VISUAL HISTORY OF CARAVANS

With photographs from the 1920s to the modern day, this big visual picture book is an informative look at the heritage of the touring caravan over its first 100 years as a popular form of leisure. The first commercially built caravan was the Eccles brand back in 1919. Then a rich man's hobby, it became more affordable by the 1930s with more modern production techniques. Dr Gordon Stables influenced the caravan with his specially built horse drawn caravan 'The Wanderer', now on show at the Broadway Caravan & Motorhome Club Site. Stables wrote of his adventures, and caravanning in a sense had begun. Major Flemming William began his Car Cruiser Caravan company in 1925. Arthur and Joy Gardner founded in the late 1920s Summerfield Caravans. Sam Alper OBE was the author's caravan industry hero with his forward-thinking designs. Alper tested his Sprite caravans and proved reliability at an affordable cost (and he was also responsible for setting up the Little Chef chain in 1958). We meet other caravan designers and learn of their histories throughout Great Britain whilst enjoying a whole gallery of sleek interiors, changing designs and models, posters and advertising, manuals for tow-pole attachments, sleeping and cooking accommodation, bathing and wardrobes and of course a gallery of old cars towing them like the Austin A40. We marvelled at he Zephyr from 1954 with its almost circular shape yet it slept four people! The GNU, safari caravans, and the Winchester Royal at six meters long was a luxury caravan with high specifications including fridge, full cooker, bath in the floor, electric lights and solid stove, to the 5m fibre glass moulded tourer the 1956 Freeman Glen Cairn. Hundreds of colour and archive photos, 104 pages, 21.6 x 28.6cm.