Ever since the first horse drawn trams wobbled onto the road in the 1870s, the status of these useful vehicles has been debated. Did they represent an outdated concept, or might they hold the key to a flexible future? The tram's Edwardian heyday was followed by a mid-20th century decline, but in the 21st century a number of Britain's major cities, including Sheffield, Manchester, Nottingham and Edinburgh, not to mention London's pioneering Docklands Light Railway, have reinstated a fixed-rail model of public transport. This comprehensive book tells the detailed story of Britain's tram systems, with fascinating archive photos on every page. The first horsedrawn street tramways opened in London and Liverpool in 1870, and in Dublin, Belfast and Cork two years later. Glasgow was the first city to embrace steam trams, and a few years later, in 1883, a battery tram was trialled in London, with an overhead trolley wire service being introduced in Leeds in 1891. Although a cable tram was in use on Highgate Hill for a time, by the end of the century electric trams with a pantograph had become the norm. An archive photo in Clapham High Street suggests that, although the buses of the time were also horse-drawn, a tram's rail tracks enabled them to carry far greater loads. Women tram conductors were employed for the first time in Glasgow during World War I, and the last horse-drawn tram ran in Morecambe in 1926. In the 1930s Britain's major cities started replacing trams with trolley or motor buses, and during the 1950s trams virtually disappeared. Then in the 1980s new light rail systems began to spring up, with cities like Nottingham and Manchester integrating them closely with other form of public transport. Who knows what the future will bring? 269pp, archive photos.

Published in association with English Heritage and with a foreword by Dan Cruikshank, here are over 300 spectacular photographs of London's lost buildings from English Heritage's archive and a detailed view of the city's lost heritage, its social and economic history, work, wealth, poverty and change during the years 1870-1945. Philip Davies's bestselling Lost London was described in the Sunday Times as 'A haunting portal into the bygone life of the capital.' Now some of the books finest photographs have been enlarged to poster size revealing the true quality. There are 100 previously unseen images in this new, larger landscape format tome. It reproduces historic photographs commissioned by the London County Council, many of them in the early days of photography, to capture individual buildings and streets that along with entire neighbourhoods were on the threshold of redevelopment. Haunting faces can be seen very clearly in windows and hoardings and shop fronts plastered with advertising reveal their wares and architectural features and textures leap into focus. Take the tram to Aldwych 1932, see Sir Christopher Wren's Court Room with its fine vaulted ceiling and fluted Corinthian screen, and see numbers 24-26 Jacob Street Bermondsey circa 1910, long before Bibliophile moved there in 1984! Almshouses, the ship's chandler in Limehouse, a street in Wapping 1906 with all the children lined up, many stunned at the sight of a camera, hovels in Millbank 1906 before demolition and the Blewcoate School, Westminster 1910. Glamorous interiors, shops, docks and wharves, markets and horse drawn fire engines with helmeted firemen, advertising and groups of curious somewhat ghostly onlookers staring the unusual sight of a camera. 16.25" x 11.5". The ultimate coffee table book, this cannot come highly recommended enough . 320 pages, over 300 spectacular photographs of exquisite quality and close-up detail.

