(A Town Called Wallingford is a follow up to Landmark in Time: the World of the Wittenham Clumps)
A town with stories to tell …
Stories of Alfred the Great and William the Conqueror … but also of state-of-the-art enterprise and Europe’s biggest tsunami simulator.
Stories of the blacksmith’s son who rose to become the greatest mathematician of the age … and of the small-town lawyer who became one of the most influential figures ever born in these islands.
Stories of thousand-year-old Saxon defences … and of the great coffee shop invasion of our town centres.
Stories of a great castle that gave England the Plantagenets and the Tudors … and of a heroic act that averted a twentieth-century disaster.
Stories of four sisters who overcame Victorian prejudice to be acclaimed as Royal Academy artists … and of why Wallingford’s most famous resident and the world’s best-selling novelist is scorned by literary critics.
Plus … the first in-depth investigation into an extraordinary rumour that has lingered on in the town for the last two hundred years.
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Contents
Chapter 1. Thames Street rules
Judge William Blackstone, Recorder of Wallingford in the eighteenth century, may have been a dull man: but he was also one of the most influential people ever born in these islands.
Chapter 2. Shaken not taken
In the northeast quarter of Wallingford, there once stood one of the greatest castles in England. Today, a few flint walls are all that remain of a place where much of our nation’s history unfolded.
Chapter 3. The great coffee shop takeover
How did a country famous for tea drinking become a nation of coffee lovers? And why is Wallingford to blame for coffee shops taking over our nation’s town centres?
Chapter 4. On wings of fire
On September 9th 1944, two young men died saving Wallingford from catastrophe. Behind their bravery that day lies the story of another town and another tragedy.
Chapter 5. A woman of few pretensions
Why is Wallingford’s most famous citizen and the world’s best-selling novelist looked down upon by the literary world?
Chapter 6. The bell, the clock and the curfew
The clock of St Mary’s shows fifteen minutes to nine as I sit in the market square waiting to hear an echo of something that happened a thousand years ago.
Chapter 7. On the chalk down land bare
In the Spring of 1914, a group of poets gathered at a peaceful farmhouse on the Downs above Wallingford. One was already famous. One would achieve fame. Neither knew what was to come, or that poetry itself was about to be changed.
Chapter 8. The bridge of time
Today there is nothing more threatening than a children’s splash park on the other side of a river crossing where so many armies have faced each other over the years.
Chapter 9. A sleepy market town
Running Europe’s biggest tsunami simulator, surveying the sea bed for an offshore wind farm, measuring radiation levels in nuclear waste, protecting the world’s harvests from pests, testing the international appeal of a new perfume — welcome to Wallingford’s world of enterprise.
Chapter 10. The heavens cast in Iron
At age ten, he was the orphan son of Wallingford’s blacksmith. At thirty-five, he was the most famous mathematician of the age and Abbot of a great monastery. His life’s work — a mechanical device that was ‘a marvel beyond equal in the whole of Europe’ — was lost to time. Lost, that is, until a researcher came across an obscure medieval manuscript.
Chapter 11. The sub plot
A strange rumour has rumbled on in Wallingford for over two hundred years. It concerns a notorious smuggler, a secret boat yard on the Thames, the Emperor Napoleon and a privately-built submarine. Could it possibly be true?
Chapter 12. A famously wrong prediction
Every morning, more than 2,500 people in Wallingford get up and go to work. Most will not return until evening. Whatever happened to the promise of the fifteen-hour week?
Chapter 13. Four sisters and a prejudice
How did four sisters living on Wallingford’s Thames Street overcome Victorian prejudice to become successful artists who exhibited at the Royal Academy and whose work today fetches record prices at auction?
Chapter 14. The glory that was Wessex
Wallingford’s first historian believed it to be a Roman town, visited by Julius Caesar and home to the legions for four centuries. The evidence now says that Wallingford dates not from the time of Emperor Claudius but from the reign of King Alfred.
Chapter 15. A tapestry of tears
The arched entrances of the two former coaching inns on Wallingford’s High Street are icons of the quaint and the bygone. Three hundred years ago, they were part of the world’s most dynamic and organised transport system.
Chapter 16. Behind the green door
Fifty years ago, a monthly magazine was launched in Wallingford to report on the struggle towards a world where everyone would have adequate food, clean water, safe sanitation, basic health care and a school to go to. What progress in five decades?
Chapter 17. Poverty in paradise
Official statistics say one in ten of Wallingford’s children is growing up in poverty. Is it true? How is it measured? And why is it controversial?
Chapter 18. The class room
Some of the teenagers heading towards the gates of Wallingford School are cheerful enough. Others look as if they are dreading the day ahead. My granddaughter explains: ‘It’s because some are good at all the stuff they ask you to do and some aren’t’.
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