Download or read book Britain s Lost Cricket Grounds written by Chris Arnot and published by Aurum Press Limited. This book was released on 2014-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From county grounds where Denis Compton hit a century to the smallest village field Britain’s Lost Cricket Grounds movingly shows how picturesque greenery gave way to shopping malls and housing estates. The cricket ground is as much a part of the British landscape as the parish church. Hastings used to have a historic ground in the middle of the town surrounded by elegant houses – but then recently it disappeared under a shopping precinct with a branch of River Island where the wicket used to be. Yorkshire used to play at Sheffield’s Bramall Lane – until the football club built grandstands over it. Like so many companies with works grounds, Guinness have closed their cricket ground at Park Royal and sold it for an industrial estate. Now, in a further addition to Aurum’s successful ‘Lost’ series, following Britain’s Lost Cities and Lost Victorian Britain, Guardian journalist Chris Arnot tours the country in search of our most lamented lost cricket grounds, hearing reminiscences from former players and spectators, and finding what, if anything, is left nowadays, apart from the poignant photographs of their picturesque heyday that make this a nostalgic and rueful trip back in time.

Download or read book Britain s Lost Cricket Festivals written by Chris Arnot and published by White Lion Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cricket festival - when one of the county cricket clubs takes a week or so of games out of its home ground to a club ground somewhere else in the county, and attracts a large and festive crowd to a bucolic arena fringed with white marquees, beer tents and deckchairs - is a declining phenomenon. This follow-up to 'Britain's Lost Cricket Grounds' visits 30 lost festival grounds from Bournemouth to Abergavenny, Weston-super-Mare to Harrogate, and talks to former players, ground staff, club secretaries and spectators to re-live the days when the world's finest players came to town for one week only, packed the beer tent and thrilled the crowds.

Download or read book Britain s Lost Mines written by Chris Arnot and published by Aurum Press. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of Britain's Lost Cricket Grounds and Britain's Lost Breweries, comes a journey underground to the mines that built the nation and defined a century. Twenty minutes from the Regency elegance of Bath and half an hour from the Glastonbury Festival, you might notice looming over the Somerset village of Paulton what appears to be a dormant volcano. In reality it is a colliery spoil tip, and one of the few reminders that until the 1970s men worked here far beneath the green fields of England - digging for coal. Walk the clifftop path hugging the Cornish coast: those gaunt brick chimneys and wind-ravelled winding-houses are the ruins of a once vast tin-mining industry. Until very recent times hundreds of thousands of men dug deep underground - sometimes miles out under the sea - for all kinds of minerals and ores, from slate in North Wales to gold in Dorset. Their labour was the most backbreaking of all, amidst swirling dust and sweltering temperatures, and the mines they descended scarred and re-made the landscape. But the closure of Daw Mill colliery in Warwickshire in 2013 confirmed the almost total demise of this once-ubiquitous and proud industry, whose pithead baths and winding-wheels have since disappeared under retail parks, football stadia or at best become part of the heritage industry. Now, in Britain's Lost Mines, Chris Arnot seeks out thirty lost mines within Britain's shores, from Scotland to Kent, where men mined anything from fluorspar to salt, iron ore to copper, and re-discovers the unique culture that spawned brass bands and male voice choirs, terrifying fast bowlers and rock-hard rugby league players. Illustrated throughout with a stunning array of photographs, and filled with the reminiscences of the ex-miners he meets, he evokes a vanished and truly remarkable way of life for men who did not just work together, but played, sang and drank together as brothers under dust-encrusted skin, looking out for one another as they risked their lives daily. Within a generation, most of our miners will no longer be with us; this mesmerising book will help ensure their history is in no danger of being buried forever.

Download or read book Derelict London All New Edition written by Paul Talling and published by Random House. This book was released on 2019-07-11 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ______________________________ The huge word-of-mouth bestseller – completely updated for 2019 THE LONDON THAT TOURISTS DON’T SEE Look beyond Big Ben and past the skyscrapers of the Square Mile, and you will find another London. This is the land of long-forgotten tube stations, burnt-out mansions and gently decaying factories. Welcome to DERELICT LONDON: a realm whose secrets are all around us, visible to anyone who cares to look . . . Paul Talling – our best-loved investigator of London’s underbelly – has spent over fifteen years uncovering the stories of this hidden world. Now, he brings together 100 of his favourite abandoned places from across the capital: many of them more magnificent, more beautiful and more evocative than you can imagine. Covering everything from the overgrown stands of Leyton Stadium to the windswept alleys of the Aylesbury Estate, DERELICT LONDON reveals a side of the city you never knew existed. It will change the way you see London. ______________________________ PRAISE FOR THE DERELICT LONDON PROJECT ‘Fascinating images showing some of London’s eeriest derelict sites show another side to the busy, built-up capital.’ Daily Mail ‘Talling has managed to show another side to the capital, one of abandoned buildings that somehow retain a sense of beauty.’ Metro ‘Excellent . . . As much as it is an inadvertent vision of how London might look after a catastrophe, DERELICT LONDON is valuable as a document of the one going on right in front of us.’ New Statesman ‘From the iconic empty shell of Battersea Power Station to the buried ‘ghost’ stations of the London Underground, the city is peppered with decaying buildings. Paul Talling knows these places better than anyone in the capital.’ Daily Express ‘[London has an] unusual (and deplorable) number of abandoned buildings. Paul Talling’s surprise bestseller, DERELICT LONDON, is their shabby Pevsner.’ Daily Telegraph ______________________________

