Without mentioning level descriptions, this series develops the skills and understanding of geography at key stage 2. Each book is about a specific town or village; they are in contrasting localities in Britain. The reader learns where the place is, why people live there, how they live and why the place is changing. This could lead into a local history study.

Sometimes there is even fleeting reference to issues. Unemployment in Torbay is 14 per cent in winter and 12 per cent in summer. Two new companies, including foreign-owned ones move into Milton Keynes every week.Because chapter headings are more or less the same in each book, you could compare two towns, as the national curriculum says you should. There are maps and simple statistical analyses.

But you also find out about the real families the statistics represent. There are pictures and thumb-nail sketches of the residents. You can get quite interested in them, and they don’t keep asking you questions or giving you things to do.

The last page does suggest you do a similar survey of the place where you live. If you live in Cockermouth that would be easy, but if you live in Camberwell it might prove more difficult. Things do not hang together there so neatly and the issues might be a bit more tricky.

But a sense of place is not just who lives where and how and why. It also involves reconstructing its uniqueness through the senses and the imagination, through smells and sounds, through the poetry of buildings and landscapes and imagination. Maybe that should be the starting point for children to develop a sense of their own special place.