The History of Britain

Britain's history has made a clear imprint on the landscape, and aerial photography demonstrated this in a particularly vivid way. This collection contains a wide variety of 150 private British aerial photographs, some specially taken for the book, brought together to represent Britain from prehistoric times to the 1980s. Arranged chronologically, the subjects include stone circles and burial mounds (often invisible at ground level); Roman monuments; Iron Age hillforts and mediaeval castles, their military significance clearly appreciated from the air; country houses and landscapes, seen as they must have appeared in the eyes of the designers; the normally hidden traces of deserted mediaeval villages; the ground plans of Gothic cathedrals and royal palaces, raised into three-dimensional reality; the characteristic layouts of Oxford, Cambridge and Bath. Towns, villages, industry, agriculture are all shown here. Every picture is accompanied by a detailed commentary.