Through the Ages – serie

Despite its remote location, surrounded by the high ground of the North Yorkshire Moors, Whitby has featured significantly in history throughout the years. One of the earliest records of Whitby is from AD 656, when Oswy, a Christian king of Northumbria, founded the first abbey there. In AD 664, the town was the setting for the famous Synod of Whitby. Other significant aspects of Whitby's legacy include: the role of Captain Cook, who learned seamanship when based in the town; its role as a fishing port, and its important as a base for whalers; and the jet jewellery industry, which flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century. Today, Whitby is a major tourist attraction, and people come from far and wide to visit this picturesque town. More recent events, festivals associated with the town's link to Dracula, and the 'Goth Weekend', have ensured the town continues to thrive. There have been some inevitable changes to the town and its architecture over the years, but Whitby continues to appeal to and spark the imagination of so many people.

Hartlepool Through The Ages is a sister volume to Paul Chrystal’s Hartlepool Through Time, produced this time with Stan Laundon. Stan not only provides many of the old images but has taken care of the modern photography and, in so doing, has given us some stunning images of Hartlepool as it is today. Hartlepool Through the Ages offers a further 200 pictures or so, none of which appeared in the earlier volume. As before, the book explores the three towns that make up Hartlepool (‘Old Hartlepool’, West Hartlepool and Hartlepool), along with outlying villages, this time including Wolviston, Blackhall and Crimdon.In this selection you will meet Chick Henderson, Joe Brown, Terry Bell, Henry Smith, Captain Perry, Egbert the tank, Winston Churchill and Miss Great Britain, among others. The authors will take you to the steelworks north and south, to Blackhall Rocks, Steetley Magnesite, Greatham Co-op and to the top of Christ Church, and will show you parts of the town by night and by day; you’ll learn how to street dance on the pier and will watch a rehearsal of The Wizard of Oz. Altogether, Hartlepool Through the Ages is a warm and colourful celebration of a warm and colourful town, past and present.

The coastal town of South Shields, which lies at the mouth of the River Tyne, has a rich and fascinating history. The town was established as a hub for fishing and retains that tradition to this day. Yet South Shields is much more than a historic maritime port, and over the years has had a number of various industries develop and prosper. It has become a popular tourist destination, with its reconstructed Roman fort, Guiness clock tower and seafront complex.In a follow-up to South Shields: The Postcard Collection, Caroline Barnsley has created a new pictorial history of South Shields. The book charts the town’s buildings and monuments, and a miscellany of pubs, shops and street scenes. Coupled with stunning modern-day photography, South Shields Through the Ages depicts the many changes and events the town has witnessed over the past century.

Northwich Through the Ages offers a unique insight into the illustrious history of this part of the country with a completely new set of past and present images. Reproduced in full colour, this is an exciting examination of Northwich, the famous streets and the famous faces, and what they meant to the people of this town throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Looking beyond the exquisite exterior of these well-kept photos, readers can see the historical context in which they are set.Through the author’s factual captions for every picture, and carefully selected choice of images, the reader can also achieve a reliable view of the town’s history. Readers are invited to follow a timeline of events and watch the changing face of Northwich, as Paul Hurley guides us through the town’s streets. There is something for everyone here, whether they have lived in the area all their lives, or whether they are just visiting this fabulous town. Northwich Through The Ages also shows how photography has continually evolved to keep up with an ever-changing society.

In our modern day and age, when satellite imagery and GPS services like Google Maps, offer strikingly accurate images of the world, we can easily forget that for most of human history the world was an unknown tabula rasa on which cartographers, scientists, men of god, and kings imprinted their own dreams and ideals. This new extended edition, with the addition of about 15 maps, explores changing perceptions of the world map through the centuries and across multiple vastly different cultures. It juxtaposes 18th century Buddhist cartography in Japan with European mercantile maps of the same period. It travels with speculative cartographers and they argue in the scientific academies of Paris, London, and St. Petersburg over theories about what 'must' fill the great unknown. The book observes the emergence of the modern world view through the cartographic lens.

This book is an overview of plans, maps, and occasionally map-views of great cities all over the world. It follows the development of the city plan from its earliest stages in the Renaissance, through the Enlightenment, to the colonial city, the Grand Tour, Asian cities, the Industrial Revolution, gold rush and frontier cities, the administrative city plan, and finally the modern pictorial city map. Each map will be accompanied by a textual description of the map placing it within its historical, political, social, and /or economic context. In addition, we will also include short biographies of the cartographers who produced each map highlighting their contributions to cartography. While the work will cover many of the world's great cities, the book revolves around a loose group of anchor cities with a long mapping heritage, such as New York, London, Paris, Beijing, Tokyo, Rome, and others, that appear repeatedly as the book progresses through different styles and eras of the urban plan. This enables readers to better understand how the city plan has changed over time as well as how these great cities have changed and, at the same time, extrapolate a better understanding of the other city plans offered. While the book follows a loose chronical progression, overlapping urban planning and cultural differences, prevent this book from following a strict chronological order.