BAGDContext CSM

This was the stand-out display this year…a post-industrial fantasy, Mad Max style!

This photo is of the rail-head and pier, at the docks in Oakland, California. Nowadays, Oakland is one of the largest Pacific-facing ports in the US.

Oakland does a bot of heavy-lifting for Los Angeles, and the Bay area. The story of how globalisation has played out politically in Oakland – through exclusion and gentrification etc, is told in this new book…

This is a lovely small impressionist style painting, in open air, of a suburban railway station. There are many famous paintings of the railway, by Monet and Pissarro especially.

In this painting, I especially like the architectural detail of the station and bridge; the iron railing picked out against the sky has real sparkle. The railway line provided for faster and more convenient communication in a number of ways; the telegraph lines remind us that the railway line was an information super-highway of the 19C.

This picture of a steam loco, on the ceinture line in Paris, reminds us that steam trains in cities produce lots of mess – soot and steam especially. Not surprisingly, most of the areas around the railways tracks were either industrial brown-field or slums…Mornington Crescent, outside Euston in London was so bad that, at the end of the 19C and beginning of the 20C, artists and poets could afford to live there.

I like the look of that! The ceinture was a line built to go around Paris, so as to make journeys across the city easier, especially as the city expanded rapidly at the beginning of the 20C.

I love the shape of this tank engine, for local suburban services around Paris…a sort of ideal form for this type of engine. So-called because the water tanks flank the boiler.

I love the way the railway line, now transformed into an urban walk-way, just slices through the building. In modern times, the brown-field railway hinterland of trackside and siding has become a site of huge added value. in London, check out the Acton Corridor, King’s Cross and Nine Elms for starters.

Obviously, the building on the left is from about 1980. The one on the right about 1880.