Rural Britain Then & Now: A Celebration of the British Countryside Featuring Photographs from the Francis Frith Collection

by Roger Hunt

Francis Frith began to take his striking photographs of rural Britain in 1860. Over the next 50 years, he and his team of photographers took thousands of pictures capturing the special charm of the British countryside-its churches and castles, its quaint villages and rolling hills, its peaceful vistas and haunted ruins, as well as its unpretentious, hard-working people. Now, side-by-side with contemporary photos taken a century or more later, these images offer an evocative record of a century of social change, as well as vivid testimony to Britain's enduring beauty

Genres: Nonfiction

Paperback

First published September 8, 2004

About the author

Roger Hunt studied stage management at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and then worked in film, television and photography. Loving history, and having been intrigued by building techniques and materials since childhood, he started writing about buildings. He is now an award winning writer and blogger specialising in sustainability, old houses, housebuilding and traditional and modern building materials and construction.

Roger is the co-author of New Design for Old Buildings from RIBA Publishing as well as the bestselling Old House Handbook and the companion volume Old House Eco Handbook, published in association with the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB). He is the author of Rural Britain: Then and Now, a celebration of the British countryside featuring photographs from The Francis Frith Collection; Villages of England; and Hidden Depths, an archaeological exploration of Surrey's past. He also contributed a chapter to the Reader's Digest book The Story of Where you Live and wrote Hamptons International's millennium book The House 1000-2000.

He is editor of the SPAB Briefings, a series which offers a summary of recent work by the Society with cutting-edge information to help both owners and building professionals. Titles include Energy Efficiency in Old Buildings, Windows & Doors, Lime and Disaster & Recovery.

His work has appeared in numerous publications including The Daily Telegraph, Period Living, House & Garden, Grand Designs, Homebuilding & Renovating, Real Homes and Listed Heritage. He is sustainability correspondent for Show House, a title aimed at the housebuilding industry, and is a judge of the What House? Awards for new housing.

Roger Tweets @huntwriter and blogs at huntwriter.com. He also lectures regularly on retrofitting and repairing old buildings.

He was named Sustainable Property Journalist of the Year at the LSL Property Press Awards in both 2013 and 2014 and B2B Property Journalist of the Year at the Headline Property Awards 2008. His huntwriter.com blog won Best Blog and Best Eco Home Blog at the PrimeLocation.com Blog Awards 2011.

Interests include landscaping gardens and renovating houses. Although based in the UK, his latest renovation project is a 1900 house on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, USA.

Reviews

[Natalie Awdry · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very comprehensive set of topics for which each has a really nice, and brief, overview. Thorough and yet succinct and easy to read. The only downside with the book is that its synopsis focuses on how it is a photographic comparison of rural life in the past and rural life now (or at least the early 2000s when the book was published), yet there are very few comparative photos of the same place. Very, very few.

OK, it might be hard to reconstruct the exact angle and scene, but how hard can it be to travel back to the same place to take a photo of the same building or landscape feature? The fact that so few of the photos are of the same place makes me think that the historical features are no longer there and that therefore Roger Hunt, or his photographer, had to travel to alternative locations in order to find features that are still-standing which ruined the effect for me.

[Ruth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a great "looka" book. And the then and now photographs shows clearly how much the agricultural land has been taken up for modern housing estates. There are clear and concise explanations of how man and modern times influenced the various ways of building from county to county. Sadly, not enough of comparison photographs but full of fascinating facts. I did not realise that Milton Abbas in Dorset was one of the earliest example of a "planned" village. Great stuff and forward thinking by the owner, the Earl of Dorchester, until you find out that he "had" to do this because he flattened the original market town because "it spoilt his view"! What is great to see is that some old buildings such as inns and tea rooms have been preserved for the future albeit that they have been converted into private dwellings. A key fact mentioned in the book and one that I have heard in various documentaries is that trades that once played a key role in rural life, but are no longer practised in many villages, are preserved in the names of streets and buildings hence some buildings known as "Saddler House" and "Blacksmith Arms" Published in 2004.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting, but they could have used a slightly larger format - the print was sooo tiny that I almost had to grab a magnifying glass to read it - and my eyes are really good! Otherwise, a great book.

[Judie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The photos are lovely. The written word is small, miniscule even. It was difficult to read, but there is good information. I was hoping for something a little more area specific.