This is a story set in the huge slum clearance scheme in Nottingham (The Meadows) in the 1970s. Three very unlikely squatters: John Brown, a banker and Freddy Baldwin, a renowned musician, who both had wife troubles, although very different from each other. Then the most remarkable of them all: Annie, a child who had cared for her father, during his terminal illness (cancer) and who was then considered too young to be living alone in her own home. Afraid to be evicted, possibly into care, she appealed to her own sister, who had then turned her out, to face an unforgiving world, where rape and motherhood awaited. It is a story of deceit, unrequited love and, then, as the story evolves, just maybe a brighter future for them all.

This is the remarkable and unlikely story of how a bakery came to be built in a small Derbyshire village. Of the two orphaned traumatized children living in no more that an improvised wind brake (a cott.) on the edge of the great forest of Sherwood, and the common lands that stretched for miles to the north and east, who schemed, firstly just to provide enough food to survive. Many didn't in the harsh economic climate, of the cruel, pre-Victorian times in which they lived. Of childbirth, that could be a death sentence, and medical advancement's that came gradually, and through unlikely ways. It is the story of trickery and superstition, bordering on witchcraft, and the remarkable advancement through the industrial age. Of how illness, or injury, blighted the lives of all, and success could be no more than the ability to stay alive and healthy. Through it all, runs the theme of the bakery, based on the people who lived, worked and died there. It is also a history of the area and the age through which they lived, from the days of the highwaymen, the coming of the roads, canals, and railways, of the expansion of the church, and it's often eccentric priests. And of how disease was largely conquered by the event of clean water. And a population that was dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age.

Alfreton of the late 1700s with its open sewers running down the centre of Moot Hill King street, and with no real access to the town apart from a few tracts through the woods or moors, was a real frontier town. Its inhabitants morose and brutal, life expectancy was short. Contrast this with the opulence of the lords of the manor who lived in a mansion, behind some ornamental trees, unseen and largely unknown by the locals. From this period a series of pictures from both sides of the divide has filtered down to to the present day. How could this be? In order to make some sense of this the author has created this narrative.