In the early nineteenth century, Henry Maudslay, an engineer from a humble background, opened a factory in Westminster Bridge Road, Lambeth, a stone’s throw from the Thames. Maudslay invented precision engineering, which made the industrial revolution possible, helping Great Britain become the workshop of the world.He developed mass production, interchangeable components, and built the world’s first all-metal machine tools, which quite literally shaped the modern world. Without his...

In the early nineteenth century, Henry Maudslay, an engineer from a humble background, opened a factory in Westminster Bridge Road, Lambeth, a stone’s throw from the Thames. Maudslay invented precision engineering, which made the industrial revolution possible, helping Great Britain become the workshop of the world.He developed mass production, interchangeable components, and built the world’s first all-metal machine tools, which quite literally shaped the modern world. Without his...

In the early nineteenth century, Henry Maudslay, an engineer from a humble background, opened a factory in Westminster Bridge Road, a stone’s throw from the Thames. His workshop became in its day the equivalent of Google and Apple combined, attracting the country’s best in engineering talent. Their story of innovation and ambition tells how precision engineering made the industrial revolution possible, helping Great Britain become the workshop of the world.

Gertrude Tennant’s life was remarkable for its length (1819–1918), but even more so for the influence she achieved as an unsurpassed London hostess. The salon she established when widowed in her early fifties attracted legions of celebrities, among them William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Thomas Huxley, John Everett Millais, Henry James, and Robert Browning. In her youth she had a fling with Gustave Flaubert, and in h...

**'A magnificent, rollicking narrative' Max Hastings, Sunday Times 'Top 25 Non-Fiction Books of the 21st Century'Sunday Times History Book of the Year 2015Britain's railways have been a vital part of national life for nearly 200 years. Transforming lives and landscapes, they have left their mark on everything from timekeeping to tourism. As a self-contained world governed by distinctive rules and traditions, the network also exert...

From the bestselling historian and acclaimed broadcaster‘A rich social history … Paxman’s book could hardly be more colourful, and I enjoyed each page enormously’ DOMINIC SANDBROOK, SUNDAY TIMES‘Vividly told … Paxman’s fine narrative powers are at their best’ THE TIMESCoal is the commodity that made Britain. Dirty and polluting though it is, this black rock has acted as a midwife to genius. It drove industry, relig...

'BR rebel chairman resigns' The Guardian.'Rebel rail chief in row' Daily Mail.'I don't take it back says sacked rail chief' Daily Express.This is the notorious book that got Gerard Fiennes sacked from British Railways while he was Chairman and General Manager of the Eastern Region in 1968.Fiennes became a railwayman by accident, joining the L.N.E.R as a Traffic Apprentice in 1928. Over the next four decades he worked himself up to ...

William Armstrong was a brilliant and charismatic figure of the 19th Century – a self-made man whose achievements are now being more widely recognised. Inventor, scientist, engineer, and an early advocator of renewable energy, he built a pioneering house in Northumberland in the North East of England called Cragside, the first house in the world to be lit by hydroelectricity.Armstrong's industrial powerhouse Elswick Works on the Tyne employed over 25,000 people in ...

Yorkshire is 'a continent unto itself', a region where mountain, plain, coast, downs, fen and heath lie close. By weaving history, family stories, travelogue and ecology, Richard Morris reveals how Yorkshire took shape as a landscape and in literature, legend and popular regard. The result is a fascinating and wide-ranging meditation on Yorkshire and Yorkshireness, told through the prism of the region's most extraordinary people and places.

From the author of ‘Britain BC’, ‘Britain AD’ and ‘Britain in the Middle Ages’ comes the fourth and final part in a critically acclaimed series on Britain's hidden past.The relevance of archaeology to the study of the ancient world is indisputable. But, when exploring our recent past, does it have any role to play? In ‘The Birth of Modern Britain’ Francis Pryor highlights archaeology’s continued importance to the world around us.The pioneers of the Industrial Revolution wer...

Clanging: Belfast in its industrial pomp must have been noisy: shipyards manipulating sheets of metal, the constant riveting being only one source of racket; the endless clatter from linen mills, the screeching of trams on unyielding rails, sirens and hooters marking time at the factories. There were steam trains and steam engines in addition to horses' hooves beating on the streets. The rumbustious, often riotous, eternally spirited Belfast people packed into the terraced houses as well a...

In the early evening of 16 October 1834, to the horror of bystanders, a huge ball of fire exploded through the roof of the Houses of Parliament, creating a blaze so enormous that it could be seen by the King and Queen at Windsor, and from stagecoaches on top of the South Downs. In front of hundreds of thousands of witnesses the great conflagration destroyed Parliament's glorious old buildings and their contents. No one who witnessed the disaster would ever forget it.The events of that Octo...