Here’s something we found earlier…it’s a coloured photographic print of the French resort of Juan Les Pins, near Nice, in the South of France. The long landscape format is distinctive of railway carriage prints.
carriage prints were, as the name implies, displayed in railway carriages. This doesn’t make sense in relation to the aircraft seating-plans of modern trains. In the old days, the standard carriage lay-out was divided into small compartments. Thes eusually had six or eight seats with mirrors above and a luggage-rack in the ceiling.
The most practical of these kind sof carriages had a corridor down one side of the train. This allowed all passangers to move through the train and gain access, throughout the journey, to the restaurant car and facilities. Trains with these kinds of carriages are referred to as a corridor express.
Carriage prints flanked the mirrors above the seats in each carriage. That’s four prints per compartment and, with probably ten compartments per carriage, that’s abot forty prints per carriage. Accordingly, an a passenger express train might have one-hundred and fifty or so prints displayed throughout its length.
Typically, the prints would show the activities of the railway of scenic views of the various destinations served by the trains…in the first instance, these views were drawn and painted by artists. Then, there were photographic images in black and white, and then with colour added. In the last iteration of these kinds of prints the images were produced as colour photographs. Nowadays, these kinds of prints are collected by railway enthusiasts.
The French railway network developed at a slightly different and later epriod to its British counterpart. The associated developemnt of seaside resorts was correspondingly later too. In general, the big French resorts were developed to serve the aristocratic elites of Europe and America. Cannes, in the south, and Biarritz, in the west, were the most famous of these resorts. Dauville and Le Touquet, in the north, provided a week-end retreat for wealthy Parisians.
From the 1920s onwards, the South of France, provided a sophisticated and relatively unspoilt holiday environment. Beyond Cannes, the Cote d’Azur remained as it always had – dirt roads, mountain-top settlements and small fishing villages. This allowed the wealthy elites to play, over their summer holidays, at the simple, rustic, life…
This was the holiday as a back-to-basics reminder of the simple, pre-industrial, life. It’s a weird 20C re-casting of Marie Antoinette’s playing at being a shepherdess.
Coco Chanel even invented the perfect outfit for this, derived from traditional fisherman’s clothing. Rope sandals. baggy trousers and a horizontally-striped top. A straw beach bag, slung over the shoulder, completed the outfit. This remains a stpale of summer fashion around the world.
The French railway company, Paris Lyon Marseilles (PLM), provided luxury train services to the south…with restaurant facilities, hair-dressing salons and sleeping compartments available. The route-to-the-south was probably the most famous of trains in France.
Accordingly, images of the Cote d’Azur are freighted with a glamour and sophistication that eludes other coasts and resorts. The print we found is probably from the 1940s – there’s an art-deco inspired diving platform in the bay.
There was a most interesting story on the BBC news website. You can catch it, here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-28130579
Basically, 300 people died, last year, on the British railway network. But, they had to climb over a fence, or throw themselves in front of the train, to do so. This was a tragic record for modern times.
The story also stated that
…it is important to remember that the train is still the safest way to travel on land. Moreover, all of this (300 deaths) sits against a whopping increase in the number of people actually catching a train, with journeys up 53% in a decade.
There were no passenger or workforce deaths as a result of a train actually crashing. In fact, not one passenger train came off the rails over the past year, which is the first time that has happened for two decades.
I am old enough to remember that working on the railways was so dangerous, that the railways were obliged to provide orphanages for the destitute children of their employees. We now know that, whatever the best intentions of these institutions, they quickly became a sanctuary for bullies and child abusers…so, we should be grateful that we no longer require these places.
My own father was taken away from his destitute mother when his father was killed in a workplace accident in 1936/7. Luckily for him, and whatever the exact circumstances of his being in care, the school recognised him as a kind of genius… He won scholarships to Radley School and, thence, to Cambridge University. I know he never forgot that this amazing personal trajectory was born of family tragedy. He never spoke about it.
I can remember the Southern Railway Orphange, near Woking, Surrey. Weirdly, the railway ran right past it as a constant reminder, to the orphans, of why they were there! That’s a finely nuanced kind of psychological brutality to add to the mix of abuse and bullying…still, as Nietzsche said,what doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger!
You can watch a clip of Pathe newsreel film about the Orphans. It’s online. And, there are endless clips of people doing silly things near the railway line or on a level crossing. A train is a big machine going fast; it always wins.
It’s not surprising, in these circumstances, that I am a great champion of the promotion of health and safety. I consider the provision of a safe working and leisure environment, one of the great achievements of 20C Britain. I commend all those who have worked towards this.
