Journalist and author John Phillpott will be at the Tudor House Museum, Worcester, on Saturday, July 14, to publicise his new book, Beef Cubes and Burdock: Memories of a 1950s Country Childhood.

It describes a time when farm labourers lived in tied cottages now occupied by young professionals… an era when children played safely on streets, an era in which the farm life would slowly give way to something more urban. These were the days when there was a village shop, pub, off licence, post office and school

The book is a collection of stories from the days of his boyhood growing up in the village of Churchover, near Rugby, north Warwickshire. After leaving school, John worked as a trainee reporter at the age of 16. Since then, he has worked on numerous regional newspapers during a career spanning nearly five decades.

His fascination with family history has led to him uncovering a number of interesting stories following extensive research into the lives of ancestors. These include a forebear with the same name who was the co-assassin of Peasants’ Revolt leader Wat Tyler in 1381 and another namesake who was burned at the stake for heresy in 1555.

John said: “The rural landscape that I knew back in the 1950s has changed irrevocably over the last half century. The M6 cut through the parish in the late 1960s, and the inevitable development soon followed, urbanising what had hitherto been rolling farmland. The book is both a lament and a celebration of a vanished rural idyll. It also serves as warning that when we cover countryside with concrete and tarmac it is lost forever.”

John will be at the Tudor House Museum in Friar Street between 10am and 2pm on the day.