Description
Book SynopsisThis is the definitive story of the men who built the railways – the unknown Victorian labourers who blasted, tunnelled, drank and brawled their way across nineteenth-century England. Preached at and plundered, sworn at and swindled, this anarchic elite endured perils and disasters, and carved out of the English countryside an industrial-age architecture unparalleled in grandeur and audacity since the building of the cathedrals.
Trade ReviewAbsorbing detail presented so readably that no one with a spark of imagination and a twinge of interest in people could fail to find this book a pleasure * Evening Standard *
A brilliant book about a magnificent and vanished race of men * Listerner *
Coleman's vivid and perceptive study of Victorian railway navvies is something of a landmark * Guardian *
Coleman's pioneering work of industrial history is handsomely illustrated with prints and photographs from the time with a new introduction from the most distinguished recent historian of the railways * The National (Glasgow) *
