Bus Number One: In a 2018 post I made reference to an idea that was still haunting me, ‘despite my best efforts to kill it by inactivity’. That haunting is about to be exorcised with the publication of Trent Park House: A Century of Secrets read more. It’s a book I’ve long wanted to write, about a place where I spent four formative years of my life. Nothing of historical note happened during that time – a bit of growing up, a lot of student-angst, and a few undistinguished drama productions. And the making of life-long friends.

The real story is what happened at the house in the years before student occupation. This will finally be told, not only in my book, but in a wonderful new Museum open from Summer 2026.

Bus Number Two: My book with Steve Humphries, Surviving Aberfan, was published in 2016 for the 50th anniversary of the disaster in which 116 children were killed when a spoil tip careered down a Welsh hillside to engulf a primary school. Steve made a BBC documentary of the same name. We self-published as we couldn’t get a publisher to produce it in time for the TV tx. It did well, was appreciated by readers, and got a boost when the Netflix behemoth The Crown featured the disaster in one episode.

We were therefore delighted to get an approach from Monoray, an imprint of the big Hachette publishing group, to produce a new edition for 2026, the 60th anniversary. With a change of title, The Children of Aberfan, and a striking new cover, this will appear in July. Hopefully it will reach a whole new audience of readers who, unlike Steve and I, weren’t around then to witness the heartbreaking black-and-white TV coverage of the disaster and its aftermath. Read more…