The New York of Charles Dickens’s first visit remains recognizable. It is still, as Dickens observed, “a great emporium of commerce” and a “place of general resort.”
This article was researched and written by Simon Cains for the Woodlanders’ Lives and Landscapes project, a partnership between Bucks New University and the Chilterns Conservation Board. Woodlanders’ Lives and Landscapes is part of the Chalk, Cherries and Chairs Landscape Partnership running in the Central Chilterns, funded by the National Heritage Lottery Fund. Piddington is a village with several hundred people and several small businesses, in the countryside beyond West Wycombe. But in 1902 there was nothing but fields and farms. The village was started as the vision of one man, Benjamin North, furniture manufacturer and devout Wesleyan Methodist. His father, also Benjamin North, started a furniture factory in West Wycombe which ran until 1903, when his son moved it to Piddington.