Billed as "The most user-friendly guide to the Birds of Britain and Ireland", this soft-backed chunky volume would just about fit in a capacious pocket, certainly a rucksack, and covers over 300 different common species. The Unique Selling Point of the volume is the illustrations. Each bird is presented in close-up photography from a number of different angles, sometimes as many as ten, against a typical background, but instead of the usual long-range shot without much detail, the close-up photos are presented in montage, so a far greater degree of clarity and accuracy is achieved. The first 12 pages consist of thumbnail quick identifiers of all the birds, categorised as swimming, flying or walking waterbirds, followed by upland gamebirds, raptors, miscellaneous larger landbirds, and songbirds. The main text for each bird includes the bird's length next to the name of the species, given with the English and scientific names. On each plate, plumage, age and sex are labelled, and the text describes population, behaviour, flight, identification points, and general quirks and peculiarities. The song is described, though this is a challenge: the whimbrel has "a 7-note tittering call pupupu" while a waxwing has "a distinctive, trilled sree, sibilant like a pea-whistle". Described as a "birders' favourite", the waxwing can eat up to a thousand berries a day and is often found in car parks, immune to human activity. Apart from the birds themselves, the photos of habitat are also gorgeous. 302pp, softback, colour photos.
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This appealing journey through the British countryside takes us from place to place and back in time, starting with prehistoric Shetland where the red-necked phalarope has made a comeback and ending with the habitat creation project on the Avalon Marshes in Somerset. The author is fascinated by the way wildlife has taken advantage of human habitation and transformed it for its own needs. Since WWII pollution, intensive farming and the global climate emergency have contributed to a loss of habitats for adders, stoats, lizards, orchids, bush crickets, peregrine falcons and great crested grebes, to name a few. However, these endangered species have found unexpected havens in abandoned transport networks, places of worship and industrial sites. The author visits the Shetland iron age settlement on the island of Mousa, where the broch, a round lookout post, is as solid now as when it was built. Since then there have been four conquests of the British Isles, the Romans, Saxons Vikings and Normans, each one bringing its distinctive technology. Rare lichens now spread themselves on Hadrian's Wall, wheatears and ring ouzels return from Africa and perch on granite boulders, while the Emperor Moth is again an upland speciality. Following the Industrial Revolution, visiting the countryside became a specialised activity, with walking and rambling set apart from everyday life, but there are signs that we are once again embracing nature. Our railway network of 10,000 miles was more than twice that at beginning of the 20th century, and old railway lines are now becoming wildlife corridors, with some of the most popular to be found in urban settings such as Finsbury Park to Highgate and Bristol to Bath. 260pp paperback.

'The second day Ian smashed a flowerpot. Bobby is not having anything to do with us.' 'Plenty of hippies on the pier, but they behaved.' 'Can't say we're having a good time.' 'I'm wasting time by writing to you.' 'A crab bit my toe.' - written on the back of a postcard from LONDON! 'If it doesn't stop raining soon I shall have webbed feet.' And a picture of Hotel Paguera in Spain with the handwritten message on the reverse 'If I was here I'd be having a superb time.' On our holidays in the 1960s and 70s we sent stacks of sun-bleached postcards from leaky caravans in Skegness and chintzy guesthouses in Weston-Super-Mare, gossiping about our relatives, spilling the beans on summer romances, and providing a constant stream of weather reports. Tom Jackson has gathered the funniest, weirdest and most moving messages from his vast postcard archive, transforming the throwaway scribblings of a generation into a symphony of voices and tantalising glimpses into the past written from rainy campsites, over grim hotel breakfasts, on sweltering beaches and in windy seaside carparks. A laugh-out-loud tribute to the British character. 167pp, colour postcards on every page, softback.

What to see, what not to miss, itineraries and more with pre-departure practical information, this is a superb in-depth guide to the area of Devon and Cornwall with highlights and full colour maps throughout, history, wildlife, the arts and recommended books. Windswept moors, golden sands and craggy castles, Devon and Cornwall's shifting landscapes are truly captivating. Go puffin-spotting on Lundy or island-hopping in the Scillies, get messy eating fresh crabs, take in stately homes and modern art galleries, scenic walks, prime surfing spots, colourful local regattas, cosy country pubs, Piper's Hole and other caves, beaches like the sandy crescent sheltered Rushy Bay, the Lizard with Penwith peninsulas with its prehistoric sites all the way down to Lands End, St. Ives, Newlyn, Mousehole and Helston. And don't miss of course the Eden Project, Caerhayes Castle which leads down to a lovely coastline, the Lost Gardens of Heligan, or the Oyster Festival at Falmouth. With details on accommodation, eating, biking and other outdoor activities and with beautiful colour photographs and colour coded pages. From the excellent series we can highly recommend, first time discounted 360 page paperback. Colour illus.

