Tom Rolt was born in Chester to a line of Rolts "dedicated to hunting and procreation". His father Lionel had settled back in England in Hay-on-Wye after working on a cattle ranch in Australia, a plantation in India and joining (unsuccessfully) in the Yukon gold rush of 1898. However he lost most of his money in 1920 after investing his capital in a company which failed and the family moved to a pair of stone cottages in Stanley Pontlarge in Gloucestershire.

Tom studied at Cheltenham College and at 16 took a job learning about steam traction before starting an apprenticeship at the Kerr Stuart locomotive works in Stoke-on-Trent, where his uncle, Kyrle Whillans was chief development engineer. His uncle bought a wooden narrow fly horse boat called Cressy and installed first a steam engine and then (having discovered the steam made steering through tunnels impossible) a Ford Model T engine. This was Tom's introduction to the canal system.

In the thirties slump he was jobless and turned to vintage sports cars, taking part in the veteran run to Brighton and acquiring a succession of cars including a 1924 Alvis 12/15 two seater 'ducks back' which he was to keep for the rest of his life.He bought into a motor garage partnership in Hartley Wintney in Hampshire and together with a local landlord, Tom Carson, formed the Vintage Sports-Car Club in 1934. He also found and helped create the Prescott hill climb.

In 1936, Kyrle bought back Cressy, which he had earlier sold, and several trips on the waterways convinced Rolt that he wanted a life afloat. He persuaded Angela Orred, a young blonde in a white polo-necked sweater who had swept into his garage in an Alfa Romeo in 1937 and got caught up into the vintage car scene, to join him in this idyll. Tom bought Cressy from his uncle and set about converting her into a boat that could be lived aboard, the most notable addition being a bath.

By the summer of 1939 they decided to defy Angela's father's reluctance and got married in secret on 11th July and within two weeks had set off up the Oxford Canal in Cressy. But the second world war intervened and Tom, a pacifist at heart, immediately signed up at the Rolls Royce factory at Crewe. on the production line for the Spitfire's Merlin engine. He was saved from the tedium of the production line by the offer of a job in an Aldbourne foundry. They battled south in Cressy through storms, reaching Banbury a day before the canals were finally frozen over for the winter.

Their first four month cruise became a book which he initially called Painted Ship. Despite sending the manuscript to many publishers, he had to put it aside as they all considered there was no market for books about canals. It wasn't until a magazine article he wrote came to the attention of the countryside writer H. J. Massingham that he had the break which led to the book finally being published in December 1944 under the title Narrow Boat. It was an immediate success both with critics and public, with fan mail arriving on the boat at Tardebigge where they were then moored.

Two of the letters he received were from Robert Aickman and Charles Hadfield who were both to figure prominently in the next phase of his life, as a campaigner. He invited Robert and his wife Ray to join them on Cressy and this trip Robert later described as "the best time I have ever spent on the waterways". It was on this voyage they decided to form an organization that a few weeks later in May 1946 at Robert's London flat got the name of the Inland Waterways Association, with Robert as chairman, Charles Hadfield as vice-chairman and Tom as secretary.

This was a critical period for the waterways which were nationalised in 1947 and faced an uncertain future as the traditional life which Rolt had so movingly described was faced with extinction. Aickman, with a private income, was working full-time on the campaign whilst Rolt, who had only his writing to support himelf and was still living aboard Cressy, struggled to meet all the commitments he found himself with. Eventually he fell out with Aickman over the latter's insistence that every mile of canal should be saved and in early 1951 was expelled from the organization he had inspired.

By this time also he had decided to bring his life on Cressy to an end and return to his family home in Stanley Pontlarge. Angela departed to continue the mobile life, joining Billy Smart's Circus.

A letter he had sent to the Birmingham Post in 1950 resulted in the formation of the Talyllyn Railway Preservation Society and he now threw himself into this and became chairman of the company which operated it as a tourist attraction. "By the time the fateful letter terminating his IWA membership arrived, he was already busy issuing and stamping passengers' tickets from the little station in Towyn".

He got married again to Sonia South, a former actress, who had become one of the amateur boat women during the war who worked the canals and had married a boatman. She had been on the council of the IWA.They had two sons, Tim and Dick and continued to live in Stanley Pontlarge till Rolt's death in 1974.

The fifties were his most prolific time as an author with the best known being biographies of Brunel, which stimulated a revival of interest in a forgotten hero,

and Telford, and his classic Red for Danger, which became a text book on numerous engineering courses.He produced many works about subjects that had not previously been considered the stuff of literature: civil engineering, canals, railways, etc.In the last years of his life he produced 3 volumes of autobiography, only one of which was published during his lifetime.

