Your Towns and Cities In The Great War books in order

Reading order

Your Towns and Cities in the Great War is one of the most ambitious local history publishing projects in British popular non-fiction. Running to 98 volumes published between 2014 and 2021, the series gave individual treatment to towns, cities, and regions across England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, documenting how each community experienced the years of the First World War.

M.J. Trow wrote many of the volumes himself, drawing on the same research instincts and archival habits he brings to his historical fiction and true crime non-fiction. Each book covers the same broad period — roughly 1914 to 1918 — but from the ground level of a specific place, using local newspapers, council records, military enlistment figures, and accounts of the dead to give the statistics of the war a human face.

The towns covered range from major cities like Liverpool, Glasgow, and Bristol to smaller communities like Carmarthen, Billericay, and Dorking. The breadth of the series means it functions as a kind of collective portrait of the British home front — each volume a single tile in a much larger picture. For readers with a connection to a particular place, finding their town in the series gives the already well-documented conflict a personal angle.