Russell Thomas – författare

To the untrained eye there’s nothing as unexciting as tofu, normally regarded as a tasteless, beige, congealed mass of crushed, boiled soybeans. However, tofu more than stands up on its own. Reviled for decades as a vegetarian oddity, the brave, wobbly block has made a comeback.This global history of bean curd stretches from ancient creation myths and tomb paintings, via Chinese poetry and Japanese Buddhist cuisine, to deportations in Soviet Russia and struggles for power on the African continent. It describes the potentially non-Chinese roots of tofu, its myriad types, why ‘eating tofu’ is an insult in Cantonese, and its environmental impact today.Warning: this book actually makes tofu exciting. It’s anything but bland.

Winner of the Association for Industrial Archaeology’s Publication Award 2025Gasholders became one of the most instantly recognisable and iconic features on the landscape since they first appeared in the early 19th century. Their simple but precise engineering, durability and flexibility allowed then to operate over a span of 200 years. They witnessed times of great social change, from the early years of the industrial revolution, through countless wars, the reign of nine monarchs, strikes, suffrage, switch to natural gas and through the turn of the millennium. Using a mixture of archive and contemporary photographs, engineering drawings, prints, paintings, adverts and diagrams, the book captures the importance of these industrial structures on the English Townscape. From their very earliest beginnings the book captures their place on the gasworks and in wider society. Evolving from simple designs on a small scale through to becoming massive features dominating skylines and becoming local landmarks.Each chapter take a different perspective, covering the different types, the varying landscapes they inhabited, their place in society, the engineers who designed them and the people who built them. It finishes with a glimpse of how they will be reimagined for future generations.