Sub-titled 'Our Story In Numbers as Told by the Office for National Statistics' from the Census 2021. What official data past and present tells us about our nation is who we are, what we do and where we live. For the past 200 years, the Census has charted our jobs, home lives and strange cultural habits with questions on occupation, housing, religion, travel and the family. The Census findings have informed the economy, politics and every other national matter and the data collected forms the single most valuable on-going historical resource of modern times. In 1841 there were 734 female midwives working in Britain, along with 9 artificial eye makers, 20 peg makers, six stamp makers and one bee dealer. Fast forward nearly two centuries and there are 51,000 midwives working in the UK, and not a single eye maker in sight! Here is the lowdown on our relationships, cultural beliefs and of course recent findings on COVID-19. There is a great deal on the popularity of 'traditional' names, the trend towards informality with names, the way in which we use the Internet is changing, the gap between what young people wanted to do and how much they envisaged earning and the reality of how they ended up. In 2016 the top five jobs that 16-21 year olds wanted to do included artistic, literary and media (writer, actor, producer), teaching, health professional, police officer or nursing. House building and skyscrapers, working hours and education, a fascinating slice of mass observation. 298pp, diagrams.

Working his way clockwise round Cornwall's stupendous coastline, the author crosses the Tamar Bridge from Devon and visits Saltash, a place where Neolithic flint arrowheads are two-a-penny and where William the Conqueror built a strategic fortification which later became the site of a key battle in the English Civil War. Nearby Launceston and Liskeard were Royalist towns, as was Fowey, where famous later residents of the area include Daphne du Maurier, author of Rebecca, the illustrator Mabel Lucie Attwell, and Kenneth Grahame who wrote The Wind in the Willows. West of St Austell is Falmouth, the most south-westerly harbour in Britain, and often the first place Royal Navy ships docked when returning from overseas. Truro, the county capital, was a stannary town, involved in the tin mining industry. Granted city status by Queen Victoria in 1877, its cathedral was built over the next 20 years. The rugged coastline of the Lizard peninsula was a notorious graveyard for ships, and continuing west, St Michael's Mount has a long history of strategic importance culminating in Hitler promising it to Ribbentrop should Germany win the war. Sennen is the first village in England travelling back from Land's End, followed by the bleak prehistoric settlement of St Just. St Ives, now Cornwall's most popular tourist destination, was a simple fishing village until the coming of the railway in 1877. The town of Bodmin is the only large Cornish settlement noted in the Domesday Book, though nearby Padstow also appears, now a renowned centre of gastronomy. 152pp, softback, numerous black and white photos.

Sussex-born tour guide, teacher, history consultant and journalist Kevin Newman regularly escapes up on the South Downs on walks much shorter than Belloc managed. Many writers have written about the delights of the former kingdom of the South Saxons, its Downs, villages, countryside, people and their ways, but this is the first book to take readers on a tour of discovery of each of the county's historic eras in turn. It looks at Ancient, Roman, Saxon, Viking, Norman, Medieval, Tudor and Second Iron Age, Stuart, Civil War and Restoration, Georgian, Napoleonic and Regency, Industrial, Victorian, Resort and Railway Era, Edwardian and First World War, Interwar, Art Deco/Modernist and Second World War, Post and Cold War Sussex. Points of interest like Church Norton, Chichester Cathedral, Arundel Castle, Goodwood, all houses and points of interest and where to lunch are marked in bold text in a book celebrating the writers, painters, royalty, artists and millions who have enjoyed Sussex's changing coastline and verdant villages. Hundreds of black and white photos, line art and maps. A super and quirky slice of history in one heavyweight softback handbook, 198pp, 15.5cm x 23cm.

