Audiobooks Narrated by Phil Benson

Hard Times, the shortest of Dickens's full-length novels, is set in the fictitious Victorian-England city of Coketown, where facts are the rule and all fancy is to be stamped out.

The Masque of Anarchy was Shelley's response to the Peterloo massacre at St Peter's Fields, Manchester, where 18 died and hundreds were injured, after Hussars charged into a rally for parliamentary reform. Written in Italy in 1819, the poem was not published until 1832, ten years after Shelley's death.

The county of Lancashire in the north-west of England is best known as the engine room of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution.

Located in a part of Cumbria that was once part of Lancashire, the River Duddon rises in the high fells of the Lake District and flows for 25 miles through varied scenery before disappearing into the sands between Millom and Barrow-in-Furness.

Reputedly the best-selling poetry collection of the 20th century, 'Songs of a Sourdough' is best known for Robert W. Service's classic Yukon ballads, 'The Shooting of Dan McGrew' and 'The Cremation of Sam McGhee'.

From the velocipede to the motor cycle in twenty chapters. A short history of the British bicycle industry from its origins in a Coventry sewing machine factory in 1868 to its transformation into one of the countries most important industries.

Frances Hodgson Burnett was born and grew up in Manchester, England, and emigrated to the United States with her family at the age of 16.

John Leland's 'Itinerary' was the product of several journeys around England and Wales undertaken between 1538 and 1543.

A fine adventure set in 10th-century England at a time when everyday life in north was made hazardous by wars and shifting alliances among Saxon, British and Norse rulers.

Born in Manchester in 1893, Harold Laski was a leading figure in the left-wing of British socialism in the first half of the 20th century.