It is exactly a thousand years since Darlington first appeared in written records. During the following millennium, the small Anglo-Saxon settlement grew into today's thriving town, its history now generally linked in the public mind with entrepreneurial Quakers and the birth of railways. But as this book shows, Darlington's history encompasses many more diverse aspects in the change from medieval village to modern town. Through a survey of its physical development, the book describes how the town flourished in the middle ages; was largely destroyed by fire in 1585; and grew again in the...

This latest volume in the Victoria Country History of Durham (the first for over eighty years) presents a study of the township of Darlington, part of the parish of the same name. It traces the history of Darlington from the earliest times: a small Anglo-Saxon settlement becoming a flourishing bishop's borough in the middle ages; its growth as an important staging post on the Great North Road during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and the town's prosperity during the nineteenth century, reinforced by its situation on the railway network. The story is taken up to the present time,...

Famed across Europe during Bede's time and the heyday of Wearmouth monastery, Sunderland found a less celebrated renown in the twentieth century with the distress of its heavy industries between the wars, and their final extinction in the 1980s. Between those very contrasting eras, its story is one of re-invention and of a growing industrial and commercial might. The coal trade transformed the town during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; shipbuilding came to the fore in the nineteenth, and Wearside became the nation's, and the world's, greatest shipbuilder. Though it lacked formal...

This title was first published in 2000: In a life of only 52 years, Fleeming Jenkin established his reputation as a pioneer in the new world of electrical engineering, known for his work on undersea telegraphs and later on the electrical transportation system known as telpherage. Equally at ease in the realms of theory and practice, from 1850 until his death in 1885 Jenkin engaged in every field of Victorian engineering. As a young adult he worked on intercontinental submarine telegraphy, the cutting edge technology of its day which was inextricably bound to the new science of electricity....