L.T.C Rolt – författare

Engineering genius, technical innovator and one of the greatest figures of the Industrial Revolution, Isambard Kingdom Brunel changed the face of the English landscape with his groundbreaking designs and ingenious constructions. L. T. C. Rolt's masterly biography is the definitive work on Brunel, tracing the life, times and monumental achivements of the man who helped to build modern Britain.

In these evocative and elegiac writings L. T. C. Rolt meditates on landscape, history, poetry, steam railways, vintage cars and the endless summer days of his childhood. He also recalls his many happy boating voyages on Britain's canals: the peace and tranquillity, the wildlife and people, the changing scenery as he travelled from county to county, and the role he played in preserving the waterways for future generations. Generations of inhabitants have helped shape the English countryside - but it has profoundly shaped us too.It has provoked a huge variety of responses from artists, writers, musicians and people who live and work on the land - as well as those who are travelling through it.English Journeys celebrates this long tradition with a series of twenty books on all aspects of the countryside, from stargazey pie and country churches, to man's relationship with nature and songs celebrating the patterns of the countryside (as well as ghosts and love-struck soldiers).

'It had always struck me that, despite its overwhelming importance in the story of mankind, far too little attention had been paid to the Industrial Revolution in literature and art . . . I conceived the idea of concentrating a number of actual historical happenings in the English Midlands upon one imaginary industrial town . . . from the days of the first monastic mill on the river to the present day when an atomic research establishment on the outskirts of a huge blackened town struck a new apocalyptic note . . . I called my imaginary town Winterstoke.' Tom Rolt, writing in 1972L. T. C. ('Tom') Rolt (1919-74) was a famed pioneer in the preservation of Britain's canal networks and railways, a biographer of the great civil engineers, and a forerunner of our current green movement. Winterstoke (1952), arguably his most visionary work, is reissued here with a new introduction featuring his widow Sonia and son Tim.