Tring Through Time

Some towns receive sweeping cinematic treatments full of revolution, scandal and international intrigue. Tring, admirably and stubbornly, receives books lovingly documenting what happened to the bakery, the station approach and that row of shops everybody swears looked better before ?they modernised it.? And honestly, civilisation is richer for it. Tring Through Time by Jill Fowler is part local history, part visual archaeology and part accidental existential crisis. Because once you begin comparing photographs of the same streets decades apart, you inevitably find yourself pondering the unstoppable march of time, the disappearance of independent ironmongers and whether humanity truly peaked around the era of practical coats and sensible signage. This is one of those marvellous ?then and now? books that quietly hypnotise readers. The formula sounds deceptively simple: old photographs paired with newer views. Yet somehow the experience becomes deeply emotional. A corner shop vanishes. A cinema becomes a supermarket. A field becomes housing. A pub changes name four times and eventually turns into luxury flats with suspiciously optimistic marketing brochures. Jill Fowler clearly understands that local history is not really about buildings. It is about continuity, memory and the strange fact that perfectly ordinary places become historically fascinating the moment enough time passes. A grainy photograph of a bus stop from 1962 suddenly carries the emotional weight of a Renaissance fresco. Someone in the background wearing an oversized raincoat accidentally becomes the symbolic representative of an entire vanished Britain. And what a Britain it was. A world of proper butcher?s shops, cautiously cheerful municipal flowerbeds and shopfronts painted by human hands rather than generated by corporate branding consultants in glass offices. The modern photographs inevitably reveal cleaner paving, more cars and infinitely less personality. Progress, in other words. There is also something gloriously ironic about our modern obsession with preserving the recent past. Entire generations once worked tirelessly to replace ?old-fashioned? Victorian buildings with concrete precincts, only for later generations to produce expensive nostalgia books mourning the loss of the Victorian buildings while quietly pretending the concrete precinct never happened. Humanity remains wonderfully consistent in regretting whatever it demolished twenty years earlier. The Amberley publishing format suits this material perfectly. These books possess a kind of calm historical confidence. No dramatic revisionism. No attempts to argue that Tring secretly altered the course of European politics. Just careful documentation of a town evolving through the decades while everybody got on with life, complained about parking and occasionally redecorated things in deeply unfortunate colours. Condition-wise, this copy is listed as Good, meaning it has likely fulfilled its purpose admirably: being repeatedly shown to visitors while someone enthusiastically points out where the old post office used to stand. A local history book in pristine untouched condition would almost feel suspicious, like a cookbook with no food stains. And naturally it is sold by Crappy Old Books, which remains one of the finest shop names imaginable. It sounds less like a business and more like the sort of establishment an eccentric retired detective would run while accidentally uncovering Cold War secrets in old parish records. If you enjoy nostalgia, architecture, disappearing Britain, old photographs, or simply the eerie pleasure of seeing how quickly ?modern life? becomes history, Tring Through Time is an unexpectedly absorbing little volume. At the very least, it may leave you wandering around your own town wondering which utterly mundane bus shelter future historians will describe as ?a cherished local landmark..…