Lord Clark of Windermere has always believed the Lake District a special place. His memoirs of the 1940s and 50s give a unique insight into a thriving rural community of working people which is now long gone. His warm style brings to life his happy years growing up in a family struggling to make ends meet including facing eviction, which made a lasting impression on him. Working on the land meant the family lived close to nature and he learned the names of all the local flora and fauna. He rejected a job on the farm for one in forestry and 50 years later became Chairman of the Forestry Commission. He attended university as a mature student and in 1970 was elected to Parliament where he spent almost 50 years including a spell in Cabinet. He was dubbed the 'First Green MP' and later led a successful campaign for World Heritage Status for the Lake District. The beauty of Lakeland is shaped by nature and then moulded by human activities. The sheep and cattle farmers of the uplands cleared the scrub trees and opened up the fells to grazing, providing humans with inspirational views and the freedom to roam at will. The traditional sheep breed, the Herdwicks, are 'hefted' to the land and won't stray from it. The mountainous area has been mined for over a thousand years and there have been over 1,000 mines and quarries and more than 20 minerals extracted. The tourist hotspot of Coniston has its extensive copper mines, whilst Grasmere and Glenridding also have their remains of lead mines. 182 page well illustrated softback, one colour plate.

Manchester Arena, Finsbury Park Mosque, the Bunch of Grapes bar at London Bridge, the 7/7 bombings, the nail bomb which ripped through the Admiral Duncan pub April 1999, the 1988 Omagh car bomb in Northern Ireland, the 1996 Manchester IRA bombing, the explosion onboard Pan Am 747 over Lockerbie, the Grand Hotel in Brighton, the Birmingham pub bombings, that is just some of the extraordinarily poignant and upsetting Daily Mirror newspaper photographs included in the section on Terrorism. Some of the earliest pictures are of the old buildings, many now demolished, which were the scene of Jack the Ripper's victims plus No 10 Rillington Place where bodies were found in the garden, the Acid Bath murderer John Haigh seen driving away from his hotel, the Moors Murderers, and Anne Downey mother of Lesley Ann pictured during a search for her daughter and another of her brother retrained by police as Ian Brady and Myra Hindley leave Hyde Court. Serial killers like Peter Sutcliffe, Harold Shipman, the Kray twins, grim basements, crowds outside courtrooms and prisons, police searches, here are killing sprees and mourners in this first-hand look at some of Britain's darkest moments. An impressive archive of the most infamous crimes caught on camera in this photographic collection. 144pp, mono throughout.

A thorough account of the Home Front in a region which backed up troops by manufacturing munitions and maintaining essential industries to 'keep the home fires burning', as well as hosting, educating and caring for thousands of evacuees. The region had two regiments: the Sherwood Foresters and the Derbyshire Yeomanry. Chatsworth House was used by Penrhos College and Hardwick Hall gave much of its park and lands over to military barracks and a gymnasium space for interned Italian prisoners. Learn that Glossop and Buxton were surrounded in absolute secrecy to protect them from the shelling by Luftwaffe aircraft as they held the largest store of ammunition in the country in underground tunnels through Harpur Hill. In Crich parish, there were WVS first aid exercises where members would mock up injuries on themselves with dirt or lipstick and present themselves as 'casualties'. There are brilliant black and white photographs included from the old silk mill in Derby and a photograph of the moors between Howden Reservoir and Margery Hill which claimed several plane crash victims, to an Air Raid Precautions (ARP) warden in gas-protection clothing. Paperback, images, 102pp.

We descend into the Yorkshire's netherworld of caves and mines, and face dark episodes at once brave and dark such as the part played by Whitby and Hull in emptying Arctic waters of whales, or the re-routing of rivers and destruction of Yorkshire's fens. We encounter real and fabled heroes and discover why, from the Iron Age to the Cold War, Yorkshire has been such a key place in times of tension and struggle. In his wide-ranging and lyrical, restless, poetic and strange book Morris weaves history, family stories, travelogue and ecology to reveal how Yorkshire took shape as a landscape in literature, legend and popular regard. The book is illustrated with 64 images from the Tom Pudding Train to an acoustic mirror, a rainbow bridge to an internment camp, plus 26 plates including the topography of Yorkshire, castles at Richmond, Pontefract and Whorlton, a map of Yorkshire in a hand drawn style and all packaged in a neat 278 page paperback. Some colour plates.

