Hello Kew
Hello Kew is a scrapbook of words and pictures which celebrates Kew’s souvenir guidebooks and recreates the experience of visiting Kew through the ages.
Author: Sophie Shillito. 360pp. 246 x 172mm. Hardback, ISBN 9781842467800, Kew Publishing 2023.
Hello Kew is a stunning scrapbook of words and pictures which celebrates Kew’s souvenir guidebooks and recreates the experience of visiting Kew through the ages. This beautifully curated album of fascinating cuttings, charming pictures and intriguing stories allows readers to time-travel through Kew’s ancient landscape, glimpsing history and discovering the Gardens. It is a keepsake from the past, a souvenir from a trip to a time before ours, a book that celebrates the glory of Kew. Packed full of fantastic archival imagery including photographs, guidebooks, maps, postcards, ticket stubs and more, this beautiful gift book offers a fascinating social history of Kew.
Sophie Shillito writes about place, palimpsests, and micro-histories. She is the author of Love From Kew (Kew Publishing, 2021), an imaginative scrapbook of scribbled postcard stories, and All The Little Places (Blue Mark Books, 2020), a haunting poetic-prose tapestry of fairytale fragments.
Media and Reviews
"Like a rich tapestry, Sophie has woven a web through the fascinating and ever-changing landscape of Kew Gardens. Photographs, guidebooks, maps, posters and prints reveal a place that has drawn the good and the great, the many and the multitudes together in celebration of the natural world. With her keen eye for social history, she shows how changes in Kew mirror broader events in fascinating ways. This book is a gem for anyone (myself included) who loves Kew and feels a little of their lives
imprinted on it."
- Dr Janina Ramirez, best-selling author of Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It
"This beautifully curated album of fascinating cuttings, charming pictures and intriguing stories allows readers to time-travel through Kew’s ancient landscape, glimpsing history and discovering the Gardens. It is a keepsake from the past, a souvenir from a trip to a time before ours, a book that celebrates the glory of Kew".
- Escape Learn Create https://www.escapelearncreate.co.uk/the-royal-botanic-gardens-at-kew-featured-reviews
