Today Warrington is a thriving business and commercial centre where its workers might be found sitting at computer terminals in offices and business parks, building societies, call centres and travel agents; or scanning goods at supermarket checkouts and super stores; frothing cappuccinos in cafe bars or delivering pizzas.
Witney grew up as the result of deliberate planning on the part of successive Bishops of Winchester, a spacious, wedge-shaped market area being laid out parallel to the river Windrush.
Wiltshire is one of the largest counties in southern England and has a wide variety of landscapes, from river valleys lined with picturesque villages to the expanses and open skies of Salisbury Plain.
Always known as the Wilts & Berks Canal, never Wiltshire and Berkshire, the W&B has been derelict and abandoned for over a century, but plans exist to restore the waterway.
Rhondda' - even now, the name evokes the turbulent times when Rhondda (actually two valleys, the Fawr and Fach) was synonymous with the deep-mining of steam coal.
Bedworth's long history, from its Saxon origins to its Domesday entry as a small farming settlement, and later to near extinction in the Black Death, has always been marked by hardship and poverty.
To begin at the beginning: it is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea.
Although early records of Hampstead can be found in a grant by King Ethelred the Unready to the monastery of St Peter's at Westminster (AD 986) and it is referred to in the Domesday Book (1086), the history of Hampstead is generally traced back to the seventeenth century.
The picturesque seaside town of Nairn enjoys a prime location on the Moray Firth coast; in fact, it claims to be the driest and sunniest place in the whole of Scotland.
Dunstable, once a stagecoach centre, then a hat making town, and lately a major base for printing and vehicle manufacture, is once again reinventing itself to adapt to a changing world.
The history of Glasgow extends back into the mists of legend, even beyond the sixth century AD when the city's patron saint, St Mungo, entered its story.
The three towns of Paignton, Brixham and Torquay form the area of the Devon coast known as the English Riviera, due to the sandy beaches, mild climate and host of leisure attractions.
Many parts of Britain are renowned for the 'chocolate box' quality of their pretty villages, but rarely do people include Swale in North Kent, a delightful rural area known as the Garden of England.
Stretching for some 90 miles from the Kent boundary near Camber Sands with its sand dunes to Thorney Island within the sheltered waters of Chichester Harbour, the Sussex coast presents a rich variety of features, from bustling resorts to oases of calm and isolation.
The scenic beauty of the canals' route through the Golden Valley provided professionals and amateur photographers of the 1870-1930 period with a plethora of subjects.
This volume completes a trilogy of albums dedicated to capturing as much as possible of the evidence from historic photographs of two famous canals which together linked the rivers Severn and Thames.
Stroud is the capital of the south-western Cotswolds, located at the divergence of the five Golden Valleys, named after the monetary wealth created in the processing of wool from the plentiful supply of water power.
St Andrews in the 'Kingdom of Fife' in its beautiful setting of St Andrews Bay with the Angus hills to the north and Grampians in the far distance, has been known to Helen Cook since childhood.
