Lest We Forget - War Memorials

by Peter Ashley

Published 15 December 2004
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. Two world wars ripped through the heart of every community in the country, with the 1914-18 war responsible for a loss of life on such a scale that barely a town, village or hamlet escaped the terrible scything-down of its youth. Most memorials will be simple stone crosses, but this Pocket Book discovers that the dead are remembered in an intriguing variety of monuments and buildings.

Beside the Sea

by Peter Ashley

Published 30 April 2004
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. It could be a row of gaily-coloured beach huts, a red corrugated-iron lifeboat station or a film star customs house. Pleasure pier or fishermen's hut, this tour of the coast sets out to discover buildings imbued with a maritime flavour, be they for work or pleasure. Wherever they are they all share the common ground of being on England's edge, that irresistible magnet the coast.

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.

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. Lettering on signs and buildings were once the preserve of the signmaker, lettercutter or commercial artist. In this commuter-generated age we are rapidly losing the skills that gave us such a variety of traditional signing: the wooden letters of railway station signs, the everlasting bright colours of vitreous enamel advertising, the comforting livery of a local bus company, a quality of craftsmanship that enriched our lives for so long.