Aylesbury is an old town, first recorded as long ago as the year 571. It had grown up on the Roman Akeman Street, at the centre of the fertile Vale which bears its name. Its market tolls are listed in Domesday Book and its medieval market place is still the focus of town life today. "The chief support of the town is the market, thoroughfare and assize" is how Dr. Pococke, a visitor in 1750, summed up Aylesbury's economy; he also mentioned duck-breeding, a cottage industry which lasted into the present century.

The topography of the old town began to change in the early 19th century, as communications improved. In 1814, the Aylesbury branch of the Great Junction Canal was opened and by 1826 the demand for a more direct through-route for wheeled traffic led to the creation of a new High Street. In 1839, Aylesbury acquired its own branch line - the first of its kind - of the main London and Birmingham Railway, while the Metropolitan Railway finally arrived in 1892. With the railways came industry, notably printing and food-processing, but the town's expansion was relatively slow and gradual until the 1950s.

The fabric and atmosphere of the ancient market town remained remarkably intact until the 1960s, as this book vividly reveals. By then, successive waves of housing and office development had produced a massive increase in population and the town became a casualty of the prevailing fashions for wholesale town centre re-development. The closure of the cattle market in the 1980s severed the last significant link with the rural past. Aylesbury has seen dramatic changes over the past four decades, after a thousand years during which its character had hardly changed at all; adding greatly to the interest and value of this new book.

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