Safe Haven Books – förlag

Predictably for such a beautifully green city, London is rich in bird life - and not just pigeons, gulls and parakeets. Now here is a beautiful guidebook by one of London's most experienced birders to the best places to watch birds in the capital.Over 100 species are seen in a year on Hampstead Heath alone, for example, from goldcrests to hobbies. Peregrine falcons nest in the Barbican and on Battersea Power Station. A short walk from East India Dock DLR is a secluded backwater frequented by teal and shoveller ducks. Flagship wetland reserves run by the RSPB, WWT and London Wildlife Trust at Barnes, Woodberry Down and Rainham offer everything from bitterns to avocets, marsh harriers to bar-tailed godwits. Some 60 birding locations are covered, all round the capital, from classic parks to former brownfield sites like a Battle of Britain fighter station and a water treatment plant.Birdwatching London both reveals the amazing variety of birdlife in London and offers a wonderful guide to unexpected places for a day or afternoon out among nature.

Half boat, half aeroplane, taking off in a thrilling tumult of spray, the flying boat was the journey of a lifetime, Imperial Airways’ legendary Empire boats flying up the Nile in nightly hops and alighting on lakes and in harbours all the way down to South Africa. But in 1939 the Empire boat Corsair came down in fog on a tiny river in the Belgian Congo and, through an epic salvage operation, gave its name to a new village in an obscure backwater of Central Africa. The Flying Boat That Fell to Earth, re-published with a new Afterword, tells the story of this amazing adventure, and seeks out, from Alaska to the Bahamas, the very last places on earth where it was still possible to catch a flying boat.

The Yorkshire coastline is the second most visited tourist destination in England - and here is a walking guide to its entire length?From Redcar all the way south to Bridlington, and then on along Spurn Point on the Humber, is magnificent clifftop and seaside walking. The route takes in scenic holiday hotspots like Whitby, Scarborough, Filey and Robin Hood's Bay, magnificent seabird cliffs at Bempton and Flamborough, not to mention steam railways, Winifred Holtby's South Riding and the home of Dracula. Now Andrew Vine, an experienced walker and distinguished Yorkshire journalist, has written the definitive walking guide, full of colour photos, and the whole route covered with OS large-scale maps. It is an essential purchase for the serious walker and the afternoon stroller alike.

Never mind all the Great Men - what about the great womenimmortalised on London's streets? As this superbly wide-ranging book reveals,they are an extraordinary and varied band with exceptional tales to tell. It may have taken the women a little longer to gainrecognition, but recent years have seen new figures of Virginia Woolf, MaryWollstonecraft, Ada Lovelace and of course Millicent Fawcett in ParliamentSquare. Here are ground-breaking statues of the black community,famous names from Florence Nightingale to Twiggy, interviews with artists likeMaggi Hambling and Gillian Wearing, and even Statue Safaris to take aroundcentral London. And where is Wonder Woman? London's Statues of Women offers nothing lessthan a new vision of the capital.

Though everyone from D. H. Lawrence and DavidBowie struggled with being there, and comedians have made it a byword for theugly and banal, this town halfway between London and Brighton has a remarkablehistory at the centre of things. Eleven archbishops are buried there. London'sfirst airport was there. In the sixties it was a daring experiment infuturistic brutalist architecture. Its contribution to black culture began with our most notable black composer andculminated in the first black British artist to headline Glastonbury. Its BritSchool produced everyone from Adele to Amy Winehouse and Raye. Still want todiss Croydon? Croydonopolistells the amazing story of this much-maligned town, whose only fault was to betoo far ahead of the curve, and always go for broke.

According to popular myth, Allied prisoners of war during the Second World War spent most of their time escaping. In fact, from Germany to the Far East, they were doing much more remarkable things.Faced with the prospect of years of boredom, these servicemen took up the crafts and professions they'dpursued before their captivity - or set about learning new ones. They formed orchestras(asking the Red Cross to send kettle drums), sat accountancy exams (textbooks,please), dressed up in drag and put on operas. They contested Ashes series, laidout golf courses in the exercise yard. When they needed medical care, their ownsurgeons perfected camp dentistry, fashioned prosthetic limbs. Actors like Clive Dunn and Donald Pleasance, cartoonists like Ronald Searle, artists like Terry Frost - all developed, or even first plied, their crafts while POWs.Little wonderthat one camp in Germany became known as 'the Barbed-Wire University' . . .Acclaimed on firstpublication, this superb book is now reissued with an extensive Afterword.

A young Northern woman called May is working inthe fabrics department of a grand London department store when a detectivecomes in, clutching a scrap of fabric. Any idea what this is . . ? May’ssuperiors aren’t interested, so she takes the piece of oddly carpet-like cloth– patterned in pretty yellows, purples and blues – and gets rid of the officerby offering to find out.It turns out to be a piece of railway moquette –but from which line, since no-one appears to have seen this striking pattern before - and how does it solve a murder? May’s investigations takeher out into Metroland, up to the textile mills of Halifax, and finally to the Isleof Wight. Can this plucky young woman solve the Moquette Mystery?Seats of London – a left-field guide to the colourful array of patterns adorningLondon’s Tube train, bus and train seats since the Thirties – has become an unlikely bestseller, and is already in its sixth printing. The Moquette Mystery is a kind of sequel , as well as a quirky and unique crime novel in its own right.