He was Vice-President of the Newcomen Society, which established a Rolt Prize;a trustee and member of the Advisory Council of the Science Museum; member of the York Railway Museum Committee; an honorary MA of Newcastle; an honorary MSc of Bath and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was a joint founder of the Association for Industrial Archaeology, which has an annual Rolt lecture. He helped to form the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust.

A locomotive 'Tom Rolt' on the Talyllyn Railway, the world's first preserved railway, was named in his memory in 1991. His book Railway Adventure recalls this period.

Rolt observed the changes in society due to the industrial-scientific revolution. In the epilogue to his biography of I.K.Brunel he writes two years before C. P. Snow makes similar statements about the split between the arts and sciences:

Men spoke in one breath of the arts and sciences and to the man of intelligence and culture it seemed essential that he should keep himself abreast of developments in both spheres. ... So long as the artist or the man of culture had been able to advance shoulder to shoulder with engineer and scientist and with them see the picture whole, he could share their sense of mastery and confidence and believe wholeheartedly in material progress. But so soon as science and the arts became divorced, so soon as they ceased to speak a common language, confidence vanished and doubts and fears came crowding in.

He set out these ideas more fully in his book High Horse Riderless, a classic of green philosophy.

A bridge (no. 164) on the Oxford Canal in Banbury bears his name (in commemoration of his book Narrow Boat), as does a centre at the boat museum at Ellesmere Port in Cheshire. A blue plaque to Rolt was unveiled in at Tooley's Boatyard, Banbury on 7 August 2010 as part of the centenary celebrations of his birth.

Rolt's work (arranged by topic in rough chronological order) includes:

Waterways

• Narrow boat (1944) Eyre & Spottiswoode
• Green and silver (1949) George Allen & Unwin
• The inland waterways of England (1950) George Allen & Unwin
• The Thames from mouth to source (1951)
• Navigable Waterways. (1969) Longmans. (1973) London: Hutchinson. ISBN 0-0990-7800-7
• From sea to sea: the Canal du Midi (1973) Allen Lane.

Various

• High horse riderless (1947) George Allen & Unwin (personal philosophy)
• Sleep No More (1948) (ghost stories)
• Worcestershire (1949) Robert Hale (County series)
• Horseless carriage: the motor car in England (1950)
• Winterstoke (1954) — the history of a fictional Midlands town
• The clouded mirror (1955) (travel)

Railways

• Lines of character (1952) Constable (with Patrick Whitehouse)
• Railway adventure (1953) Constable
• Red for Danger (1955) London: John Lane, The Bodley Head.
• Patrick Stirling's locomotives (1964) H. Hamilton
• The making of a railway (1971) Evelyn

Biography

• Isambard Kingdom Brunel: a biography (1957) Longmans Green
• Thomas Telford (1958) Longmans Green
• The Cornish giant: the story of Richard Trevithick, father of the steam locomotive (1960) Lutterworth Press
• George and Robert Stephenson: the railway revolution (1960) Longmans Green
• Great Engineers (1962)
• James Watt (1962) Batsford
• Thomas Newcomen: The prehistory of the steam engine (1968) David & Charles

Industrial history

From the period of 1958 onwards, Rolt was commissioned by many engineering companies to document their history. Many of these are unpublished internal documents; only the published works are listed here.

• Holloways of Millbank: The first seventy-five years (1958)
• The Dowty story (part I 1962, part II 1973)
• A Hunslet Hundred: one hundred years of locomotive building by the Hunslet Engine Company (1964)
• )
• The Mechanicals: progress of a profession (1967)
• Waterloo Ironworks: a history of Taskers of Andover, 1809–1968 (1969)
• Victorian engineering (1970)
• The potters' field: a history of the South Devon ball clay industry (1974)

Autobiography

• Landscape with Machines (1971) London: Longman. ISBN 0-5821-0740-7 — the first part of his autobiography)
• Landscape with Canals (1977 — the second part of his autobiography)
• Landscape with Figures (1992 — the retitled third part of his autobiography)
• The Landscape Trilogy (2001) combines all three parts of his autobiography in one volume.

Other works

• The Aeronauts: A History of Ballooning 1783-1903 (1966), republished as The Balloonists: The History of the First Aeronauts (2006)
• Two Ghost Stories (1994)

File:Tom Rolt Bridge.jpg|Oxford Canal, Banbury. Bridge 164 carrying Compton Road over canalFile:Tom Rolt Bridge close.jpg|Closeup of bridge parapet showing name Tom Rolt BridgeFile:Tom Rolt Bridge plaque towpath.jpg|Plaque attached to retaining wall of Tom Rolt Bridge on mooring side of canalFile:Tom Rolt Bridge plaque road.jpg|Plaque attached to retaining wall of Tom Rolt Bridge at side of Compton Road