Traditional Crafts and Industries in East Anglia: The photographic legacy of Hallam Ashley (English Heritage)

East Anglia is an area of England renowned for its wide horizons, vast skies and extensive areas of wetland a place where the land, sea and sky are beautifully intermingled. Hallam Ashley, a talented professional photographer, was drawn to this unique landscape and the people who lived and worked there and his wonderful documentary photography, dating mostly from the 1940s to the 1960s, is featured in this new book. Traditional crafts and industries were under threat in this period of rapid industrialisation and social change so his stunning images are also important historical documents of a fast-fading way of life. The 140 black-and-white photographs in the book are only a small selection from the archive of Hallam Ashley’s photography held by the National Monuments Record (NMR) in Swindon and they range from a flat-capped miller carefully dressing an ancient millstone and a flint-knapper fashioning gun-flints to a small boy admiring a farrier’s work and a busy repair shop for wooden carousel horses. Complemented with a personal biography by Hallam Ashley’s daughter and an informative introduction by the author, this book will appeal to anyone with an interest in photography, social history and the heritage of East Anglia.