There is nowhere quite like Thetford. Once the town was the heart of Saxon East Anglia, and later it was the only assize town in Norfolk apart from Norwich, with its courtroom, gaol and site for public hangings. Its famous products have ranged from traction engines to moulded paper furniture. Thetford’s many fascinating residents have included Thomas Paine, writer and revolutionary, the Maharajah Duleep Singh, and Allan Minns, the first black mayor in Britain.

Breckland is a unique landscape with its sandy soils and its meres. It includes the country’s earliest industrial landscape in the flint mines of Grimes’ Graves. Thetford and Breckland have greatly increased in population in the last fifty years, with new residents from London and all over the world. This new book brings the heritage of the region to life in photographs, and includes many images that have never been published before.