Bookshelf

"West Kingsdown - The Story of Three Villages in Kent

by Zena Bamping. 17 x 24cm, 280 pages, coloured frontispiece, 46 photographs, 58 illustrations and maps, and large, folded, coloured, redrawn tithe map. Hardback, £8.95. (£10.45 by post).

This new Kent local history is the result of an enlightened venture by the West Kingsdown Parish Council. In an effort to promote local patriotism and interest to counter moves by rapacious developers encouraged by Council and Government planners, the local author was asked to prepare a popular history for the population of the three villages of Kingsdown, Maplescombe, and Woodlands, which now comprise the civil parish of West Kingsdown.

In the words of modern marketeers, the work is "self-liquidating", i.e. being sold at cost, and the author has subsidized the book by absorbing ten years of research costs and foregoing royalties. This northwest Kent history will set standards for others to follow - old-fashioned standards of full-color frontispiece, a fold-out full-color tithe map, large numbers of illustrations, maps, pedigrees, etc. all in a cloth binding with headbands which will make it an attractive acquisition for any library. Although sadly neither time nor money allowed for the preparation of an index.

Of the work itself, this has been written in an uncomplicated style which will make the complicated story easy to follow. The author has written up this history from all available published and unpublished sources from the earliest times to 1983, and in doing this has brought to light much new material which should be helpful to inhabitants of other west Kent villages.

West Kingsdown: The Story of Three Villages in Kent..

Since the official opening of the North Downs Way in 1978, its waymarked access has stimulated the production of several new books to add to the already extensive bibliography of this rather controversial ancient trackway.

The North Downs Way

by Tom Doggett and John Trevelyan. 14 x 21cm, 16 pages, 7 maps, 9 photographs. Paper, 25p. The Ramblers' Association.

Discovering The North Downs Way

by David J. Allen and Patrick R. Imrie. 11 x 17cm, 80 pages, 51 maps. Paperback, 95p. Shire Publications Ltd.

The North Downs Way

by Denis Herbstein. 13 x 20cm, 46 pages, 45 colored O.S. maps, very extensively illustrated with photographs and colored drawings. Limp cloth, £3.95. H.M.S.O.

The North Downs Way

by H.D. Westacott with maps by Mark Richards. 20 x 12cm, 156 pages, 58 maps. Paperback, £2.50. Penguin Books."