I think there were several books in this series all published at about the same time. Click the image to download a PDF copy of this wonderful work.

Here’s a treat for the Aldridge contingent reading the blog – a are thing indeed here, an old history guide to the village scanned and converted to searchable PDF and available for download.

The long out of print Aldridge History Trail book is 42 pages, and covers the history of the place from it’s origins as am Anglo-Saxon settlement to the growing town it had become when local historian Betty Fox wrote the book for the publishers, Walsall Local History Centre in 1990.

As well as engagingly written text, there are photos and good maps, too, the quality of which is limited by the restrictive small-scale publication technology of the day, but are nonetheless illuminating.

For a pre-internet age work, it’s very thorough with good source acknowledgement. Like any work on Aldridge, it relies heavily in parts on the seminal work ‘Men of Aldridge’ by the charismatic Jim Gould which I’ve featured here extensively before.

The whole book was beautifully scanned by the young David Evans, and I’m not sure where he found it, but he’s done an excellent job, as usual. My thanks to him for his tireless work and unending patience with my slowness to post material here.

You can download the ‘Aldridge History Trail’ book at the link below in PDF form for your perusal, or browse the first 20 pages in the gallery below. The book is a large file and may take a while to download on slow connections.

Aldridge History Trail by Betty Fox – PDF format, 18 megabytes

There are one or two assertions in the book I think may prove contentious, and if you have anything to say about it, please feel free, either in a comment on this post or by mailing me: BrownhillsBob at Googlemail dot com. Thanks.