Stowmarket is an old market town, which in the course of the nineteenth century became a minor industrial centre amid the fields of rural Suffolk. The products of its engineering works reflected the town's agricultural background; those of its guncotton works, which blew up with devastating effect in 1871, did not, although the growth of the explosives industry did indeed stem from the manufacture of artificial fertilisers. Happily, a succession of photographers have captured not only the town's industrial activities but also the town scene, from the fire of 1868 to the redevelopment of the 1960s. Their work is employed in this book to provide a fascinating record of the changes in a country town over more than a century.