Search results for ""Author Peter Brandon""
The History Press Ltd A History of Surrey
Surrey affords good examples of prosperous peasant life at the woodland margin in the Middle Ages and had some of the best developed industry before the Industrial Revolution. The landscape gardening which has made the county unrivalled in its still beautifully contrived scenery is a major contribution to the arts of Western Europe. “Dr. Brandon is meticulous in charting Surrey’s growth ... detailed but not dull ...” Surrey Advertiser.
£17.99
The History Press Ltd The Discovery of Sussex
There is a greater difference between life in Sussex today and life one hundred years ago than there was between the times of our great-grandparents and of Queen Elizabeth, for in 1900 Sussex away from the seaside resorts had more in common with the Sussex of 1700 than today's county. Horse power still set the pace of life and thistledown floated up from the spacious sheepwalks in high summer. Hazel and chestnut coppice was still cut regularly, men had not left off singing, and the bell-teams of wagon horses on the road were familiar sounds in what was called 'sleepy, snoozy, Sussex'.This book examines the social, cultural and environmental changes which went into the making of modern Sussex from the end of the 18th century, particularly those that resulted from the invasion of wide-eyed Londoners as tourists and health-seekers, writers and artists, weekenders or permanent residents, in the half-century up to 1939. Those in favour of innovation and progress, who wanted to let things run their course, gave their active or tacit support to change, but there were others who abhorred the modern age and tried angrily to reverse the process. There were also those who fought on behalf of the countryside and resisted urbanisation by means of landscape protection, thus saving much of the county from bricks and mortar.Sussex became a foil to the metropolis on its doorstep, functioning as a re-discovered Eden in the guise of an undeclared national park, with values and lifestyles at variance with those of the capital city. The remarkable efflorescence of painting, writing, arts and crafts, domestic architecture, and landscape design and planning was deeply affected by the nostalgia for the countryside which accompanied the rapid and largely unplanned metropolitan growth. Writers and promoters of tourism created a rural ideology designed to meet the strains and stresses of the new urban mode of existence.
£22.50
The History Press Ltd The South Downs
The South Downs has throughout history been a focus of English popular culture. With chalkland, their river valleys and scarp-foot the Downs have been shaped for over millennia by successive generations of farmers, ranging from Europe’s oldest inhabitants right up until the 21st century. “... possibly the most important book to have been written on the South Downs in the last half-century ... The South Downs have found their perfect biographer.” Downs Country.
£18.00
The History Press Ltd Sussex Writers in their Landscape: Self-fulfilment in the Age of the Machine
'Theirs was a pre-urban world in the glow of its last sunset, without a care or doubt, in which it seemed as if nothing could ever come to harm. Here was their version of that ideal world that has haunted the dreamer, rebel and pastoral poet for centuries.'Between 1850 and 1939 such well-known writers as Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf and Richard Jefferies came to Sussex, a county already home to the likes of Wilfrid Blunt, Hilaire Belloc and others. The result was an explosion of literary creativity which rejected modernity and the London scene, and instead developed writing imbued with a sense of nature and landscape.In this, his last book, Peter Brandon (1927–2011) has drawn on his vast knowledge of the Sussex landscape to show how such writers, seeking a foil to London, were inspired by their surroundings and found peace and a tranquillity which existed in few other places.
£19.80
