RLD JOURNEY IN BOOKSAs mentioned on the TRAVEL WRITING page, I have collected together over 250 travel books over the years, and there is a definite Geographical air to the collection, some of which is housed in bookcases which are covered with old OS maps and varnished to provide an appropriate home.
The aim of this section of the site is to suggest useful books which have information relevant to particular parts of the world for those who may be planning to travel to a particular place. They will be a mixture of fiction and non-fiction titles, and I will provide details on each book so that they may be ordered through AMAZON (from where some of the cover art will come) or from second-hand sites such as ABE BOOKS if they are a little older or more esoteric.
All book details are shown in BLUE, as are hyperlinks to related sites for some of the books involved. This will slowly be added to when I get the time: if I set myself a target of 1 book a week during 2006 that would perhaps be good, but of course I probably won't manage to do that....
Click to enlarge the cover image
For me, there is one artist who has captured a lost era of Englishness and helped to produce the image of 'old England' which a lot of us carry with us. The pictures are recorded on a series of books by Batsford publishers, which were largely about the landscape or architectural history of Great Britain.
The sample shown above is typical. Taken from a book which captures most of the cover art of Brian Cook, it shows an imaginary coastal scene - although much of Cook's work was based on actual places within Britain.
He produced the covers for a series of books on the UK which are avidly collected today. The drawings are distinctive in form, and have brilliant used of colour, and were largely produced in the 1930's.
"The Britain of Brian Cook" - Sir Brian Batsford (Batsford, 1987) ISBN: 0 7 134 5700 7
REGIONAL TRAVEL
NORTH OF ENGLAND
YORKSHIRE
"All points North" - Simon Armitage (Penguin, 1998) ISBN: 0 14 026238 5
A meditation on the North of England in verse, radio script, anecdote, autobiography and travelogue. An entertaining collection of work by a leading British poet. Covers many locations in the North of England (see also ICELAND)
Some excellent descriptions and vignettes:
"The North, where the M1 does its emergency stop, and away over the back of the hill is the M62, gouged into the moorland and completely out of its element. At one point the carriageways separate to pass each side of a farm, and a farmer brings his cows for milking at dusk, through a subway, into his central reservation. Thousands of tons of steel pass any given point every minute of the day, but when the winter brings the motorway to a frozen standstill, convoys are snuffed out by the snow in less than an hour, and vehicles are excavated weeks later like woolly mammoths out of the tundra....From the observation suite of Emley Moor Mast, not much short of a thousand feet of fluted concrete, with a hypodermic aerial on top, just south of Huddersfield, you can see both coasts. Or you could if you were allowed up it, and the weather was clear, which you aren't, and even if you were, it wouldn't be."
The Man in the Farm on the M62 is also the subject of a song by John Shuttleworth and a programme on Radio 4
I actually got to go inside Emley Moor, and to the base of the ladder which goes to the top, or the lift which holds 2 people. It was part of a piece of work we did during my degree looking at the impacts of cold weather on the area. The first Emley Moor collapsed due to accumulations of ice on the cables. We chanced our arm and were allowed in to see the control room, and the emergency mast which is there in case of emergency. We also went up to Holme Moss, another transmitter near Huddersfield.
'Wild Wales': George Borrow
An old classic of the genre.