England is surrounded by a fringe of mud and pearls - tidal flats and marshes, holiday parks and petrochemical works, jagged cliffs and silver beaches. It has the isles of Canvey, Sheppey, Foulness, Wight and Dogs. Mersea, Wallasea, Two Tree and Rat. And the wild and rockier places of Lundy, the Scillies, Hilbre, the Farnes. Then there's the deserted wartime forts, oil platforms, lost lands of Doggerland and Lyonesse and off-shore wind turbines. These islands and their inhabitants not only cast varied lights on the mainland, they also possess their own peculiar stories, from the Barbary slavers who once occupied Lundy, to the ex-major who seized a wartime fort in the North Sea and declared himself Prince of Sealand. Ian Crofton embarks on a personal journey to a number of the islands encircling England, exploring some that were once places of refuge or holiness, and others that have become locations for prisons, rubbish dumps and military installations. He shows the ways in which England's islands have been formed and how they are constantly changing and his book is filled with excellent natural description, comic encounters, history and culture and he is the most engaging travelling companion. 286pp, 16 pages of colour photos, maps.

From the Historic England popular series by the historian who has researched incredible photographic archives and who here selects 1,200 of the best images depicting the yards and alleys of Georgian and Victorian London and Britain, the maze of medieval streets, transformation of shopping areas and lost buildings. Once sleepy villages and market towns during this period were engulfed by a tide of development - Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Leeds exploded across the face of England and railways wrought massive changes as their iron tentacles spread across the landscape. By 1900 nearly 80% of England's population lived in urban areas, compared with just one third 100 years earlier. Ranging from 1870, the midpoint of Queen Victoria's reign, England was entering the Great Depression. Education became a statutory right, putting children at school desks rather than setting them to work. Women were being given control of any wages they earned and they began their long fight for equality. European rivalry accelerated and Britain's industrial and commercial pre-eminence was challenged by foreign competition. It was the age of the internal combustion engine, the telephone, radio, and aviation lay just around the corner and photographs were now able to record the moment. Most were taken to provide a permanent record of areas which were vanishing, and the quality of the images are of the highest quality of the time showing early railways, coaching inns, horse-drawn travel, the offices of the White Star Line Liverpool 1898, mock Tudor homes in Port Sunlight model village, Knebworth, fishermen's towns like Newlyn Cornwall 1907 with women and children and a man at work, New Street Station, grand civic buildings and town halls, Fry's chocolate in glamorous shop windows, tea rooms and formal gardens, back-to-backs, puppet shows and village life, markets and railway workers, Windsor Castle and Stonehenge with silk top-hatted gentlemen visiting, a windmill being demolished, watermen selling water with a bonneted child alongside her parents and his cart. The images are grouped by Northwest, Northeast, East Midlands, West Midlands, East England, South and Southeast, London, South and Southwest. A spectacular heavyweight large volume 10" x 11¾", 560 glossy pages.
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It was from the 1740s onward that cartographers, poets and artists had begun to give outsiders some idea of what the Lakeland landscape of mountains and valleys, lakes, rivers and waterfalls actually looked like. The Romantic movement with its cult of the 'sublime' and of the 'picturesque' made the mountainous regions of Wales, the Lake District and even Scotland more fashionable for visitors to admire for their 'beauty, horror and immensity'. But these tourists never left the well-beaten and recommended path nor ventured into the hills for themselves. Only miners and quarrymen or shepherds with sheep to find or pack-horse drivers did that, and when the first eccentric visitors asked to be guided to the summits, the locals were amazed and bemused. When Samuel Taylor Coleridge, wild, unconventional and physically fearless, arrived to join the Wordsworths in the Lakes in 1799, he immediately set out fell walking on his own. His records of these explorations in his notebooks and letters, particularly to his beloved but unattainable Sara Hutchinson, provided totally new and modern appreciation and understanding of the mountain landscape. Helvellyn, Skiddaw, Scafell and most of the now popular summits were visited by him alone, without maps or any equipment beyond his notebook in which he scribbled his impressions and his reactions. 'O Joy for me!' he jotted on first seeing Ullswater from the top of the Great Dodd. The book explores and explains the experiences of a true pioneer and captures the remarkable creative spirit of this great Briton. Chapters also cover his walks around Nether Stowey, Somerset between June 1797 to July 1798, his tour of the Harz mountains Germany, May 1799, at home at Greta Hall, Keswick 1800, Saddleback, Dungeon Ghyll Force, Coledale Fells, Walla Crag, Nab Scar and a nine day walk to the coast and back in August 1802 among them. Plus final walks with Sothey and Hazlitt through Borrowdale and the Fell wanderer Alfred Wainwright. Beautifully produced 194 pages with many modern colour photographs, line art and coloured maps.

