Nick McCamley, sb , 232 pps, 235mm x 156mm

Avoncliff is a Wiltshire hamlet situated at a narrow point along the valley of the Bristol Avon between Bradford-on-Avon and Bath. It has no church, chapel or school although it does boast an ancient pub and a railway halt; it also lies on the course of the Kennet & Avon Canal which crosses the Avon here by a monumental acqueduct.

What Avoncliff possesses in abundance is evidence of a long and varied industrial past. In the author's own words: 'The Avon has swept along the industrial detritus of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from the whole of England and deposited key elements of each upon its banks'.

Its extensive underground quarries played a vital role during the Second World War both as an armaments factory and as a reposiotory for many of the greatest treasures of the nation's museums and art galleries.

In addition to this remarkable story, Nick McCamley presents the history of the Kennet & Avon Canal, the Wilts, Someset & Weymouth (later Great Western) Railway, and the Bradford Union Workhouse (later transformed into a strife-ridden country-house hotel before becoming the wartime headquarters of the British Museum). He also gives the detailed histories of the hamlet's two woolen mills (one of which in the 1950s became a somewhat surreal chemical works extracting chlorophyll from stinging nettle leaves),and of the Victorian and later waterworks pumphouses that struggled to provide Bradford-on-Avon with potable water. Further chapters deal with the history of the Cross Guns public house and with the various breweries, large and small, in Bradford-on-Avon (including an account of the financial shenanagins that brought about the fall of Spencer's brewery), and with the complex array of surviving Second World War anti-invasion defence structures in and around Avoncliff, which was situated at a point where several important defence lines met.