Rosyth Church (or what is left of it) dates back to the 12th century and Rosyth Castle to the 15th, but the town of Rosyth in Fife is by comparison a new town only having come into being in 1909 after the Royal Navy had concluded we neeeded a naval base on the east coast to face the impending threat from Germany across the North Sea. As you drive through it today, it might not be apparent that, in planning terms, Rosyth was a pioneer, having been designed as a garden city to accommodate the workforce at the naval base. Building work on the base was not finished when war broke out in 1914, and by the time it was ready for action in 1915, there was plenty of business for it. In the 1920s, the dockyard scrapped eleven German ships that had been scuttled at Scapa Flow and then salvaged. Besides the dockyard history, the book also features more tranquil photos of the newly built tree-lined streets of the garden city, its public buildings, and the inhabitants at leisure.