Download or read book There Is No Planet B written by Mike Berners-Lee and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-28 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Feeding the world, climate change, biodiversity, antibiotics, plastics - the list of concerns seems endless. But what is most pressing, what are the knock-on effects of our actions, and what should we do first? Do we all need to become vegetarian? How can we fly in a low-carbon world? Should we frack? How can we take control of technology? Does it all come down to population? And, given the global nature of the challenges we now face, what on Earth can any of us do? Fortunately, Mike Berners-Lee has crunched the numbers and plotted a course of action that is practical and even enjoyable. There is No Planet B maps it out in an accessible and entertaining way, filled with astonishing facts and analysis. For the first time you'll find big-picture perspective on the environmental and economic challenges of the day laid out in one place, and traced through to the underlying roots - questions of how we live and think. This book will shock you, surprise you - and then make you laugh. And you'll find practical and even inspiring ideas for what you can actually do to help humanity thrive on this – our only – planet.

Download or read book Shadowlands A Journey Through Britain s Lost Cities and Vanished Villages written by Matthew Green and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2022 A “brilliant London historian” (BBC Radio) tells the story of Britain as never before—through its abandoned villages and towns. Drowned. Buried by sand. Decimated by plague. Plunged off a cliff. This is the extraordinary tale of Britain’s eerie and remarkable ghost towns and villages; shadowlands that once hummed with life. Peering through the cracks of history, we find Dunwich, a medieval city plunged off a cliff by sea storms; the abandoned village of Wharram Percy, wiped out by the Black Death; the lost city of Trellech unearthed by moles in 2002; and a Norfolk village zombified by the military and turned into a Nazi, Soviet, and Afghan village for training. Matthew Green, a British historian and broadcaster, tells the astonishing tales of the rise and demise of these places, animating the people who lived, worked, dreamed, and died there. Traveling across Britain to explore their haunting and often-beautiful remains, Green transports the reader to these lost towns and cities as they teeter on the brink of oblivion, vividly capturing the sounds of the sea clawing away row upon row of houses, the taste of medieval wine, or the sights of puffin hunting on the tallest cliffs in the country. We experience them in their prime, look on at their destruction, and revisit their lingering remains as they are mourned by evictees and reimagined by artists, writers, and mavericks. A stunning and original excavation of Britain’s untold history, Shadowlands gives us a truer sense of the progress and ravages of time, in a moment when many of our own settlements are threatened as never before.

Download or read book Felling the Ancient Oaks written by John Martin Robinson and published by Aurum Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning visual record of England's most spectacular and scenic country estates that were broken up for sale and lost for ever. A sweeping country estate, with grand house and spectacular gardens and park, would not be the first impression of a visitor to modern suburban Watford. But well into the twentieth century that was exactly what was there – the magnificence of the Cassiobury estate, of which only a modest municipal park survives. Underneath the expanse of Rutland Water lies the once splendid Normanton estate, while Deepdene in Surrey is now memorialised only by an ugly office block. Fortunately, at least photographs live on to remind us of how the landscape looked before death duties, mining subsidence and sometimes the plain impecuniousness of the black sheep in the family took their toll and forced the break-up of all too many historic landed estates. In this elegiac book, a successor to Aurum’s Lost Victorian Britain, John Robinson surveys 20 of the most egregious losses, from Costessy in East Anglia to Lathom in Lancashire, and shows how the deer park, the home farm, the parterre and the cottage garden gave way to the power station, the motorway and the caravan park.

Download or read book The Shorter Wisden 2012 written by Bloomsbury Publishing and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-04-12 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Shorter Wisden is a compelling distillation of what's best in its bigger brother. Available from all major eBook retailers, Wisden's digital version includes the influential Notes by the Editor, all the front-of-book articles, reviews, obituaries and all England's Tests from the 2011 season.

