Amberley imprint: 2705 books

Leighton Buzzard is a hidden gem in the English countryside, which retains the atmosphere of a medieval market town. It has a long social history of over 1,000 years, with a royal estate recorded in the Domesday Book. The sand industry has shaped the town, and straw plaiting, lace making and other...

St Neots used to be in the county of Huntingdonshire, but it is now in Cambridgeshire. If you ask locals what St Neots is famous for, they will probably give you one of the following answers: that at one time it had the most public houses per capita in the British Isles; or that it is called St Neots...

Bedworth's long history, from its Saxon origins to its Domesday entry as a small farming settlement, and later to near extinction in the Black Death, has always been marked by hardship and poverty. Seventeenth-century hearth tax returns show it as the poorest village in Warwickshire. Hardship has...

Alton has been a market centre for the villages that surround it for many hundreds of years and these two pictures show the changes that have taken place in the last 100 years. For most of that period a weekly Tuesday market took place in the Market Place and on 14 December 1909 it was accompanied...

The picturesque seaside town of Nairn enjoys a prime location on the Moray Firth coast; in fact, it claims to be the driest and sunniest place in the whole of Scotland. In the nineteenth century, the alleged medical properties of the local seawater (along with the good weather) brought Victorians...

Old Town, the original Swindon, developed slowly and modestly throughout the medieval period, on a hill some 450 feet above sea level. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was still a small country town. Almost every worker was employed in some form of agriculture, or as a servant to the gentry...

Southwark is one of London’s oldest and most intriguing neighbourhoods; a hotbed of culture and commerce that has played a major part in the development of the capital. Its streets were familiar to Shakespeare and Dickens, both of whom surely drank, schemed and dreamed in the many inns and taverns...

'There is some deep satisfaction in being born in a place like Chard', said Margaret Bondfield the UK's first female cabinet minister, in her book A Life's Work. 'The old cloth trade of Chard - the lacemaking industry - the dyeing houses - the iron foundries - the old radicalism and nonconformity...

ISAMBARD KINGDOM BRUNEL is famous for the engineering wonders he left behind - from the SS Great Britain to the delights of Paddington and Temple Meads stations, but much of what he designed has been lost. From the ships Great Western and Great Eastern to the majestic water towers of Crystal Palace,...

Farnborough Through Time is a unique insight into the illustrious history of this part of the country. Reproduced in full colour, this is an exciting examination of Farnborough, the famous streets and the famous faces, and what they meant to the people of this area throughout the 19th and into the...

Whitehaven and the Borough of Copeland have seen many changes over the centuries, but the pace of their transformation has been breathtaking over the past decade. Whitehaven's one-time commercial harbour, tied to the needs of local industry, has been wonderfully restored, and now boasts a new sea-lock...

Waverley is Scotland’s largest railway station and covering an area of 25 acres it is the second largest mainline station in the UK after Waterloo. Unusually for such an important destination it is both a terminus and a through station. In the 1840s, three railway companies built stations at the...

Located on the banks of the River Clyde, Glasgow was once the second city of the Empire, producing ships, locomotives, cars and heavy engineering for the world. Its docks would see huge numbers of exports. But Glasgow is much more than this; it is a religious centre, with one of Scotland’s earliest...

Harborne changed very little until the nineteenth century. Until then it was a farming community, with a resident Lord of the Manor, one parish church, a chapel and a few pubs. The main industry in the town was nailing. Harborne was in Staffordshire, and was part of the ancient parish of Harborne...