Find out more about the history of Langford in a new book.

Irene Allen and Patrick Chaplin have spent more than six years researching and writing the 500-page book, Langford: An Obscure Essex Village Transformed.

The village was first ‘invaded’ by modern technology in the 19th century by the arrival of the railway and became a place of considerable importance when the Southend Waterworks’ pumping station and treatment plant opened in the 1920s.

This led one newspaper reporter to write that Langford was “an obscure Essex village transformed.”

A village of never more than 250 people, Langford has lost residents in wars, experienced two plane crashes and a railway disaster.

It has also produced or played host to a Wimbledon tennis champion, a member of Scott’s Antarctic exhibition, a professional cricketer, a Nobel Prize winner, a private school for the daughters of gentlefolk and been the home of the Byron family.

Even its church is unique, as the UK’s only surviving example of a parish church with an apsidal west end.

* The book costs £15 from Allbooks in Maldon High Street or the Museum of Power in Langford.