BOOKS GALORE: Packed with the past, full of superb photographs and information – just the ticket for a nostalgic trip back in time

A VISUAL feast of 1,300 photographs from the Historic England archives which take readers – or viewers – on a tour of old England.

It concentrates on the main cities – there are truly splendid displays from Newcastle and Sunderland, and York is so well represented that it features on the cover. But there is a good smattering of pictures from places like Durham, Darlington, Middlesbrough, Richmond and Bedale so much of the country is covered.

There is an erudite commentary about Britain in those early years of photography, but the pictures, selected from various archives amassed by Historic England (formerly English Heritage), that are the stars.

Digital cameras may have brought point-and-press photography to the masses but these images from 100 years ago are amazingly sharp. There’s such a wealth of pin-point detail in them that you can feel yourself stepping back in time.

Sometimes this is a great disappointment because you can see how many distinctive and characterful buildings have been lost and replaced by anonymous, cheap modern architecture.

Sometimes, though, it is a relief. There’s a wonderful study of Castle Garth in the shadow of St Nicholas’ Cathedral in Newcastle, with Dog Leap Stairs going off to the right. It was taken shortly after a shower of rain, and you can feel the damp permeating the bricks of the houses and the shawls and long skirts of the ladies.

Then there’s a group of poor Sunderland women and children taken in 1889 outside a wooden-fronted shop. They are all bonnets and baskets, aprons and long skirts – and the children are bare-footed, the grime on their lower legs suggesting it was weeks since they’d last had a wash or worn a shoe.

So for all these brilliant pictures make us nostalgic for the wonderful architecture of Lost England, we shouldn’t always look back with rose-tinted spectacles.

Mistress of Science – the Story of the Remarkable Janet Taylor, Pioneer of Sea Navigation, by John S Croucher and Rosalind F Croucher (Amberley Publishing, £20)

JANET TAYLOR gained a worldwide reputation in the mid-19th Century for publishing books and making instruments that aided navigation of the oceans. She was a truly remarkable woman, fighting to be heard in a very masculine world, and making a success of her nautical college amid tough competition in London.

She was all the more remarkable as her story begins in Wolsingham, County Durham – a more landlocked place it is difficult to imagine. Her father, Peter Ionn, was vicar of St Mary and St Stephen Church in the village – there is still a large plaque in it dedicated to him – and he inspired in his fifth child a love of science and, especially, astronomy.

Janet’s precocious mathematical ability got her noticed, and aged nine in 1813, she won a scholarship to Queen Charlotte’s Royal School for Embroidering Females. Located in Bedfordshire, this was an enlightened attempt by George III’s queen to give a start to gifted girls.

Even so, Janet’s career choices seemed limited to teaching but, with characteristic bloody-mindedness and the help of her understanding husband, she set up her academy and, in 1833, published her book, Luni-Solar and Horary Tables. It was packed with mathematical tables that converted the position of stars into longitude and latitude locations, and it proved a great boon for sailors.

A valuable source of income for her came with metal ships replacing wooden hulls. This caused the navigational compasses on the bridge to distort, so Janet went “ship swinging” – measuring the deviation in each ship and then altering the compasses to compensate.

In her workshop, Janet and her team of skilled men made instruments, and she patented her great device, the Mariner’s Calculator. It was designed to replace all the various navigational compasses and sextons with just one instrument, but it never succeeded – was it because it was too complicated, or was it because Janet was a woman? The authors, who are Australian academics, try to resolve the question by building the instrument from the details in Janet’s patent application.

She died on January 26, 1870, in the vicarage at St Helen’s Auckland, which was the home of her sister, and she is buried in the churchyard. When the authors visited in researching their book, her grave was badly neglected – is it still?

Her story is remarkable, fascinatingly told with plenty of wider detail. She deserves a place alongside William Emerson of Hurworth, John Bird of Bishop Auckland, Thomas Wright of Byers Green and Westerton, and Jeremiah Dixon of Cockfield, as one of the great mathematical brains of the county. It is amazing that her story isn’t better known.

The Nevills of Middleham – England’s Most Powerful Family in the Wars of the Roses by KL Clark (The History Press, £25)

FOR more than 30 years, over the course of four kings’ reigns in the middle of the 15th Century, the Nevills were the most powerful family in England during one of the most fascinating periods in the nation’s history.

Their heartland, of course, was here in the castles of North Yorkshire and the North-East

This hardback book, again written by an Australian academic, traces their rise and fall, their feuds and battles, and their roles as statesmen, soldiers, archbishops and wives. Plus it tells of their ambition, the scheming and even the treachery of how they engineered themselves controversially into place.

A good, easy read, with plenty of dramatic detail, this is the definitive history of one of our greatest families.

Chillingham: Its cattle, castle and church, edited by Paul G Bahn and Vera B Mutimer (Fonthill Media, £20)

WITH a foreword by Prince Charles, you would expect this well illustrated hardback to be about the famous cattle and the ancient castle in Northumberland.

They do, of course, feature in some detail in this book, which is a collection of essays by different authors and experts about various aspects. There’s rock art, deer parks, early aviation, native trees, great art and fascinating history.

But the chapter that really catches the eye is the long one about ghosts. Sir Humphry Wakefield, who restored the castle from ruin in the 1970s, talks happily about the floating blue band that regularly appears where the bones of “the wailing Blue Boy” were discovered, while the testimony from an amateur ghost hunter about terrifying noises and unstill torturers is positively frightening.

Chillingham is obviously a chilling place as well as being the home of the cattle which Prince Charles calls “scientifically important and of considerable fascination”.

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The Northern Echo has just published Looking Back at Durham City (£2), which is a glossy magazine containing photographs from our archive, principally from the 1960s when the city was undergoing great change. Many of the pictures have featured within the pages of Memories, but they look truly splendid enlarged on high quality paper.

The magazine is available from newsagents in and around Durham.

Sunderland in 50 Buildings by Michael Johnson (Amberley Publishing, £14.99) is a colourfully illustrated romp through the distinctive architecture of Sunderland, while York in the 1970s by Paul Chrystal (Amberley Publishing, £14.99) is a nostalgic blast in words and pictures for anyone who lived in the city during that decade.

As previously mentioned in Memories, Page Bank Remembered by Tom Hutchinson (£5) has just been published. It is a 50-pager filled with photographs of the lost mining village that used to be near Spennymoor. It is available from Etherington’s newsagents in Bishop Auckland, Sheldon’s in Willington and The Studio in Spennymoor, or call 01388-602194.

The Darlington Grammar School: From Pease to Peter by Dennis Perkins (Janus Publishing, £12.95) is also available again as it sold out at its launch a couple of weeks ago. It is a 350-page history of the grammar school on its Vane Terrace site, from 1878 until its conversion into today’s sixth form college in 1970. It is available online from the publisher or Amazon and Waterstones.

And may we also politely remind you that Darlington in 100 Dates by Chris Lloyd (The History Press, £7.99) would nicely fill a stocking. It is available from Waterstones and Amazon.