Peter Ashley

In Cross Country photographer and author Peter Ashley unleashes his passion for Blighty. He takes us on an enlightening jaunt that encompasses many of England’s most loved regions. His love of buildings and landscape extends far beyond architecture in picturesque surroundings. By combining personal reminiscence and an ear for intriguing anecdote, he shows us with wit, and sometimes irreverent comment, just how richly varied the fabric of England is: abandoned Cornish tin mines above tide-washed caves; Norfolk boat sheds leaning on salt marches; Romney Marsh shepherd’s houses disappearing behind roadside willows; and hedges looked over in Wiltshire. Local details are found in both Essex estuaries and Cumbrian sand dunes; and long abandoned railway lines are once again pressed into service to take us around his beloved High Leicestershire. Ashley never misses the curious and neglected – be it a sheep wash in the Cotswolds or a disused petrol pump in Herefordshire. He travels deep into t eh countryside he cares about. His wry observations allow us to rediscover and delight in what many of us might previously have deemed familiar territory.

English Buildings and Landscape From Countryside to Coast

Cross Country

London is a city that continually changes to suit the age; an ever changing backdrop to what has survived from over the centuries. We are always conscious of the show-piece buildings, but London can never quite shake off the smaller details, the disregarded curiosities that connect us to a past that never goes away. London Peculiars goes in search of the strange, the unexpected and the downright odd: dinosaurs in Sydenham, stage-set housefronts in Bayswater, a funeral railway in Waterloo. Architecture that moves considerable distances, architecture that hides other purposes. The weird, the mysterious, the preposterous; this book is a manual for anyone wanting to scratch away at London's surface gloss, for everyone who looks beyond the immediate and obvious. Through a succession of atmospheric photographs and text, this fascinating book will send the reader on an enchanting journey of discovery through London's alternative histories.

Curiosities in a Capital City

London Peculiars

Anne Ashley

The Canadian Plant Sourcebook

Philip Wilkinson

This is the most comprehensive single volume on English architecture for the general reader. It is a visual cornucopia and a tribute to the diversity of the English built environment, which is among the richest and most diverse in the world. Over 700 buildings are described and illustrated, and they range from the architectural icons to the less noticeable but equally fascinating buildings of England's towns and villages.

The English Buildings Book

Unmitigated England is a personal view of an England lost and an England found. Accompanied by a wry and often very funny commentary this is a remarkable visual record of very English passions, touching on everything from films to guidebooks, household brands to railway stations, traditional shops to very particular kinds of pubs. Peter Ashley draws on his collections of photographs and images to show both how this country once looked and how what is left is coming increasingly under threat, a truly unique and thought-provoking book.

Unmitigated England

English Heritage Pocket Books encourage us to look beyond the obvious. Writer and photographer Peter Ashley champions the sometimes neglected and unsung architecture and related artefacts of everyday life, looking at everything from signal boxes to pre-war road signs, from lighthouses to canal tunnels. The series is beautifully produced with original colour photography throughout, accompanied by a witty and often idiosyncratic text The windmill is one of our most conspicuous landmarks. This Pocket Book finds mills still rumbling and shaking as they once again grind corn, drainage mills out on lonely East Anglian marshes that in a very watery past pumped water up from low-lying fields into rivers, and the most ubiquitous mills of all, the derelict stumps out in the fields that still remind us of their past glories as essential working machines.

Windmills

Up in the Wind

- - A nostalgic three-book series celebrating a slower, old-fashioned way of life- - Vintage train memorabilia from across Britain- - Dedicated to a cultural staple in British industrial history: the trainAs the world speeds up, as technology takes over, it is worth remembering how we used to live. This three-book series is a nostalgic hymn to an era when life was slower: a meandering ramble through the British countryside by bicycle, automobile and train. Take an amble across the countryside with this book, which celebrates a time when our railway network was more than a permanently delayed omnishambles of overcrowded and overpriced trains. Country stations and lonely halts, milk churns and coal yards, enamelled signs and platform clocks - these are the fragments of a more leisured age, from a time when the local station was a well-loved institution at the heart of so many communities. Here are gas-lit rural stations, oil lamps on level crossing gates, enamelled signs, waiting room fires, timetables and luggage labels. Less a clattering, steamy ride into the past than a touchstone for joyous memories of such a vital and well-loved institution, The Slow Train harks back to a more measured, considered era. Also available: The Bicycle ISBN 978178884094 The Open Road ISBN 9781788840927

Peter Ashley

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