Utterly unique, press-out over 50 landmark buildings to transform your book into a work of art. Once the card buildings have been removed and constructed, you can fan out the book to create your own version of London to treasure and display. This book literally transforms the cityscape and features 50 seminal buildings, each with a compelling description covering key facts and history of its architecture, its address, the architects, date completed and height. To press around each building, hold the page steady with one hand and use the other to press gently on the delicate edges. Discard the excess card, smooth the edges with your fingers, and display. It begins with a red London bus, then the Houses of Parliament, the London Eye, Westminster Abbey, Nelson's Column, Liberty London, the French House Pub in Soho, James Smith Umbrellas, St Pancras Station and Hotel, the Charles Dickens Museum, Alexandra Palace - which opened in 1875 with seating for 14,000, a Palm Court, a 3,000-seater theatre and a Concert Hall for 3,500, museums, banqueting suites, refreshment rooms, Italian gardens and a vast, landscape park. The Natural History Museum, the Royal Albert Hall, Wembley Stadium, Hampton Court Palace, and quirky ones like the Reliance Arcade in Brixton or the explorer Sir Richard Burton's tomb where the visitor can peer down into an oriental world of flaking murals depicting the moon, stars and seraphim and a chequered floor of Carrara marble. It is 12 feet high, is in SW14 and was completed in 1890. Then we go right through to The Shard and The O2 and the traffic light tree at Canary Wharf and perhaps best of all Trinity Buoy Wharf and Lighthouse, the home of Bibliophile Books! Cutty Sark, St Pauls, Shakespeare's Globe, Tate Modern and the K2 Telephone Box, this is highly recommended. 110pp, colour.
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'I don't know any tract of land in which in so narrow a compass may be found an equal variety of sublime and beautiful features'. So said the poet William Wordsworth of the Lake District, an area as rich in cultural associations as it is in beautiful scenery. Hunter Davies, who has spent every summer in the Lakes for nearly half a century, takes the reader on an engaging, informative and affectionate tour of the lakes, fells, traditions, denizens and history of England's most popular tourist destination. From the first discovery of Lakeland as a tourist destination in the 18th century, to the tale of the Maid of Buttermere, the poet Coleridge's ascent of Scafell Pike in 1802, to such enduring local traditions as Cumberland wrestling and hound trailing, here are the lakes and tarns and towns and villages, literary and artistic folk and Cumbrian characters and a miscellaneous Lakeland A-Z in a living place, not a museum. Very well illustrated throughout, 324pp in paperback.

Yorkshire is a county with more strangeness than you can shake a Dale walking stick at. Home of Robin Hood (born in Barnsdale), Guy Fawkes, Dick Turpin and Dracula (Bram Stoker wrote part of the vampire tale in a Whitby hotel) and, some say, the birthplace of modern civilisation began in Leeds, but you'll have to read the book to find out why. Ideal for a blowy winter night, the history begins in Jurassic Yorkshire 200,000,000BC, Britain's oldest house (8770BC), the Stonehenge of the north, St Hilda of Whitby and Caedmon the Cowherd (614); the uneducated Yorkshire lad who gave us the British Empire (1693) who was John Harrison from Wakefield, Gentleman Jack, the Luddites and what they stood for, and the Brontë connection, four exceptionally well-married daughters, a cat, a cliff and a life-saving intervention (1934), the Yorkshire accent combats Nazi propaganda, building Britain's highest motorway (1963), the Yorkshire Ripper finally caught (1981), and John Noakes gets down about Shep among the dozens of entries in this fun and readable quirky reference book. 170pp, paperback.

Tall, elegant hardback, slim enough to fit into the walker's pocket, with beautiful line drawn maps for meandering through Salcey Forest in Northamptonshire towards Buckinghamshire, St. David's Head in Pembrokeshire, Castle Carrock and the River Gelt Cumbria, the Ashdown Forest to play Pooh Sticks or Swanwick to Corfe in Dorset, here are paths that will lead you through our golden island of discovery. Christopher Somerville is one of Britain's best-loved walking journalists and personalities and here presents a personal selection of his best walks. Laid by region with over 40 illustrations and area maps, car parks, circular routes, easy-to-follow directions and what to look out for, the volume is a treasury of anecdote, observation and description. 534pp.

Country Life magazine has been delighting readers with its observations from rural Britain for 130 years, and this collection of extracts covers a range of subjects - sports, pastimes, village life, landscape and architecture - from the magazine's first 50 years. An old boy of Winchester College takes the reader on a walk round the school as it was in 1902, including the "bare and cheerless" dining hall. 1903 sees a portrait of an old-mole-catcher with a bizarre contraption round his neck, but disappointingly the profession is reluctant to reveal any secrets of the trade. "Ponies for Children" in 1934 urges parents to get a pony who is keen but not too keen, just enough to keep the child on their toes without actually endangering life, and as late as 1926 a doctor is called in to pronounce on the dangers of women riding astride. Although the matter was considered too delicate for detail, the MD concluded by saying his own daughter rides the modern way. A celebration of barge-painting in 1944 reveals that the typical bargee is hazy about the origins of the traditional designs depicting "big old teapots with roses and castles". Knickerbockers or trousers for golf? To the regret of the writer, the traditional plus fours have been discarded in favour of slacks and (whisper it) shirt-sleeves. In 1940 the travel writer H .V. Morton writes patriotically from the tower of the village church, where he was doing guard duty, saying "All over our land, villages, once proclaimed dead and done for, have awakened to arms." In the same year the historian A. L. Rowse is confident that "it is the English who provide the best example of a people in harmony with their environment". 244pp, numerous black and white illustrations.

