About the book

RCHS 2020 Canal and Waterways Book of the Year

“Fully referenced but written in an easily readable style, this book should satisfy both the academic and the amateur local historian. A pioneering study, it has a relevance to rural areas well beyond Hertfordshire as it deepens the understanding of rural transport needs and problems in the first half of the nineteenth century, and prompts the reader to make comparisons with his or her own area.” Peter Brown, The Local Historian

“This is an extensive and detailed study which is intriguing and interesting… It tells of the effect of new transport infrastructure on an agricultural community with small market towns which again, 50 years later, was going to have to respond to the coming of the London and Birmingham Railway along much the same route.” Ted Martin, History in Bedfordshire

“This book will certainly appeal to economic and social historians as well as to those with an interest in transport history, not to mention Hertfordshire.” Ruth Jeavons, Herts Past & Present

The fifty years from the last decade of the eighteenth century saw great changes in Britain. Significant technological and economic change, not to mention wars, affected great swathes of the population and profoundly changed many aspects of life. In this book Fabian Hiscock considers this dramatic upheaval as it played out in western Hertfordshire, focusing in particular on just one of the many innovations of the time: the Grand Junction Canal, created to connect the Midlands with London.