Two things made the battleship possible: the harnessing of steam for propulsion and Britain's vast industrial power in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
British traditional working boats are famous - Morecambe Bay prawners, Manx luggers, Scots fifies and zulus, Lowestoft and Yarmouth drifters, Yorkshire cobles, Colchester smacks, Hastings beach boats, Brixham trawlers, and many others.
In the 1960s and 1970s, many of the traditional shipping companies trading or based in Liverpool slowly vanished because of containerisation or competition from passenger aircraft.
Kirkcaldy Harbour: An Illustrated History traces the story of Kirkcaldy harbour from its sixteenth-century royal connections, through the boom years of commercial shipping, to its recent rescue from dereliction by the international grain ships servicing the huge flour mill.
The Holland America Line was founded in 1873 and operated a fleet of passenger and cargo vessels from the Netherlands to the east and west coasts of America.
P&O was established in 1837 and maintained a schedule of routes to India, the Far East and Australia, being the first choice for the majority of passengers travelling to that part of the world.
Lee-on-the-Solent is synonymous with planes and seaplanes, but it is also the home of another, slightly more unusual form of transport - the hovercraft.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, paddle steamers in Britain initially did rather well, with four new ones built between 1946 and 1953 and about sixty still in service nationwide.
The traditional cargo-carrying narrowboat - recently voted one of the 100 icons of England - emerged with the construction of the narrow canal network and lasted in until 1970 when the last regular long-distance contract was lost.
Continuing the Steam Days Remembered series with Eastern Steam Days Remembered, Kevin Derrick takes us on a leisurely ramble back around both the Eastern and North Eastern regions during the 1950s and 1960s in this volume.
In the post-war era, there was still a demand for ocean-going travel, not just on the glamorous large liners and mail ships, but also on much smaller ships.
The Great Western is the least known of Isambard Kingdom Brunel's three ships, being overshadowed by the later careers of the Great Britain and the Great Eastern.
Featuring 180 wonderful images, Classic Boats offers an accessible, beautifully illustrated guide to some of the stunning craft that can be seen around the shores of Europe today.
Kingswear Castle is one of a number of smaller paddle steamers built in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to provide transport and excursions along some of Britain's most beautiful rivers.
Before the development of canals, railways or metalled roads, the quickest and most effective means of transporting goods from one point to another in Britain was by the use of coastal shipping, shallow-draught boats travelling between the ports of the British Isles.
In 1977, the remote British island of St Helena in the South Atlantic, host to Napoleon and Captain Bligh, and Boer War prisoner-of-war camp, was first served by a lifeline motorship dedicated to the purpose.
The 1954 film On the Waterfront brought to life the New York docks of the 1950s, when it was often said that a ship, usually a freighter, arrived or departed every 24 minutes, around the clock.
For a hundred years excursion paddle steamers gave all the social classes the opportunity to enjoy a cruise on the briny from ports, resorts and piers around the UK.
John Cooper takes the reader on a fascinating journey along the towpath of the Grand Union Canal, which meanders through what is arguably one of the most picturesque stretches of inland waterway in the county.
Steamship Travel in the Interwar Years: Tourist Third Cabin offers a window into a bygone era in which modern steamships like the Queen Mary, the Normandie, and the Olympic transported new breeds of tourists between Europe and North America, and dazzled them with their technological marvels and palatial interiors.