Download or read book The Great Romantic written by Duncan Hamilton and published by Hodder & Stoughton. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neville Cardus described how one majestic stroke-maker 'made music' and 'spread beauty' with his bat. Between two world wars, he became the laureate of cricket by doing the same with words. In The Great Romantic, award-winning author Duncan Hamilton demonstrates how Cardus changed sports journalism for ever. While popularising cricket - while appealing, in Cardus' words to people who 'didn't know a leg-break from the pavilion cat at Lord's'- he became a star in his own right with exquisite phrase-making, disdain for statistics and a penchant for literary and musical allusions. Among those who venerated Cardus were PG Wodehouse, John Arlott, Harold Pinter, JB Priestley and Don Bradman. However, behind the rhapsody in blue skies, green grass and colourful characters, this richly evocative biography finds that Cardus' mother was a prostitute, he never knew his father and he received negligible education. Infatuations with younger women ran parallel to a decidedly unromantic marriage. And, astonishingly, the supreme stylist's aversion to factual accuracy led to his reporting on matches he never attended. Yet Cardus also belied his impoverished origins to prosper in a second class-conscious profession, becoming a music critic of international renown. The Great Romantic uncovers the dark enigma within a golden age.

Download or read book The Shorter Wisden 2011 2015 written by Scyld Berry and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-08-06 with total page 1850 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Shorter Wisden is a compelling distillation of what's best in its bigger brother. Available from all major eBook retailers, Wisden's digital version includes the influential Notes by the Editor, all the front-of-book articles, reviews, obituaries and all England's Tests from the previous season. Brought together for the first time, here are the first five editions of The Shorter Wisden, distilled from the Almanacks published between 2011 and 2015.

Download or read book The Great British Dream Factory written by Dominic Sandbrook and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SPECTATOR BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2015 Britain's empire has gone. Our manufacturing base is a shadow of its former self; the Royal Navy has been reduced to a skeleton. In military, diplomatic and economic terms, we no longer matter as we once did. And yet there is still one area in which we can legitimately claim superpower status: our popular culture. It is extraordinary to think that one British writer, J. K. Rowling, has sold more than 400 million books; that Doctor Who is watched in almost every developed country in the world; that James Bond has been the central character in the longest-running film series in history; that The Lord of the Rings is the second best-selling novel ever written (behind only A Tale of Two Cities); that the Beatles are still the best-selling musical group of all time; and that only Shakespeare and the Bible have sold more books than Agatha Christie. To put it simply, no country on earth, relative to its size, has contributed more to the modern imagination. This is a book about the success and the meaning of Britain's modern popular culture, from Bond and the Beatles to heavy metal and Coronation Street, from the Angry Young Men to Harry Potter, from Damien Hirst toThe X Factor.

Download or read book Evita Burned Down Our Pavilion written by Timothy Abraham and published by Constable. This book was released on 2021-05-27 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A highly entertaining read, deftly melding social history with sporting memoir and travelogue' Mail on Sunday A history of Latin America through cricket Cricket was the first sport played in almost every country of the Americas - earlier than football, rugby or baseball. In 1877, when England and Australia played the inaugural Test match at the MCG, Uruguay and Argentina were already ten years into their derby played across the River Plate. The visionary cricket historian Rowland Bowen said that, during the highpoint of cricket in South America between the two World Wars, the continent could have provided the next Test nation. In Buenos Aires, where British engineers, merchants and meatpackers flocked to make their fortune, the standard of cricket was high: towering figures like Lord Hawke and Plum Warner took star-studded teams of Test cricketers to South America, only to be beaten by Argentina. A combined Argentine, Brazilian and Chilean team took on the first-class counties in England in 1932. The notion of Brazilians and Mexicans playing T20 at the Maracana or the Azteca today is not as far-fetched as it sounds. But Evita Burned Down Our Pavilion is also a social history of grit, industry and nation-building in the New World. West Indian fruit workers battled yellow fever and brutal management to carve out cricket fields next to the railway lines in Costa Rica. Cricket was the favoured sport of Chile's Nitrate King. Emperors in Brazil and Mexico used the game to curry favour with Europe. The notorious Pablo Escobar even had a shadowy connection to the game. The fate of cricket in South America was symbolised by Eva Peron ordering the burning down of the Buenos Aires Cricket Club pavilion when the club refused to hand over their premises to her welfare scheme. Cricket journalists Timothy Abraham and James Coyne take us on a journey to discover this largely untold story of cricket's fate in the world's most colourful continent. Fascinating and surprising, Evita Burned Down Our Pavilion is a valuable addition to cricketing and social history.