These fascinating short articles from Country Life in the first half of the 20th century plunge us into a nostalgic world when gentlemen's leisure pursuits were rarely penetrated by women. "Yachting in London" describes the Peter Pan pleasures of sailing models boats on the Round Pond, while "Ferreting" is accompanied by an archive photo of a man heading down a rabbit hole with only his legs visible. "The pleasures of a cold" from 1939 describes what we now know as man-flu with uncanny accuracy. In 1900 an article praising the master tattooist, Sutherland Macdonald, promises absence of pain if alleviated by cocaine. "Hitch and hike" is a popular pastime in 1926, and the secret to getting a ride is to have a clean collar; the illustration in fact shows the hitchhiker wearing a jacket and tie. In 1934, the year driving tests were introduced, a letter to the editor suggests that licences should be accompanied by a set of rules forbidding cutting in, driving in the middle of the road, and parking on bends. Boxing, cricket, rugby and polo all elicit strong opinions, while fishing has a whole section to itself, concluding with "Experiments with fishing gut". Lord Baden Powell writes in 1937 about the importance of fitness for all in the face of the coming conflict. Hunting and point-to-point are popular pastimes among readers of Country Life, and in 1921 the Prince of Wales's first steeplechase is deemed worthy of close analysis. Everything from fine brandy to crocodile shooting is dissected, usually with advice about how to dress for it. 244pp, black and white illustrations.

Frederick Daniel, George, Heywood, James and their descendants are the celebrated Hardy family of artists, some of the leading genre painters of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Heywood Hardy was one of the best Victorian animal painters and instrumental in advancing a more realistic portrayal of animals, leaving behind the romanticised representations of Landseer. His elder brother James was amongst the most accomplished sporting artists of the day, while their cousins Frederick Daniel and George painted some of the most sympathetic pictures of county towns and villages. Here is putting at Blackheath, a splendid music room at Brighton Pavilion, a Scottish country scene of a young gillie with his setter dogs and dead game, stunning portraits of Grand National-winning horses, foxhounds and hunting dogs and hunting scenes, riding on sand dunes in Morecambe as young girls and women enjoy holiday time in 1908, the sale of Cavalry horses in 1884, two Victorian ladies being scared by a bull over the fence, a lion cub, corn stooks by Bray Church, a mother and child posting a letter, a baby's birthday and other family scenes like taking in orphans, a firstborn and trying on spectacles. James Hardy Sr was a miniature portrait painter; his granddaughter Mable Emily Lee-Hankey maintained the tradition and painted a famous series of miniatures of Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, later Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, held in the Royal Collection. The author discusses the life and work of each artist and the influences of each other's paintings, the context of artistic and social developments and draws on contemporary sources to expertly illustrate how critics and collectors viewed the work of the Hardy family. Many are reproduced here in colour for the very first time in this beautifully made 224 page large art gallery, 9½" x 12". Colour.

Sub-titled 'One Man's Walk In Search of his Father and A Lost England' this powerful and moving book is about the need to write new stories for our communities and ourselves. In 1981, Mike Carter's dad Pete organised the People's March for Jobs which saw 300 people walk from Liverpool to London to protest as the Thatcher government's policies devastated industrial Britain and sent unemployment skyrocketing. Just before the 2016 EU referendum, Mike set off to walk the same route in a quest to better understand his dad and his country. As he walked, Mike found many echoes of the early 80s - a working class overlooked and ignored by Westminster politicians, communities hollowed out, anger and despair co-existing with hope and determination for change. He also found that he and his father shared more in common than he might have thought. The book begins with the story of Pete who left school in West Bromwich at the age of 15 in 1953, illiterate, one of six children of alcoholic parents. He trained as a bricklayer where he was radicalised on the building sites and joined the Young Communist League, and by the early 70s, led the Birmingham Building Workers in their successful strike action against the use of casual labour. He went on to become the industrial organiser of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Working on the Guardian, his son Mike asked himself "what had happened to the Britain that my father had promised me?" Clearing his father's belongings, Pete discovered papers, photographs and scrapbooks and newspaper cuttings about the industrial disputes of the 70s, love letters and letters to himself and his sister and his father?s old flat cap. He put it on and decided to follow the route of the March which had set off on 2nd May 1981 35 years to the day later. 391pp, paperback.