The Lower Thames Estuary has many picturesque rivers that feed it and the author loves to stop awhile and ponder, drift into shallow anchorages for a night or two and investigate the local shores. 'Pleasant moments are spent pottering through the Saltings on miniature voyages of discovery in a little gunter-rigged tender... away from man's hard edges, terrain that was once dry land is luxuriant with salt tolerant plant life...' Pure salt water courses through Nick Ardley's veins. He was brought up on a Thames spritsail barge - the ones with the deep red sails which glide by still today. He sailed the high seas on ocean going ships and with his mate beside him, he has weaved his way through the Thames Estuary's tidal creeks and rivers for many years, mostly aboard his clinker sloop. The Estuary is an artery of modern commerce, but the remaining vestiges of past industry pepper its rivers and creeks. Flooded islands have become the domain of myriad birds, nesting on hummocks of saltings and feeding on mudflats. There are rotting wharves festooned with bladderwrack alive with life, the time-worn ribs of barges the perch for cormorants. Around all of that, man has created new uses for disused lime, cement and brick docks. Boatyards, marinas and waterside housing has emerged from the industrial ashes. Beneath his boat's swinging lamp, the author muses about old souls, shoal draft yachts with great enthusiasm for the environment in this little corner of England. 76 colour photos plus archive photos and maps. 191 page large softback.

The longest street name in Britain is Bolderwood Arboretum Ornamental Drive in the New Forest. The shortest is Rye in Puriton in Somerset. There are some 800,000 streets in England, Scotland and Wales that have a name, along with several thousand more in Northern Ireland ranging from Aachen Way in Halifax to Zurich Gardens in Bramhall in Stockport. There are more than 5,400 High Streets, but there is only one Christmas Pie Avenue. There are thousands of Roads, and Closes, but very few Vennels and Boulevards. Some state the obvious - Station Approach or River View and some are more obscure like Gillygate or Titty Ho. There are important Roman roads like Ermine Street from London to York, Watling Street from Dover to Chester, Stane Street from London to Chichester, and Dere Street from London to Cirencester. With a history from Saxon times onwards, the Circus in Bath to Piccadilly Circus, crescents and squares, quays and mews, Holborn Viaduct, here are the Latin derivations, the steps and the follies, twittens and drangways, gates and hills - natural features, trades and traders, battles, war heroes and political figures, royal connections, noble land owning families, builders and developers, local worthies, artists and entertainers, writers and sportsmen and the unique, unusual and unfortunate names like Ugly Lane, Upper Butts or Uranus Road. Eminently browseworthy, with gazetteer, 225pp.

Why London? Why now? Swinging London was a journalistic phenomenon of the 1960s, headlined by designers like Mary Quant and stars of pop culture like Mick Jagger. London had been leading international fashion since 1963, when the iconic model Jean Shrimpton first appeared on the cover of Glamour magazine. Mary Quant and Barbara Hulanicki of Biba pioneered affordable women's fashion for London's army of female office workers, but it was the new visibility of men's fashion that came to define the era, with John Stephen setting up his business in Carnaby Street and becoming a centre for the "Mod" movement in men's style. In spite of the general availability of high fashion, there was a class divide in sixties chic, with up-market venues such as Annabel's Club catering to a rich elite in which British aristocracy mixed with highly paid stars such as Michael Caine or photographer David Bailey. Many Londoners, however, will say the decade that was celebrated in journalism passed them by, and each chapter in this fascinating book takes a look at a different aspect of London life during the era. The author's overall argument is that the sixties sand seventies made the rise of Thatcherite ideology inevitable, and that Thatcher herself was following the zeitgeist rather than imposing her own ideas on the culture. There was a darker side to all the pizzazz. At the beginning of the sixties the river Thames was polluted beyond anything our present water lobby could envisage, and the great smog of 1962 led to respiratory problems and deaths from bronchitis. By the end of the decade dockers' earnings were only a third of what they had been ten years before. The bottom fell out of the shipbuilding and docking industry, together with public transport, health and other public services. Inner city areas disproportionately suffered mass unemployment and resulting political disaffection. 588pp, notes, photos in black and white and colour.