Download or read book Remarkable Cricket Grounds written by Brian Levison and published by Pavilion. This book was released on 2021-07-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across six of the seven continents on which cricket is played, there are some remarkable cricket grounds. From a tidal strip of sand outside the Ship Inn at Elie, in Fife, to the monumental Melbourne Cricket Ground with its 100,000 capacity, this book features the extraordinary places and venues in which cricket is played. Many grounds have remarkably beautiful settings. There is the rugged Devonian charm of Lynton and Lynmouth Cricket Club set in the Valley of the Rocks, not far from the North Devon coast. Then there is the vividly-coloured, almost Lego-like structure of Dharamshala pavilion in Northern India. In contrast there are under-threat cricket pitches in North Yorkshire, such as Spout House, where Prince Harry played twice, scored 16, and then got bowled by a 12-year-old. Many of England’s greatest players have come from public schools, and there are some wonderful examples of their cricket grounds such as Sedbergh and Milton Abbey. Country houses such as Audley End and Blenheim Palace form the backdrop to many cricket pitches, or castles, such as Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland, or Raby Castle in County Durham. Sri Lanka’s test ground, Galle, has a fort looming above it, while Newlands Stadium in Cape Town, has the unmistakeable Table Mountain as the backdrop. Some of the stunning imagery has a modern feel. Queenstown cricket ground has international jets taking off just yards from the playing action, while Singapore Cricket Club is an oasis of lush green set against a 21st century array of high-rise towers. Then there are cricket grounds in unusual places; Hawaii, Corfu, Berlin, Slovenia and St Moritz to name but a few.

Download or read book The Final Innings written by Christopher Sandford and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2019-07-16 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The declaration of war against Germany on 3 September 1939 brought an end to the second (and as yet, final) Golden Age of English cricket. Over 200 first-class English players signed up to fight in that first year; 52 never came back. In many ways, the summer of 1939 was the end of innocence. Using unpublished letters, diaries and memoirs, Christopher Sandford recreates that last summer, looking at men like George Macaulay, who took a wicket with his first ball in Test cricket but was struck down while serving with the RAF in 1940; Maurice Turnbull, the England all-rounder who fell during the Normandy landings; and Hedley Verity, who still holds cricketing records, but who died in the invasion of Sicily. Few English cricket teams began their first post-war season without holding memorial ceremonies for the men they had lost: The Final Innings pays homage not only to these men, but to the lost innocence, heroism and human endurance of the age.

Download or read book Fall of Giants written by Ken Follett and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-08-30 with total page 1010 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ken Follett’s magnificent historical epic begins as five interrelated families move through the momentous dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women’s suffrage. A thirteen-year-old Welsh boy enters a man’s world in the mining pits. . . . An American law student rejected in love finds a surprising new career in Woodrow Wilson’s White House. . . . A housekeeper for the aristocratic Fitzherberts takes a fateful step above her station, while Lady Maud Fitzherbert herself crosses deep into forbidden territory when she falls in love with a German spy. . . . And two orphaned Russian brothers embark on radically different paths when their plan to emigrate to America falls afoul of war, conscription, and revolution. From the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty, Fall of Giants takes us into the inextricably entangled fates of five families—and into a century that we thought we knew, but that now will never seem the same again. . . .

Download or read book And the Sun Shines Now written by Adrian Tempany and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE FEATURED IN THE OBSERVER'S SPORTS WRITERS' BOOKS OF THE YEAR On 15 April 1989, 96 people were fatally injured on a football terrace at an FA Cup semi-final in Sheffield. The Hillsborough disaster was broadcast live on the BBC; it left millions of people traumatised, and English football in ruins. And the Sun Shines Now is not a book about Hillsborough. It is a book about what arrived in the wake of unquestionably the most controversial tragedy in the post-war era of Britain's history. The Taylor Report. Italia 90. Gazza's tears. All seater stadia. Murdoch. Sky. Nick Hornby. The Premier League. The transformation of a game that once connected club to community to individual into a global business so rapacious the true fans have been forgotten, disenfranchised. In powerful polemical prose, against a backbone of rigorous research and interviews, Adrian Tempany deconstructs the past quarter century of English football and examines its place in the world. How did Hillsborough and the death of 96 Liverpool fans come to change the national game beyond recognition? And is there any hope that clubs can reconnect with a new generation of fans when you consider the startling statistic that the average age of season ticket holder here is 41, compared to Germany's 21? Perhaps the most honest account of the relationship between the football and the state yet written, And the Sun Shines Now is a brutal assessment of the modern game.

Download or read book Snow Stopped Play written by Graham Coster and published by . This book was released on 2015-10-22 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: