Liam Bailey’s Forever England gathers 125 colour photographs made at Bekonscot Model Village in Beaconsfield, a miniature settlement built by a London accountant to amuse his guests and opened to the public in 1929. It is the oldest model village in the world, drawing close to 200,000 visitors a year and holding, within its small acreage, a version of the country fixed in an idyllic 1930s. Bailey, a London commercial photographer whose work has appeared in The Independent, The Guardian and Condé Nast Traveller, does not treat the place as a quaint curiosity. He photographs its tableaux of everyday life as though their miniature population of 3,000 people and 300 animals were a real town; the result has the character and atmosphere of reportage, but the frozen quality of a stage set.

That double register is the book’s subject. Bekonscot survives as a tribute to English eccentricity, humour, determination and craftsmanship, and its particular charm lies in the way it presents an England rooted in a 1930s time warp. Bailey’s camera makes the artifice convincing, then lets the conviction slip, so the reader is carried back to an England of the imagination, where life seemed simple, secure and unchanging.

The design suits the material: 160 pages, hardback, a small 135 by 190 mm format, published by Dewi Lewis in 2006. The modest trim size puts the viewer close to the models, and the sequencing of 125 colour plates sustains a sustained act of looking rather than a tour of highlights.

For a serious collector, Forever England belongs to the line of British photography that examines invented landscapes and heritage as social evidence. It is a sustained body of work by one photographer, and its subject, a world-famous folly, gives the pictures a documentary weight beyond nostalgia.