The Office for National Statistics Census 2021 is the basis of this official story in numbers. In 1841 there were 734 female midwives working in Britain, along with nine artificial eye makers, 20 peg makers, six stamp makers and one bee dealer. Fast forward nearly two centuries and there are 51,000 midwives working in the UK and not an eye maker in sight. For the past 200 years, through the Census and national surveys, the Office for National Statistics and its predecessors have charted the lives of the British - our jobs, home lives and strange cultural habits, with questions on occupation, housing, religion, travel and the family. The Census findings have informed the economy, politics and every other national matter, and its collected data forms the single most valuable ongoing historical resource of modern times. Delving deep into statistics and including the latest findings on the Covid-19 pandemic, where to give one example the ONS with its partners set up the Virus Infection Survey to gauge the prevalence in the community, going from its announcement to first publication of results in barely three weeks, it taught us the value of timely, accurate, trustworthy, comprehensive information. The book marks the 25th anniversary of the ONS creation now that it is being brought together with the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys. Among the questions that have stumped the normally indefatigable ONS Press Office down the years were: 'What percentage of the UK are aristocrats?' and 'How many rats and squirrels are there in the UK?' 298pp, charts, diagrams.

The symbolism of the English Channel goes way beyond a simple role as a conduit for shipping, trawling and the odd lard-and-lanolin-slathered maniac in goggles and swimming trunks plunging in and making for the other side. It has made us believe we are more separate than we are thanks to 'that strip of sea which severs merry England from the tardy realms of Europe - as the Church and State Review put it in 1863.' A bulwark of invasion, a conduit for exchange and a challenge to be conquered, the Channel has always been many things to many people. Today it's the busiest shipping lane in the world and hosts more than 30 million passenger crossings every year, but this slither of choppy brine, just 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, represents much more than a conductor of goods and people. Charlie Connelly collects its stories and brings them to life from tailing Oscar Wilde's shadow through the dark streets of Dieppe, to unearthing Britain's first beauty pageant at the end of Folkestone Pier, won by a chap called Wally! We uncover the fate of the first successful Channel swimmer, learn that Louis Blériot was actually a terrible pilot and discover how, if a man with a buttered head and pigs' bladders attached to his trousers hadn't fought off an attack by dogfish, we might never have had a Channel Tunnel. Here is a cast of extraordinary characters - cheats, dreamers, charlatans, geniuses, visionaries, eccentrics and at least one pair of naked, cuddling balloonists - whose stories are all united by the English Channel to ensure the sea that makes us an island will never be the same again. 297pp.

The modern town of Cambridge can be traced back to at least AD875 and in medieval times there were leather and woollen industries. In 1209 Oxford scholars, seeking refuge from hostile townspeople there, settled in Cambridge, and Peterhouse, the oldest of the Cambridge colleges, was founded in 1284. There has always been a certain amount of friction between town and gown, although the university has provided the main 'industry' for Cambridge over several hundred years. The University Library is one of only five copyright libraries in the UK. At the start of the 20th century it was a privileged life for some, but many in Cambridge knew that war was truly inevitable. Terrible rumours were rife, that the Germans would burn the University Library and raze King's College Chapel to the ground before firing shells along the tranquil 'Backs' of the River Cam until the weeping willows were just blackened stumps. Town and gown rivalries were put aside as the city united against the common enemy. Our book tells the story of the grim years of the Great War. Thousands of university students, graduates and lecturers alike enlisted along with patriotic townsfolk. The First Eastern General Military Hospital was subsequently established on the site of the present University Library and treated more than 80,000 casualties from the Western Front. Though the university had been the long-time hub of life and employment in the town, many people suffered great losses and were parted from loved ones, decimating traditional breadwinners and livelihoods, from the rationing of food, drink and fuel, to hundreds of restrictions imposed by DORA. As a result, feelings ran high and eventually led to riots beneath the raiding zeppelins and ever-present threat of death. The poet Robert Brooke, a graduate of King's College, died on his way to Dardanelles in 1915, but his most famous poem The Soldier became a pre-emptive memorial and the epitaph of millions. 'If I should die think only this of me, that there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.' Here is the city as the great focus for military, medical and mercantile interests within all the eastern counties of Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely during 1914-18. 128 page paperback, well illus. with archive photos.