Born in the space of just 50 years at the end of the 18th century, the canal age transformed the British landscape. Thronged with boats transporting raw materials and manufactured goods between factories and cities, the canals were among the most vital arteries of the industrial revolution. Today, however, mellowed by time and issues, these waterways meander slowly through fields carrying boatloads of holidaymakers, or lie disused and forgotten, tucked away in some overgrown and mysterious corner of the countryside.

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Born in the space of just 50 years at the end of the 18th century, the canal age transformed the British landscape. Thronged with boats transporting raw materials and manufactured goods between factories and cities, the canals were among the most vital arteries of the industrial revolution. Today, however, mellowed by time and issues, these waterways meander slowly through fields carrying boatloads of holidaymakers, or lie disused and forgotten, tucked away in some overgrown and mysterious corner of the countryside.

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In these days before the motor car and in the early decades of the steam train, boats were one of the main ways of moving goods or moving people. We are fortunate that some of this era overlapped with the invention of the photographic plate, and Victorian and Edwardian Boating's photographs record some of the best of this admirable, arduous and often amusing aquatic activity.

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Black Country Canals includes a wide range of photographs, many previously unpublished, and is accompanied by fascinating and informative captions which combine to illustrate the canals in their heyday and more recently.  The book is sure to appeal to all who live in or visit the Black Country, and to transport historians everywhere.

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Today, narrow boats take families on holiday, but for over a century at the heart of the industrial revolution, they were the contemporary juggernauts, travelling sometimes 24 hours a day with vital cargoes of coal, food and manufactured goods; the canals were as as well known and as celebrated as the modern motorways.  Canal people lived a colourful, cosy, nomadic life, with their own customs, culture and morality.

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James Green (1781 - 1849) worked in Devon as an assistant to the great John Rennie.  In 1808 he became county surveyor in Devon and during the next 33 years he designed and built over 100 bridges.  Throughout his time in the West Country he also practised as a civil engineer and was involved in major projects of land reclamation in Plymouth, Budleigh Salterton, Braunton and at Westmoor in Somerset.

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'100 Years in Camera' - this book provides a fascinating pictorial history of the Kennet and Avon Canal from Bristol to Bradford-on-Avon.  An introductory text, illustrated with drawings and prints, sets the scene for 109 archive photographs, many reproduced here for the first time - that give the story of the Kennet & Avon between Bristol and Bradford-on-Avon life and life and substance anew.  The accompanying detailed captions, richly embroidered with anecdotes and previously unpublished material, assure the people, places and boats a rightful place in the history of this working waterway.

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One of Britain's best kept secrets is her network of canals and navigable rivers, over 2000 miles of waterways that make their private way around the country.  Even today, it is possible to travel by boat from Bristol to York, from Oxford to Cambridge, across the Pennines, through Scotland from coast to coast, and into the heart of Wales, and to the remote corners of the Black Country.  For most people a canal is some narrow ditch glimpsed from a car window as it speeds across a bridge.  But waiting to be discovered is a whole waterway world, and it is the best way to discover Britain's history, its traditional towns and villages, and the changing variety of the landscape.

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Northamptonshire is one of the least known inland counties of England, yet it is intersected by various surface transport modes of national importance.  Historically, these routes range from prehistoric and Roman roads to motorways.  This book looks at those transport links of the industrial revolution, the waterways, which have fulfilled, and continue to fulfil, a vital but changing role in the county's economy for two centuries, and are now entering upon a third such century.

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A fascination survey of the lesser known yet romantic and mysterious waters of the British Isles - includes a chapter on the Chelmer & Blackwater Navigation.

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