Bøker av Margaret Willes

The first complete history of Southwark, London’s stubbornly independent community over the Thames

The extraordinary story of St. Paul's Churchyard-the area of London that was a center of social and intellectual life for more than a millennium

This book shows how various plants were used for cooking and brewing, medicines and cosmetics, in the making and care of clothes, and finally to keep rooms fresh, fragrant and decorated during the seventeenth-century. Richly illustrated, it provides an intriguing and original focus on the domestic history of Stuart England.

An intimate portrait of two pivotal Restoration figures during one of the most dramatic periods of English history

Taking fifty quotations centring on flowers, herbs, fruit and vegetables, this book marries the beauty of Shakespeare's lines with charming contemporary renderings of the plants he described so vividly.

This magnificently illustrated people’s history celebrates the extraordinary feats of cultivation by the working class in Britain, even if the land they toiled, planted, and loved was not their own. Spanning more than four centuries, from the earliest records of the laboring classes in the country to today, Margaret Willes's research unearths lush gardens nurtured outside rough workers’ cottages and horticultural miracles performed in blackened yards, and reveals the ingenious, sometimes devious, methods employed by determined, obsessive, and eccentric workers to make their drab surroundings bloom. She also explores the stories of the great philanthropic industrialists who provided gardens for their workforces, the fashionable rich stealing the gardening ideas of the poor, alehouse syndicates and fierce rivalries between vegetable growers, flower-fanciers cultivating exotic blooms on their city windowsills, and the rich lore handed down from gardener to gardener through generations. This is a sumptuous record of the myriad ways in which the popular cultivation of plants, vegetables, and flowers has played—and continues to play—an integral role in everyday British life.

Examines how people acquired and read books from the sixteenth century to the present, focusing on the personal relationships between readers and the volumes they owned. This title also investigates the means by which books were sold, and lends insights into the ways booksellers and publishers marketed their wares.