old Books, this is less a purchase and more a small act of cultural rescue. Somewhere between nostalgia, archive and accidental sociology, Around Tring captures the texture of ordinary British life with far more charm than many supposedly important histories ever manage. If you enjoy old photographs, disappearing England, village life, quietly haunting nostalgia, or simply the comforting reminder that human beings once survived perfectly well without QR codes, this book will reward you enormously. At the very least, it may leave you staring suspiciously at modern town planning and yearning for a butcher?s shop with hand-painted signage.

Paperback. Condición: Good. There is something wonderfully, almost aggressively British about a book devoted to the history of Tring between 1951 and 2000. Not London. Not Paris. Not ?Europe in Crisis.? Just Tring. A market town quietly getting on with things while the rest of the world obsessed over nuclear annihilation, decimalisation, flared trousers and the internet. And honestly, that is precisely why this book is so fascinating. Jill Fowler?s Tring 1951?2000 is one of those gloriously specific local history books that begins innocently enough and then quietly absorbs your entire evening. You pick it up expecting a few old photographs and perhaps a paragraph about a bypass, and suddenly you are emotionally invested in the fate of long-demolished shopfronts and wondering whether Woolworths really did look happier in 1963. It is the literary equivalent of accidentally spending three hours on Google Street View comparing bus stops. The real charm here lies in the ordinary details. Not ordinary in the dull sense, but ordinary in the deeply human sense. The changing high street. The vanished cafés. The fashions people once considered acceptable. The municipal optimism of post-war Britain slowly colliding with the strange fluorescent consumerism of the 1980s and 1990s. Somewhere in these pages there is probably a photograph of a parade nobody remembers attending, featuring at least one man proudly dressed like a geography teacher on holiday in Benidorm. Books like this also perform a quiet act of rebellion against modern life. Today every moment is photographed, uploaded, tagged, filtered and forgotten within six minutes. But local history books preserve the things nobody thought important enough to preserve at the time. A bakery sign. A road before redevelopment. A scout troop posing awkwardly beside a church hall radiator. Tiny fragments of normal existence which, decades later, become oddly moving. And of course there is the delicious irony that places once dismissed as unfashionable or unremarkable now inspire deep nostalgia. The 1970s precinct with concrete planters and brown tiles may have looked mildly depressing at the time, but now it appears in sepia-toned books accompanied by phrases like ?a vanished era.? Humanity has an extraordinary ability to sentimentalise municipal paving. The Tempus publishing style deserves praise too. These books have a very particular energy: sturdy, photograph-heavy, deeply sincere and produced with the quiet determination of people who understand that local memory matters. They are less concerned with grand historical theories and more concerned with making sure someone remembers where the old cinema used to be before it became a carpet warehouse. Condition-wise, this copy is listed as Good, meaning it has survived admirably despite likely being consulted repeatedly by people saying things like, ?Oh look, that used to be Johnson?s bakery,? before launching into a forty-minute monologue nobody under thirty can properly follow. A proper local history book should look faintly handled. If it appears untouched, one suspects it has failed in its civic duty. As sold by Crappy Old Books, this volume occupies that perfect cultural territory somewhere between historical archive and cheerful charity-shop treasure. The sort of book you buy thinking, ?This might be mildly interesting,? only to find yourself later pointing excitedly at black-and-white photographs of traffic systems. If you enjoy nostalgia, disappearing Britain, old shopfronts, post-war social history, or simply the strange comfort of seeing how ordinary people lived before everyone carried a surveillance device in their pocket, Tring 1951?2000 is an unexpectedly compelling little time machine. At the very least, it will make you deeply suspicious of modern supermarket signage and oddly sentimental about municipal flower displays.

Paperback. Condición: Brand New. 128 pages. 9.06x6.46x0.47 inches. In Stock.

Condición: New. Dieser Artikel ist ein Print on Demand Artikel und wird nach Ihrer Bestellung fuer Sie gedruckt. This lavishly illustrated book traces the history of the second part of the twentieth century and documents the many changes which have taken place in those fifty years.KlappentextrnrnThis lavishly illustrated book traces the history of the .