This latest title in the excellent ShipCraft series of ship modelling books focuses on the British WWII Town, and Colony Classes and post-War Tiger-class cruisers. Authored by well-respected British naval historian and modeler, Les Brown, this 64-page monograph features 60 b&w period photos, many color photos mainly of model, some very nice color profiles illustrating WWII camouflage schemes, and some plans.

The book follows on from Brown’s earlier volume on British 6-in cruisers from the 1930s onwards and concentrates on the later wartime classes with triple-gun turrets of the Town-, Colony-. and Tiger-class, the latter of which were laid down in wartime but not completed until well afterwards and which take the story of British big-gun cruisers to it’s end in the 1970’s. One of the ships, the famous HMS Belfast, still survives as a museum ship.

The book outlines a basic history of each class and ship, along with refits and modifications made during their lives with particular reference to armament and radar fitments, and camouflage schemes. There are some nice photos included in this section. The modelling section features a number of builds of varying standards and various scales. Most useful is a survey of models of ships in these classes. It includes plastic and resin kits as well as a couple of paper kits. This also includes comments on the various aftermarket accessories that are available.

The book reverts to history for the post-war Tiger-Class ships. The final part of the book includes some fine color profiles of various ships, and some pages of unscaled plans, which are also not to scale with each other – while they look good, these are really too small to be of much use. The fact that they are unscaled is also not helpful. Finally, there is a short but useful bibliography.

All in all, this is a useful book with some great features and one that can be recommended to the ship modeler. My thanks to Casemate for supplying the review copy and their continued support of IPMS.