This is a book of photographs of English Angels, both secular and religious, by the team of Peter Burton and Harland Walshaw who contributed many of the photographs to the Shell Guides. The Angel of the North, the giant iron sculpture beside the A1 at Gateshead, is just the biggest and latest English Angel to make an appearance. For angels have been an obsession in England for more than a millennium. Some of England's greatest sculpture is of angels, and some of the most appealing images. The stained glass, screens, pulpits and roof bosses of our parish churches are alive with angels, playing musical instruments, carrying complete heraldic shields, acting out their roles in biblical stories. In England, no catherdral is complete without its celestial host, no graveyard without its guardians of the dead. But they are not just to be found in churches and on tombstones. Anglo-angels play a secular role that leads them into a place where you think they would fear to tread. They appear on street corners and lamp posts, on pub signs and shop fronts, on doorknobs and on candlesticks, on ships and in country houses and beside the arid motorway.

Peter Burton and Harland Walshaw have been photographing angels over many years, and theirs is the first book to celebrate the special place that angels have in English life.