A biography of an unsung Victorian hero, Joseph Paxton was the man behind the garden design at Chatsworth and the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition of 1851.

"Today one would be hard pressed to choose a "Pre-eminent Victorian," a perfect embodiment of the golden age of innovation and energy. But among the Victorians themselves, it was agreed that one figure towered above the rest. Joseph Paxton bestrode the worlds of horticulture, urban planning, and architecture like a colossus. This was the indispensable man, the self-taught polymath with a solution to every large-scale logistical problem. Rising quickly from humble beginnings, Paxton at 23 became head gardener and architect at Chatsworth, the estate of the sixth Duke of Devonshire. Under Paxton's hands, Chatsworth was transformed into the greatest garden in England, Britain's answer to the hanging gardens of Babylon. Paxton also edited garden periodicals, helped found the London Daily News, and was a Liberal MP for Coventry, but it was his design for the Crystal Palace, home of the Great Exhibition of 1851, that secured his immortality"--

Describes and illustrates engineering design and what conditions, events, cultural influences and personalities have brought it to its present state. For professional and student architects and engineers.

From the Iron Age to the Industrial Revolution, the Romans to the Regency, few things have mirrored society or been affected by its upheavals as much as the food we eat and the way we prepare it. In this involving history of the British people, Kate Colquhoun celebrates every aspect of our cuisine from Anglo-Saxon feasts and Tudor banquets, through the skinning of eels and the invention of ice cream, to Dickensian dinner-party excess and the growth of frozen food. Taste tells a story as rich and diverse as a five-course dinner.

The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.

Part biography, part detective novel, part love story, and part meditation on archival research, Love Among the Archives is the story of two literary critics' attempts to track down Sir George Scharf, the founding director of the National Portrait Gallery

In the UK we throw away 6.7 million tonnes of food a year - that's a third of all the food we buy, and a fifth of our total domestic waste. And about half of it could be eaten. Kate Colquhoun shows how to make your food go much, much further than you thought possible. On her mission to use up leftovers, wrinkly fruit and past-it veg, she includes modern, tasty recipes for: Bakes Casseroles Chutneys Crumbles Curries Fishcakes Gratins Marinades Meatballs Milkshakes Pies Soups Stews Stir-fries And more!

When it was officially opened on Easter Monday, 5th April 1847, Birkenhead park became the first municipally funded park in Britain. It was a pioneer in the development of urban public parks, designed for use by everyone, irrespective of social class, ethnicity or age. In terms of town planning, it demonstrated the importance of including green infrastructure in urban development as a vital contribution to public health and wellbeing. Paxton’s design for the park was heralded as ‘a masterpiece of human creative genius’ : it served as a vehicle for the global transmission of the English landscape school and led to the creation of numerous public parks everywhere, most famously Central Park, New York, incorporating of many of Paxton’s design features. This book addresses a long-standing gap in the Park’s historiography. Regarded as ‘one of the greatest wonders of the age’, it is an important contribution to nineteenth-century landscape history with a local focus, but of international significance. But it seeks to interpret the Park’s development until 1914 within a political and cultural context, drawing on economic and social history, as a means of explaining why it was not until the late-nineteenth century that it finally became a focal point for recreation and public health.

"The book tells how men and women have seized common occasions and made them great; it tells of those of average ability who have succeeded by the use of ordinary means, by dint of indomitable will and inflexible purpose. It tells how poverty and hardship have rocked the cradle of the giants of the race. The book points out that most people do not utilize a large part of their effort because their mental attitude does not correspond with their endeavor, so that although working for one thing, they are really expecting something else; and it is what we expect that we tend to get."--Manybooks website