The scenic beauty of the canals' route through the Golden Valley provided professionals and amateur photographers of the 1870-1930 period with a plethora of subjects. Therefore, the commercial and pleasure aspects of the stretch from Eastington to Cirencester have been well recorded. As much of the two canals, especially the Thames & Severn, has been destroyed, this collection endeavours to show how they appeared and were used before closure. However, this pictorial record is not devoted s...

Since the development of photography in the middle of the last century, the picture of our past provided by the written chronicle, the museum artefact or by failing memory has been augmented by the most vivid and immediate relic of former times, the photograph. Authenticating even as it describes, the photograph is of its time in a way that other representations of the past are not. This photographic journey recalls the final years in the life of the two canals, now being restored by the C...

This volume completes a trilogy of albums dedicated to capturing as much as possible of the evidence from historic photographs of two famous canals which together linked the rivers Severn and Thames. Today this route, now in part under active restoration, is known as the Cotswold Canals, a snappy modern name for the historic Stroudwater Navigation, opened in 1779, and the Thames & Severn Canal through which the first boat passed ten years later. Gathering over 800 images together in three ...