Tamworth: A History
by Richard Stone
Publisher: Butler and Tanner,
Published in 2003
ISBN: 1860772781
Reviewed for Volume 2 Issue 1 Winter 2024
The Review
This is a comparatively slim book for a history spanning 40,000 years! Indeed there are books larger than this one that cover only part of a chapter in this book. This history opens with fossils of mammoths over 35,000 years ago and moves on to axe heads from 4,500 BC before getting into recorded history. This is Tamworth’s curse. It has a very long and full history at both a local and a national level.
Looking at the chapter list, it’s all there. All the major points in Tamworth’s history starting with the photo of the skull of the Woolley Mammoth. It was discovered locally in 2002 in case you were wondering how there was photography thirty odd thousand years ago.
Of immediate interest are the two detailed maps on the pages inside the front and back covers. They are dated 1902 and 1906 but vary greatly in detail. This shows that up until the 1900s Tamworth was a small town bordered by the two railway lines and the river. Yes, Tamworth was south of what is now the west coast main line and east of the line from Birmingham to Nottingham. Whilst the south was bordered by the river and to the west it stopped at Park Street. Though Moor Street and Lud Lane formed most of the western boundary, with nothing west of the Moathouse south of Lichfield Street.
Despite being small a lot happened in, and around, Tamworth apart from the Anglo Saxons and the Peels.
This book was published in 2003 so with all the new re-development going on now and is set to happen in the next year or so it puts Tamworth into context. The final chapter covers “Overspill, Expansion and Tamworth Now”. Which is to say Tamworth as it was 20 years ago and provides an fascinating insight of where Tamworth might be going looking back at its history. That is the 2,000 year recorded history.
However, you have to start somewhere and this book is a fantastic introduction to Tamworth in all its facets. Written by a historian and published by a company specialising in history it is reliable. As it is well-illustrated and an easy read it will make an excellent present for friends and family who want to know about Tamworth. Actually it is a good place for most Tamworthians to start too if they want to learn about Tamworth. It is the essential overview.
