The Ace Cafe

Author: Winston Ramsey
Publisher: After the Battle
ISBN: 1399076604
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 645

Book Description
The book opens with the first beginnings of bike racing in the London area — at High Beech — in 1928 and continues with the pre-war history of the North Circular as one of Britain’s new ‘arterial’ roads, and?the establishment of the Ace ‘road-house’ at Stonebridge Park in 1939. Then, Barry ‘Noddy’ Cheese, one of the Ace’s original ‘ton-up’ boys, paints a graphic picture for us of the excitement of life at the cafe in the 1950-1960s. The controversial Dixon of Dock Green TV episode is covered as is the making of the classic film The Leather Boys and?the book goes on to describe events leading up to the closure and subsequent isolation of the Ace with the construction of the new bypass in the 1990s. The?story is brought up to date with the resurrection of the cafe’s fortunes under Mark Wilsmore and the fantastic reopening celebrations in September 2001.

Stations Of Coastal Command

Author: David Smith
Publisher: After the Battle
ISBN: 1399076574
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 826

Book Description
Coastal Command, created in 1936 alongside Fighter and Bomber Commands in the reorganization of the RAF in its preparations for the coming war, was Britain’s mainstay in the battle against the German submarine. As more and more Allied merchantmen were sunk during the long voyage from North America, the Mediterranean, and points south, tracking down the U-Boats became a constant struggle against harsh weather on long-distance patrols out over the Atlantic and Bay of Biscay. To counter the threat, Coastal Command established a ring of bases stretching from Scotland and Northern Ireland to Iceland, and from south Wales and south-western Britain to Gibraltar and the Azores, all 53 of these stations are covered in this book.

Ace Times

Author: Mick Duckworth
Publisher: Redline Books
ISBN: 9780955527869
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
This book by Mick Duckworth, centres on the definitive history of London's Ace Cafe, the roadside pull-in that became the most famous haunt of motorcycle riding Ton-up kids in the Fifties and Rockers in the Sixties. The book also tells the story of other lively bikers haunts of the past, like the 59 Club, the Busy Bee and other cafes around the country.A substantial high-quality volume packed with personal recollections and evocative photos, Ace Times also looks at the fastest motorcycles, the loudest music, the iconic movies and the distinctive clothing of the cafe-racing era. Burn-ups, press hysteria, rock'n'roll riots, police-baiting, Mods and Rockers, pirate radio and loads more besides are all portrayed in a true-to-life, unembroidered way.

The Café Racer Phenomenon

Author: Alastair Walker
Publisher: David and Charles
ISBN: 1845848934
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
The Café Racer is one of the most enduring styles of motorcycle ever created, capturing the rebellious spirit of the 50s. From original Triton-building Rockers to modern-day Sunday riders on Thruxton 900s, there are thousands of enthusiasts across the world who aspire to own an old school road burner. A look back at the glory days of the Café Racer, from Friday night dices on the North Circular, through the street specials craze of the Seventies, to the modern day revival. Interviews with some of the old school regulars at the Ace Café, and an in-depth look at the great British bike builders like Norman Hyde, Steve and Lester Harris, the Rickman brothers and Paul Dunstall. Featuring a huge, global Café Racer directory – listing specialist builders, spares suppliers, websites etc – alongside a unique mix of personal memories, unseen photos, iconic machines and chassis builders in profile, this book is a must for any ton-up rider.

Scenes Of Murder

Author: Winston Ramsey
Publisher: After the Battle
ISBN: 1399077074
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
In this book, After the Battle have explored entirely new ground to investigate 150 years of murder and present it through our then and now theme of comparison photographs. Scene of crime plans and photographs from police files focus on a wide variety of murders committed between 1812, when a Prime Minister was shot in the House of Commons, to killings on the streets of London in the 1960s. Far too often it is the perpetrator who is remembered while their victims, many lying in unmarked graves, remain lost to history. So this book sets out to redress the balance by tracking down the last resting places, even going as far as to mark two wartime graves of taxi drivers killed by American servicemen. Homicide is not a subject for the faint-hearted and many of the photographs are distressing which is why the book is made available with that warning.

Adventures in Yellow

Author: Norman Magowan
Publisher: Indepenpress Publishing
ISBN: 9781780030241
Category : Canada, Western
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
Adventures in Yellow is a heart-warming, humorous and poignant account of an epic 35,500-mile journey through the Americas. The South American leg of Adventures in Yellow is recounted in Leprechauns in Latin America

Images of England Through Popular Music

Author: K. Gildart
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137384255
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 539

Book Description
Drawing on archival sources and oral testimony, Keith Gildart examines the ways in which popular music played an important role in reflecting and shaping social identities and working-class cultures and - through a focus on rock 'n' roll, rhythm & blues, punk, mod subculture, and glam rock - created a sense of crisis in English society.

London’s Working-Class Youth and the Making of Post-Victorian Britain, 1958–1971

Author: Felix Fuhg
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030689689
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 444

Book Description
This book examines the emergence of modern working-class youth culture through the perspective of an urban history of post-war Britain, with a particular focus on the influence of young people and their culture on Britain’s self-image as a country emerging from the constraints of its post-Victorian, imperial past. Each section of the book – Society, City, Pop, and Space – considers in detail the ways in which working-class youth culture corresponded with a fast-changing metropolitan and urban society in the years following the decline of the British Empire. Was teenage culture rooted in the urban experience and the transformation of working-class neighbourhoods? Did youth subcultures emerge simply as a reaction to Britain's changing racial demographic? To what extent did leisure venues and institutions function as laboratories for a developing British pop culture, which ultimately helped Britain re-establish its prominence on the world stage? These questions and more are answered in this book.

The Ambiguities of European Comic-book Bikers

Author: David Walton
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666965375
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
In this book, David Walton explores European comic-book biker publications as a subgenre of popular culture. Using a multidisciplinary approach, he reveals an intricate amalgam of ingenuity, irony, and highly ambiguous humor. The creative resourcefulness of the comic-book biker authors is seen to dramatize and celebrate the material existence of motorcycles and lifestyles while laughing at the foibles, inconsistencies, manias, fantasies, and practices of those characterised as motorized flâneurs. At the core of Walton’s analysis is the exploration of identity formation, marked by tensions between individualism and collective affinities, undermined by egoism and competitiveness. At the same time, Walton argues that the storylines (despite much comic invention, caricature, and exaggeration) create resonances which hold up a distorted but highly revealing mirror to the multiple subgroups of people who ride motorcycles for pleasure. The author also demonstrates how the implied biker-readers of this subgenre confront comic representations of themselves which repeatedly undermine any positive self-image they may possess. Yet the comics are also seen to offer valuable insights into much broader cultural concerns ranging from subculture, consumption habits, (in)authenticity, taste, freedom, risk, and delinquency – without forgetting other key aspects of cultural studies like class, race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and ecocriticism.

The Sense of an Ending

Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307957330
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 158

Book Description
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.