David Trumper

Oswestry History Tour offers an insight into the fascinating history of this town in Shropshire. Author David Trumper guides us around its well-known streets and buildings, showing how its famous landmarks used to look and how they have changed over the years as well as exploring its lesser-known sights and hidden corners. With the help of a handy location map, readers are invited to follow a timeline of events and discover for themselves the changing face of Oswestry.

Shrewsbury Revisited contains over 200 previously unpublished photographs of the town from David Woodhouse’s vast collection of postcards. The views show daily life in Shrewsbury during the first half of the twentieth century, before many of the town’s historic and listed buildings were torn down. They also depict the hustle and bustle of a busy market town and show many family-run businesses that have long since disappeared. The book also catalogues important events such as royal visits, civic celebrations and military parades as well as the flower show and carnivals. There are also some very rare views of the River Severn that almost completely encircles the town and of life in the historic suburbs that lie on the opposite bank. The book encapsulates a period that is fast disappearing into history, when life was much harder but lived at a slower pace.

This collection of over 200 photographs explores Bridgnorth and the outlying settlements of Broseley, Shifnal, Cleobury Mortimer, Much Wenlock and many more.

Features a collection of photographs, some of them from the earliest years of photography.

Since 1968 the five towns of Wellington, Oakengates, Dawley, Madeley and Ironbridge, along with smaller villages and hamlets, have been melded into the new town of Telford. Even so the planners and the local population have done their utmost to preserve the identities of these settlements, some of which pre-date the Norman Conquest. It was an area of great contrast, from the rural character of Wellington in the north to the heavy industrialisation of Coalbrookdale and Ironbridge in the south.Each settlement developed its own unique history and local folklore, which this book has tried to capture. The pace of change has been great over the past forty years, but with the aid of over 200 rare photographs of the Telford area we look back to the era before those changes began, as well as charting the growth of the new town.

The Shropshire market town of Shrewsbury, lying on the River Severn, was an important centre of the wool trade in medieval England and its prosperity continued up until the Industrial Revolution, with a wealth of ancient and historical buildings still standing in the town centre. Although Shrewsbury was not heavily industrialised, it was the home of the railway locomotive and lorry manufacturer Sentinel. Shrewsbury and its suburbs lost many of their buildings during the 1950s and 1960s, and life in the town has significantly changed over the decades, with the rise of new retail developments and the evolution of work and leisure. Lost Shrewsbury presents a portrait of a town and a way of life that has radically changed or disappeared today, showing not just the industries, buildings, people and street scenes that have gone, but also many of the popular places of entertainment and much more. This fascinating photographic history of lost Shrewsbury will appeal to all those who live in the town or know it well, as well as those who remember it from previous decades.

The sixties, seventies and eighties were decades of great change. People’s shopping habits began to change as supermarkets took over from traditional stores, and leisure habits altered as cheap air travel led to the arrival of the foreign package holiday. Fashions, as ever, were evolving: men’s hairstyles got longer as women’s skirts got shorter. The world of work was progressing rapidly as technological advances were made and the effects of globalism began to be felt by many. And it was also a period of transformation in the way we viewed ourselves and the world as society’s attitudes to mental health, homosexuality and feminism were moving on slowly from the post-war years. These changes were keenly felt in the Shropshire town of Shrewsbury and local author and historian David Trumper has captured them all in this fascinating portrayal of the town and its people over the course of these most nostalgic decades.

David Trumper is one of Shropshire’s best-known historians. He has written at least one book on the county each year for the last two decades, forming an incredible collection of illustrated local history that celebrates Shropshire life over the last century. From long-lost scenes and vistas to the bustle of Shropshire’s streets in days gone by, his work captures all aspects of local life. This nostalgic collection, published over twenty years after his first book on the town, draws on his two decades of research and presents the finest images from those collections as a special single volume that will delight both visitors and residents alike.

The county town of Shropshire underwent great changes in the twenty-five years between 1950 and 1975, when the council’s watchword was ‘down with the old and up with the new’. This book contains over 180 images of Shrewsbury from that time, from the transformation of the town centre to the demolition of the slum dwellings in the 1960s, when whole communities were uprooted. With stunning images from a local press photographer, fine aerial shots taken by a local land agent and material from an avid collector of Shrewsbury ephemera, it offers a unique look at the town as it developed and modernised after the Second World War, and a fascinating glimpse into the daily lives of its residents.

In 1968 the government decided to enlarge the area previously known as Dawley New Town. It was renamed 'Telford' after Thomas Telford, the 'Father of Civil Engineering', whose influence on the country can still be seen today. The architects and planners of the new town were faced with a daunting task as the area was a range of contrasting landscapes made up of large settlements, villages and hamlets, agricultural land and large areas of disused industrial sites. Another problem for the planners was how to pacify the inhabitants of the five main townships of Wellington, Oakengates, Dawley, Madeley and Ironbridge, who were fiercely independent. The Telford Development Corporation wisely left them as district centres, linking them together with an amazing network of bypasses and roads. Teleford Then and Now charts the town's transformation through a wonderful collection of old photographs, taken between 1890 and 1970, which are compared and contrasted with modern equivalents, unveiling striking changes and unexpected similarities.

In his new book Shropshire historian and author David Trumper has teamed up again with Ray Farlow, Shropshire postcard collector extraordinaire, for a feast of photographs that illustrate the bygone days of Whitchurch and Market Drayton. The smaller neighbouring town of Newport is also featured in this long-awaited volume, along with many of the surrounding villages. The combination of David’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the county’s history and Ray’s superlative photographic collection ensures that this book will receive a well-deserved pride of place on many bookshelves in Shropshire.

Oswestry is an ancient market town, just to the west of Shrewsbury and close to the Welsh border. Not much has happened here since the Battle of Maserfield in 642, which is perhaps why the town is so popular among discerning tourists and those in search of a quiet life. For his new book, David Trumper has teamed up with Ray Farlow, Shropshire postcard collector extraordinaire, for a feast of photographs that illustrate bygone days in Oswestry and the surrounding villages. Featured here are numerous scenic images of Oswestry's centre, its streets and buildings, photographs of locals at work and play, pubs, people and the stunning countryside around and about. It is sure to appeal to all those who know and love the town.

Ludlow is a fine old town with over 900 years of history. We can still see much of its historic character today in the magnificent castle and church and in the wide variety of architecture of its beautiful buildings. This book looks at the town as it was at the beginning of the 1960s.

Features a collection of photographs, some of them from the earliest years of photography.