I should say that I have no specific evidence of child abuse or bullying at the Woking Orphanage. I am simply making a general point about the nature of these institutions in the light of what we now know, post Jimmy Savile etc etc.
I have been thinking about what Peter Wollen was saying about thrills, speed and cinema.
You will recall, if you read what I wrote previously, that Wollen describes the psychoanalytical compound of excitement and desire that is evoked by the experience of speed. In the original expression of the theory, by Balint, this applies specifically to the thrills of fair ground rides. For Balint, the thrill associated with speed is a form of auto-eroticism…there’s a surprise!
But, as Wollen shows, it can apply equally to the cinema image. A notion of speed is intrinsic to film – 24 frames a second – and the formal arrangement of storytelling in cinema has tended to foreground the sense of speed attaching to narrative progression. Wollen uses the example of Hitchcock’s profound expertise in relation to suspense in the thriller genre to make his case.
I consider Peter Wollen to be one of the most significant figures in the intellectual history of Britain in the last 50 years. Probably, up there with John Berger and Stuart Hall for a start. No one has heard of Wollen because he is a film-maker, not a literary or cultural theorist. Wollen is probably less well known than his former partner, Laura Mulvey, who is famous for revealing the implicit and gendered meanings that attach to the formal arrangements of film…
I first came across Peter Wollen’s name when I discovered, aged about 20, his Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. I read it when I was about 24 (1982) and the book was already 14 years old! Like John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), it revealed a whole new way of looking at the world. Berger examined a number of aspects of modern image culture, including art and advertising. Peter Wollen was writing specifically about films.
You shouldn’t take all this theory of granted. Unless someone points out the different interpretations and meanings that attach to images; you just take them at face value, whatever that means. I guess that is what we are trying to find out.
Anyway, back to what I was thinking about what Wollen had to say about speed and cinema. The obvious point is that it is not necessary to be moving at speed for the psychoanalytical association between danger, anxiety, excitement and desire to work. We can literally be transported – by railway trains or moving pictures – but we sit still. In general, the narrative speed of cinema has accelerated over time. One of the characteristics of old films is how slow they seem to young people.
So, it follows that there must be a category of images that are fast because they look speedy. This might be to do with what they show, how they are painted , or how they are framed. Think of Lartigue’s photographs and of things stepping beyond the frame. That always looks fast.
Not sure if this picture is by Lartigue. I found it online when I searched for Lartigue and train! But, it doesn’t look quite right to me. Still, it is speedy looking.
Making images seem fast is a crucial skill in visual communication.
Here’s a text I wrote, back in 2007, about the history of the seaside and the up-and-down railway track of the big dipper…I am a bit of an expert in the cultural history of the English seaside and have taught classes on it. I’ve even written things that have been published. I got to this via my interest in railway seaside posters and because I live by the seaside in Kent, and can see across to France. This text was published in Cathy Lomax’s magazine.
Margate has a special place in the development of the English seaside and in the embrace of pleasure as one of its distinguishing characteristics. I want to explore some of the ideas behind the association of seaside, pleasure, amusements and utopia. It’s not surprising that the space at which all these themes intersect is the utopian sounding dreamland amusement park.
Seaside resorts began to develop in Britain in the second half of the 18C. They were a pragmatic reaction to the overcrowding of inland spa towns such as Bath and Tunbridge Wells. The aquatic cure was promoted as an alternative to the therapeutic waters and as a more natural (or authentic) experience than the formalised rituals of the pump room and plunge-bath. In fact, it took some time, and the powerful example of the Prince Regent, for the seaside to become properly liberated from the stifling protocols of polite metropolitan society.
Margate was ideally situated to take advantage of this opportunity. It was located near to London and had good communications by road, boat, and later by rail. In the course of the 19C the popularity of the seaside grew and extended its appeal to a much wider population. Again, Margate was ideally placed to benefit from the large population concentrated in London’s south eastern quadrant.
For the aristocratic and middle class visitor at the beginning of the 19C, the seaside offered a curative therapy from the dramatic upheavals of social mobility associated with industrialisation, democratic politics, and of the increasingly powerful class interest defined by new money. The maritime perspective was a powerful reminder of a ancient and permanent natural order, the relentless and implacable force of nature, and of the sublime potential of the sea. Later, the widening appeal of these thoughts simply provoked the aristocracy to explore the more remote coastal areas such as Cornwall and Scotland in Britain, and the Mediterranean coast abroad. Later, the aristocracy recast the therapeutic potential of the sea around the loftier spaces of the alpine interior.
