A Town called Wallingford – contents page
Chapter 1. A walk through time
In the north-east quarter of Wallingford there once stood a great castle. Today there are only a few forlorn flint walls standing amid space and silence. Yet these few acres were where much of our nation’s story unfolded.
Chapter 2. Thames Street rules
Judge William Blackstone, Recorder of Wallingford in the eighteenth century, may have been known as a dull man: but he was also one of the most influential people ever born in these islands.
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. A woman of few pretensions
Why is Wallingford’s most famous citizen and the world’s best-selling novelist scorned by the literary critics?
Chapter 5. On wings of fire
On September 9th 1944, two brave young men died saving Wallingford from catastrophe. But behind their heroism that day lies the story of another town and another tragedy.
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. 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 great 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 8. The sub plot
A strange rumour has rumbled on in Wallingford for over two hundred years. It concerns a notorious smuggler, a secret boatyard on the Thames, the Emperor Napoleon and a privately-built submarine. Could it possibly be true?
Chapter 9. A sleepy market town
Operating Europe’s biggest tsunami simulator, surveying the sea bed for a new wind farm, measuring radiation 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. A famously wrong prediction
Every morning, more than 2,500 people in Wallingford get up and go out to work. Most will not return until evening. What happened to the promise of the fifteen-hour week?
Chapter 11. Four sisters
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 high prices at Christie’s?
Chapter 12. Behind the green door
Fifty years ago, a monthly magazine was launched in Wallingford to report on the struggle against world poverty. How much progress has been made in that struggle over the five decades since?
Chapter 13. 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 most dynamic and organised transport system the world had yet seen.
Chapter 14. On the chalk down land bare
In the Spring of 1914, a group of poets gathered at a peaceful farmhouse on the Downs just above Wallingford. One was already famous. One was soon to achieve fame. Neither knew what was to come, or that poetry itself was about to be changed.
Chapter 15. 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 the Emperor Claudius but from the reign of King Alfred.
Chapter 16. Poverty in paradise
Official statistics say one in ten of Wallingford’s children is today growing up in poverty. Is it true? How is poverty measured? And why is it controversial?
Chapter 17. 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’.