Derby is an exceptional and underrated city. It was an important centre of the Midlands Enlightenment, boasting Dr Erasmus Darwin and John Whitehurst FRS among its eighteenth-century residents. It produced an artist of international repute in Joseph Wright ARA and has been a centre for the production of fine porcelain and fine clocks for almost three centuries. It was a county town for five centuries and was in its Georgian heyday much admired by writers such as Daniel Defoe.

Despite the best endeavours of a peculiarly unappreciative and iconoclastic bunch of city fathers over the years, many of its fine Georgian and Regency features have managed to survive. In 90 pairs of photographs ranging from 1765 to the present, Maxwell Craven has attempted to show why it is still a city of which its citizens can be proud and how it has changed, in places out of all recognition.