Media, Speaking & Recognition
Antony David Davies is an independent historian and biographer available for interviews, historical commentary, podcasts, talks, panel discussions and heritage projects.
My principal areas of expertise include Welsh rural and community history, Llandrindod Wells and the Victorian Welsh spa, genealogy and family history, Victorian and Edwardian society, Nonconformity, working lives, country-house communities and the recovery of overlooked lives.
Areas of Expertise
- Welsh rural and upland communities
- Llandrindod Wells, Radnorshire and the Victorian Welsh spa
- Genealogy and family history
- Victorian and Edwardian social history
- Welsh Nonconformity and religious culture
- Working-class and occupational history
- Country houses, estates and their communities
- Biography and microhistory
- Railway families and railway communities
- Oral history and memory as historical evidence
I can also contribute to discussions of institutional memory, governance and the changing voluntary sector, drawing upon earlier professional experience.
Selected Media & Recognition
The coverage below concerns me, my research or material I have supplied. It is separate from articles and letters written by me.
Who Do You Think You Are? magazine
My Welsh family-history research was featured as a Reader Story in 2025, reflecting my use of genealogy to reconstruct the wider social world of earlier generations.
Manchester Evening News — Richard Emmett
“Salford man’s hidden life unearthed in letters”, February 2026. A feature on Richard Emmett and my work editing and preserving his rare first-person account of nineteenth-century working-class and military life.
County Times — Llandrindod Wells Flash Freeze
“Amazing images capture ‘flash freeze’ that hit Powys in 2010”, November 2025. The feature revisited my photographs of the exceptional flash freeze that struck Llandrindod Wells on 26 November 2010.
Crewe Nub News
Regional coverage of From Fields to Railways: The Jenkins Family and the Making of Working-Class Britain and its research into Crewe’s railway families and working-class heritage.
Dolgellau.uk
Coverage of William Jones of Glandwr Hall: Law, Authority, and the Making of a Victorian Life, linking biography, professional life and nineteenth-century Welsh social mobility.
Times Radio — Welsh Politics, July 2025
Invited by a Times Radio producer to take part in a discussion hosted by Ayesha Hazarika on the state of Welsh politics and the prospects of Reform UK becoming the dominant political force in Wales.
Published Writing
Published in: Nation.Cymru · The Guardian · The Times · The i Paper · ConservativeHome
My externally published writing includes Welsh history, rural religion, cultural identity and public affairs. Detailed article and letter links are collected separately so this page can remain focused on media, speaking and recognition.
Suggested Talks
I welcome invitations from historical societies, family-history groups, heritage organisations, libraries, museums and community groups. Talks can be adapted for specialist or general audiences.
Recovering the Forgotten Life
How genealogy, newspapers, archives and local records can be combined to reconstruct people who left no conventional biography.
More Than a Family Tree
Using genealogy to recover class, occupation, religion, migration, relationships and community.
The Lost World of Rural Wales
Community, chapel, farming, work and social change in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mid Wales.
Faith and Community
The role of Nonconformity in shaping Welsh rural society, identity and everyday life.
The Making of Llandrindod Wells
How water, railways, grand hotels, tourism and Victorian ambition created one of Wales’s most remarkable spa towns.
Below Stairs and Beyond
The country house as a community of employers, servants, estate workers, tenants and neighbouring families.
From Fields to Railways
Working-class mobility, railway employment and the creation of new family and community networks in Victorian Britain.
Memory as Historical Evidence
What personal recollection can tell us, where memory becomes unreliable, and how oral testimony can be tested against documentary sources.
Short Biography for Media & Events
Antony David Davies AFRHistS FRSA FRAS is an independent historian and biographer specialising in Welsh rural and community history, genealogy, Victorian and Edwardian social history, Nonconformity and the recovery of overlooked lives. Raised between Stokesay Court in Shropshire and Mid Wales, his work draws upon more than two decades of archival and genealogical research. His books include Voices from the Uplands and The House of Allcroft, and his family-history research has featured in Who Do You Think You Are? magazine.
This short biography may be used by journalists, broadcasters and event organisers introducing my work.
Media & Speaking Enquiries
For interviews, historical commentary, podcasts, talks, event appearances, research enquiries or heritage collaborations, please use the details on my Contact page. I am particularly happy to hear from journalists and producers seeking historical context at short notice, as well as organisations planning events relating to Welsh, local, family or social history.
Based in Shrewsbury, available for enquiries across the UK and remotely.