Hail, Salubrious Spot! (How’s Your Rupture?): Memories of a Worcestershire Village

by Gavin Bantock

A fascinating, personal portrait of an English village, its people and its life in the 1950s. Hail, Salubrious Spot! (How's Your Rupture?) is a highly evocative account of a small Worcestershire village as it was in the 1940s and 1950s. Part history, part guidebook and part personal memoir, it presents a richly detailed picture of Barnt Green, a typical English hamlet of the period, with closely-observed and occasionally mildly irreverent descriptions of many of the actual people who lived there in those years. Copiously illustrated with monochrome photographs, original paintings, sketches and maps (320 in all), the book (370pp) stands as a monument of mid-twentieth-century English life and times, and is a rich treasury of a delightful rural haven that has preserved its natural beauty to this day. Barnt Green and its environs provided the inspiration for such epic creations as J. R. R. Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings' and Godfrey Baseley's long-running radio soap opera 'The Archers', now in its seventieth year. The authors walk the reader through the length and breadth of the village, road by road, lane by lane, and over the fields and across woodlands, describing the local waterways and the crucial railway system and its peculiar division of the village into 'Strivers' and 'Arrivers'. ( This is the black and white edition. An alternative edition, with 127 of its illustrations in full colour, is also available on Amazon, at higher pricing. A number of gouache illustrations in the book by Cuillin Bantock can be viewed on his website at www.cuillinbantockpaintings.com. A .pdf file of the book in color may also be available directly from the author Gavin Bantock)

380 pages, Paperback

Published February 28, 2011