Michael Carnell

In case anyone knows where I can get one, I am currently looking for a book. It is titled “In Search Of a Dream: The Life and Work of Roye England” and was edited by Stephen Williams.

Published by Wild Swan Press in the UK, this book tells the story of the life and work of a remarkable man whose ambition was to capture a portrait of 1930s rural England that was fast disappearing and to preserve it in miniature form – in a model village of hitherto unimagined accuracy and detail, complete within a landscape of fields and woodlands and with a representation of the main line of the GWR running through the scene.

The inspiration for this dream-like project was the once-beautiful Vale of White Horse, which Roye first visited soon after his arrival in England in 1925, and which he subsequently made both his physical and spiritual home.

Out of enterprise grew the world-famous Pendon Museum of Miniature Landscape and Transport that Roye established at Long Wittenham, Oxfordshire, from 1954.

The story, which is semi-autobiographical, is not a history of Pendon per se. The book also presents one man’s reflections upon the changing world in which he lived; of the despoliation of the countryside (as Roye saw it) in the name of ‘progress’; of the heyday of steam railways and the eventual demise of steam-hauled services; of greater matters too.

If you know where I can get a copy of this book, please let me know!