Market Towns of England

A vanishing England preserved between covers before it disappeared entirely. Garry Hogg's 1974 David & Charles hardcover (ISBN 0715367986) documents the traditional market towns that had served as England's commercial and social centers for centuries, just as supermarkets and motorways threatened their extinction. Hogg, a prolific writer on rural Britain, visits these towns with a historian's knowledge and an elegist's sensibility, capturing not just architectural details but the rhythms of market day, the social hierarchies, the peculiar local customs that gave each place its character.

Published by David & Charles, the premier publisher of British local history, the book represents that press's mission to document traditional ways of life before modernity erased them. The timing is significant - 1974 Britain was in economic crisis, joining the EEC, and watching its rural identity transform. Hogg's towns - Ludlow, Lewes, Stamford, Hexham - retain medieval street patterns and Georgian facades, but his text acknowledges the tension between preservation and economic survival. For collectors of British social history or those fascinated by a pre-globalized England, this offers both elegy and ethnography.