Parissien, Steven – The Bell Bookshop

Another Round?

Emma — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Raise a glass to the Great British tradition of booze, and the twelve drinks that made it what it is today Cheers!

The history of Britain, perhaps more so than any other country, is defined by its drinking culture. Built on a foundation of pubs, clubs and watering holes, the UK has remained in the global top five for alcoholic intake per capita since 1700. It doesn’t matter how it comes nip, schooner, pint or yard we will always gladly have another.

But of such a vast and varied drinks menu, which are Britain’s favourites? Which have stood the test of time? And what do they say about our wider culture?

Steven Parissien’s Another Round? uncorks contemporary Britain’s relationship with booze in twelve very different drinks. From the 1950’s classic Babysham, to the house party favourite WKD, these flagship brands reflected and redefined British culture and politics.

For better or worse, the story of postwar Britain can be found at the bottom of every glass.

Building Britannia

Emma — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

An ambitious history of Britain told through the stories of twenty-five notable structures, from the Iron Age fortification of Maiden Castle in Dorset to the Gherkin.Building Britannia is a chronicle of social, political and economic change seen through the prism of the country’s built environment, but also a sequence of closely observed studies of a series of intrinsically remarkable structures: some of them beautiful or otherwise imposing; some of them more coldly functional; all of them with richly fascinating stories to tell.Steven Parissien tells both a national story, tracing how a growing sense of British nationhood was expressed through the country’s architecture, and also examines how these structures were used by later generations to signpost, mythologise or remake British history.Rubbing shoulders with some ‘expected’ building choices – the Roman baths at Aquae Sulis, the early Gothic splendour of Lincoln Cathedral and the Tudor jewel that is Little Moreton Hall – are some striking inclusions that promise to open doors into what will be, for many readers, less familiar areas of social history: these include The Briton’s Protection, a Regency pub close in Manchester city centre and the Edwardian Baroque Electric Cinema in Notting Hill, one of the country’s oldest working cinemas. Thus as well as identifying the relevance of certain iconic structures to the unfolding of the national story, Building Britannia finds fascination and meaning in the everyday and the disregarded.

English Railway Station The

Emma — Fri, 28 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The railway station is one of England’s most distinctive and best-loved building-types. Yet over the past century the nation’s stations have often been overlooked or dismissed, and have suffered accordingly. Today a new interest in railways – fuelled by the need for sustainability, by a growing awareness of the realities of transport economics and by the dedication of enthusiastic volunteers at heritage railways across the country – has sparked a renaissance for the historic railway station and a new appreciation of the aesthetic virtues and regeneration potential of imaginative station architecture.

The English Railway Station is an accessible, engaging and comprehensively illustrated general history of the architectural development and social history of the British railway station, from the dawn of the Railway Age to the ravages of the 1960s and the station’s rebirth at the end of the 20th century. It traces how the station evolved into a recognisable building type, examines the great cathedrals and the evocative country stations of the Victorian era, and looks at how the railway station has, over the last fifty years, regained its place at the heart of our communities.