THE
KING'S ENGLAND
SERIES
…
The most complete picture of a country ever presented to its inhabitants:
Arthur Mee’s The King’s England
Just over seventy years ago, in 1936, Arthur Mee and his researchers set out to see all England and put on record all they saw. Their task was a simple but a monumental one: to put on record all that was worthy of note. Arthur Mee himself wrote: "a remarkable event has been going on, quietly and unguessed at for many years in our countryside. There has been nothing like it before: it is the first census of the ancient and beautiful and curious historic possessions of England since the motor car came to make it possible".
Apart from the many obvious glories of England's historical heritage, they also recorded the strange, the odd, and the unusual whenever they found it, never failing to pick up a good anecdote along the way. An old lady showed them a paper model of Barnstaple Fair, made by her brother's wife, just after Waterloo: in a rectory they visited they found, in one room, a collection of sixteen walking sticks, and in another, twenty-three cats. A church they visited had an orange box keeping rain off the altar.
The 1930's was just the right decade for such a series. People set off on foot, by bicycle or by car, to make the best use of the enforced leisure granted by mass unemployment, to discover and read about their native countryside. Twelve years ago, in 1989, The King’s England Press was founded to reprint these classic guides, which had been out of print, in the original edition, for many years, recognising the need for them, both as excellent guidebooks and now with the added dimension as historical documents in their own right. Because of national publicity for the series, several customers have been looking for volumes not yet covered by our reprint programme.
To prevent confusion, the list on this site gives the up to date position
Cheshire (forthcoming)
Lincolnshire (reprinting)
Monmouthshire (forthcoming)
Staffordshire (reprinting)
Heather Couper on The King's England:
"My work in television takes me all over the world - to exotic places like Hawaii, Australia, and Indonesia... but after three or so weeks away, I begin to pine for something I can find nowhere else on the globe. It's a yearning that can only be satisfied by several days' total immersion in the English countryside, strolling through Domesday Book villages and seeing the evidence of the past all around me.
For some years now, my constant companion in all of this has been the relevant volume of THE KING'S ENGLAND. The guides are... gentle, respectful, sometimes a little stiff and formal, but always anecdotal and full of local character. It's true that they capture a way of life long gone, but one of my greatest delights is to read an account of a place in THE KING'S ENGLAND and find it essentially unchanged today.
Publication of this new, facsimile edition will show just how successful - or otherwise - we have been in preserving our rich heritage of buildings and traditions."
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