Forthcoming Publications

Forthcoming Titles:

Landscape History Discoveries in the North West (for the Chester Society for Landscape History), edited by Dr Sharon Varey and Professor Graeme White.

Wordlife: Stories and Poems from the Cheshire Prize for Literature 2011 (children's literature from the 2011 Cheshire Prize for Literature), edited by Jaki Brien.

Corporeality: The Body and Society (Issues in the Social Sciences Series), edited by Dr Cassandra A Ogden and Mr Steve Wakeman.

Archaeologies of Modern Death, by Professor Howard Williams.

Post-slavery, Post-imperial, Post-colonial: Contesting Historical Divides in French-speaking Africa (an edited collection of essays from a colloquium marking the 50^th anniversary of independence from French colonial rule in sub-Saharan Africa), edited by Professor Claire Griffiths. 

A Christian Theology of Form in an Age of Science, by The Very Reverend Gordon McPhate (Dean of Chester Cathedral).

The Prime Minister’s Son: Stephen Gladstone, Reluctant Rector of Hawarden, by Rosalind Aitken.

Recent title: 

Biodiversity in the North West: The Slime Moulds of Cheshire

By Bruce Ing

Publication date: 30 November 2011

ISBN 978-1-905929-91-7, 88 pages, 97 maps, five colour illustrations, £11.99.

The county of Cheshire, in its broadest, historical sense, has a rich diversity of wildlife, linked to a varied geology and land use. This is an account of a group of strange but fascinating organisms, the slime moulds, which straddle the boundaries between fungi and protozoans.

After a short introduction to the biology and ecology of slime moulds, the physical and ecological environment of wider Cheshire is described. The main body of the work is a detailed catalogue of all the species ever recorded in the district. The records date back into the 19th century but are mostly concentrated in the last 40 years, since the author came to Chester. There are more than 90 maps, on a 5 km grid square base, of the commoner species.

The author, who is Visiting Professor of Environmental Biology at the University of Chester, has studied slime moulds since 1957 and is a world authority on the group. He has published more than 200 papers on slime moulds and fungi and has produced the standard work on the British and Irish species. He lived in Mold for nearly 40 years but is now retired to the north-west Highlands of Scotland.

If you would like to find out more about the exciting world of slime moulds, Professor Ing's Inaugural Lecture is also available to purchase for £3.00 (Bruce Ing, The Exciting World of the Slime Moulds, 2008, ISBN 978-1-905929-62-7).

Slime moulds have been a major part of Professor Bruce Ing’s life since 1957. As a first-year undergraduate at Cambridge, and already a keen field botanist, he visited the local Madingley Wood to collect mosses. Having found a strange specimen on moss, he carefully collected it and took it back to the Botany School, where no one was able to identify it! After some research Professor Ing found a second hand booklet on Mycetozoa (as slime moulds were called then) which included a picture of his find, Leocarpus fragile. Since then, he has devoted most of his spare time to their study, exploring many wonderful parts of the world in search of slime moulds, and has made friends in all continents. They all share this excitement and sense of wonder, even after a lifetime of study, and this publication gives an insight into this fascinating world.