Everyone's image of the ideal cricket ground will be a village field, fringed by trees, the outfield dappled with clovers and buttercups, swallows flitting above... And what of all the other wildlife associated with this most natural of sports?At the Oval these days, Test Match Special's commentators remark on the resident foxes as often as the traditional pigeons. At Teddington Town CC in London's Bushy Park matches are frequently interrupted by incursions of deer; at Lyndhurst in the New Forest by wild ponies. At Kirkby Lonsdale CC in Cumbria the local fungus group found 20 species of waxcap on the outfield. For some reason hoopoes, spectacular orange and black-crested birds from southern Europe, favour cricket grounds on their rare migrations to the UK.This unique, funny, delightful cricket book from left field explores the relationship between cricket grounds and the natural world, from wildlife records to the Edwardian cricket writings of Edmund Blunden, and in many remarkable photos.

Once, every high street had a department store, and they marched the length of Oxford Street. Going up to town to shop at one of these grand emporia and lunch in the top-floor restaurant, or take the children to see Father Christmas, was both a huge treat and completely normal. But the demise of Debenhams, including historic Arding & Hobbs, and Army & Navy at Victoria along with many other House of Fraser stores, confirms that the traditional department store is now an endangered species. In the last five years alone, 83% have gone.Now, for the first time, Tessa Boase chronicles this fabulous world, from Derry & Toms with its roof garden to the Moderne lines of Holdrons in Peckham Rye (now Mr Khan's Discount), as well as Gamages' peerless toy department, Woollands' 21 Shop for cutting-edge Sixties fashion and Chiesmans' menagerie of snakes and lionesses. There is even a guided walking tour of the West End's lost stores.

The last Routemaster to ply a proper London bus route retired to the garage back in 2005. But over 15 years later, this indestructible bus still pops up everywhere! It's just that nowadays merely in London Routemasters are wedding buses, Ghost Buses, afternoon tea buses, mobile yoghurt stalls on the South Bank... And elsewhere, all over the world, they have found new homes and been put to the most unlikely but serendipitous uses.So now, Harry Rosehill catalogues all the possible uses of a Routemaster bus, from a tea room in Essex to promoting a circus in Russia to an office in Bermuda, from offering bra-fitting facilities to a history of the potato, not to mention making history during the Iraq War as a Human Shield in Baghdad. Along the way he explains how Routemasters were built to last so long, why they've become so cherished, and footbrake valves are so hard to come by. Funny, surprising and touching, Routemasters of the Universe is an alternative history of a true London icon, and a celebration of ingenuity, determination and the sheer variety of human life.

London is a city of hills . . .Shooters Hill, Muswell Hill, Ludgate Hill - the names alone convey the topography. But there hasn't been a walking guide to the capital that makes a point of seeking out and threading together all its high ground, summits and fabulously panoramic views . . . Now, Hillwalking London provides ten routes, all around Greater London, of striking high-level walking. Here are seven hills of Croydon; the Sewardstone Hills north of Chingford; the former telegraph stations stretching across south-east London, as well as cherished ascents like Hampstead Heath and Richmond Hill. A base camp for refreshments is given for every expedition. Illustrated with colour photography and route maps throughout, it will make you see this beautiful city in a new way.

The first guide to reveal the full, amazing variety of London's street tree population is now an agenda-setting, canonical work. Paul Wood's brilliant and acclaimed London's Street Trees sold out three printings in its first 2017 edition, two more in its expanded 2020 edition, and in 2024 is republished yet again in a completely revised and further extended edition. But London's Street Trees has needed to be revised and expanded again, because the capital's street tree population has continued to grow and gloriously diversify. Every month boroughs all over the capital are planting new species, from winter-flowering cherries to brighten up winter to Hackney's shocking pink-flowering Toona sinensis.

This July sees the publication of The Great Romantic, a new biography by Duncan Hamilton of the greatest cricket writer of all time, indeed the man who invented modern cricket writing as we know it: Neville Cardus.Cardus was for many years cricket correspondent of the (then Manchester) Guardian, but wrote for a host of other publications including Wisden. Before him, cricket writing meant rather drybones match reports full of statistics and jargon. Cardus wrote about the event: the sylvan ground, the emotion of watching a great batsman like Victor Trumper in full flow. For everyone who wants to sample his finest writings, Safe Haven now publishes a new volume of Cardus's best cricket writings.Here is Cardus on Don Bradman, Victor Trumper, Denis Compton and Richie Benaud, at Roses matches and the arcadian cricket festival at Dover beneath Shakespeare Cliff, seeing the Australians defeated at Eastbourne - and of course at the home of cricket, Lord's.A handsome small hardback with retro cover illustration, here is a book for every lover of fine writing on the Summer Game.

Paul Wood's brilliant and acclaimed London's Street Trees sold out three printings in its first edition, is a fixture in London's bookshops and museum and gallery gift shops, and was republished in Spring 2020 in a new, revised and expanded edition.One of its most popular features is the handful of 'tree walks' at the back, while the author is still leading his own guided 'street tree walks' every weekend somewhere in the capital. So now here is a whole book of tree walks around the capital - some for an hour or two, others for an afternoon, and several to while away a whole day. They take you to Ealing and Highgate, to see nineteenth-century London Planes lining the Embankment, newly-planted Persian Silk Trees in Brockley, and a whole Dawn Redwood forest at Canary Wharf - while pointing out the architecture and social and natural history along the way. You'll find trees taking you to the haunts of Seventies rock stars, in search of a long-buried circus elephant, and to some London's highest ground with the most stunning views over the capital.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the great age of railway building, Charles Dickens could not but be aware of their transformative impact on society. So he wrote about it - to a remarkable extent. He wrote a classic ghost story, 'The Signalman'; in Dombey and Son about what is now the West Coast Main Line being carved through north London in great ravines. He wrote satirical pieces about railway catering - even back then; about the wonder of express train travel to the Channel ports; travel pieces about exploring America by train - and about being personally involved in the notorious Staplehurst train crash in Kent. Now, in the year of Dickens' 150th anniversary, Tony Williams, a distinguished Dickens scholar, collects all these railway writings into a handsome little volume ideal for a long train journey...