As a popular leisure resort Margate, along with Southend and Blackpool, embraced the pleasure beach and amusement park. The utopian potential of the sublime and natural was replaced by the hedonistic thrill of mechanical rides. This artificial contrast between the different experiences and sensibilities of seaside visitors informs much of the debate about the English seaside and explains, in part at least, the very obvious class distinctions that still persist along the coast.
At the beginning of the 19C sea bathing appeared un-natural. The sea was viewed, in the main, as a reminder of the world’s chaotic origins. The relentless power of the waves ate persistently at the coastal margin. Very little of the shore was settled and the coast appeared, for the most part, as a desolate place. It is not surprising that, in these circumstances, people turned their backs to the sea. The few settlements along the shore were, accordingly, involved in an unending battle between the elements.
The act of sea bathing was surrounded, in its earliest forms, by a complex administration of medical instructions that assured the exact treatment as required. These instructions were brutally enforced by the dippers and drenchers who lined the shore.
The therapeutic rituals of the procedure exacerbated the coldwater shock of sea bathing. Child, female and infirm were forced into the sea and submerged according to instructions. The successive submersions resulted in a sadomasochistic approximation of auto-asphyxiation.
The bathing machine was first reported at Scarborough. Its purpose was to provide a private changing room on the beach where patients could steel themselves for the ordeal ahead. Wheels were added along with horses, ropes and pulleys so that the hut could be lowered directly into the sea. From there, escape was impossible!
Under such circumstances, and in combination with the relaxed social environments of seaside entertainment, it’s not surprising that seaside towns gained a reputation for hedonistic freedom and sexual liberalism.
The more robust male patients were encouraged to pit themselves against the relentless power of the waves, so that the same feelings of exhaustion were achieved by physical exertion rather than asphyxiation. The gender difference in the ritualised administration of saltwater treatments was a consequence, in part at least, of the increasingly formalised delivery of therapeutic treatments.
The physical demands of sea bathing made the seaside a natural environment for the promotion of exercise as part of a discourse of health and efficiency aimed at the industrial worker. The physical disciplines of gymnasium, sports-field and seaside were thought, by the later part of the 19C, to be a means of civilising the brutal and terrifying force of the working masses.
By the end of the 19C the seaside, beach and bathing had become parts of a developing leisure economy. The rupture with the medical origins of sea bathing was complete. The seaside’s therapeutic value was now identified in the psychological relief afforded from the workaday realities of discipline, productivity and efficiency as characteristics of industrial capitalism. In consequence, the beach began to be identified, psychologically and sociologically, as a site for holiday activities associated with rest, relaxation and fun.
big dipping at the pleasure beach
The first large-scale funfair was Lunar Park outside New York. The new larger and mechanical rides were made possible by the supply of electrical power and advances in mechanical engineering. Both Hotchkiss and Maxim, names associated with the deadly machinery of war, were pioneer engineers of seaside rides. Maxim’s Captive Flying Machines still provides classic entertainment on Blackpool Pleasure Beach.
Dreamland’s own Scenic Railway (1920), in Margate, is one of the earliest surviving timber-framed coasters.
WG Bean developed the Pleasure Beach at Blackpool in 1896 after the US model. It provides for a concentration of extreme rides. The permanence of the site allows for bigger and more elaborate rides than are usually available at traveling fun fairs.
Nowadays the Pleasure Beach hosts several very large roller-coasters. The first of these was the famous Big Dipper built in 1923 by John Miller. The original ride was extended during the 1930s. The notoriety of the ride allowed its name to become synonymous with this type of attraction.
The Blackpool Big Dipper is one of a diminishing number of original timber framed roller coasters that are still in use. These structures are identified with the first, golden age, of roller-coaster design during the 1920s. Sadly, Folkestone’s own timber framed roller-coaster was demolished earlier this year. More recently, computer aided design and complex steel engineering has allowed for larger and more extreme rides to be built.
Timber framed roller-coasters, although less extreme than their steel framed successors, are held in the highest regard by coaster aficionados. The timber framed ride is characterised by an elasticity that is missing from the more solid steel structures.
The roller-coaster is a closed railway-track loop comprising a series of diminishing peaks. The potential and kinetic energy are harnessed so that, from the first highest point, the cars can complete the full circuit. In their earliest forms, these rides were laid out in a straight-line, or switchback, form. There is evidence of winter sleigh version of these rides being built, using man-made mountains of ice, at St Petersburg in Russia and as early as the 18C.
It is clear that the elasticity and repeated dipping that make up the excitement of the original rides is, in part at least, an attempt to re-engineer the early experience of the aquatic cure with its combination of excitement and vertigo. The sexual and romantic potential of this excitement was recognised early on. The Blackpool Big Dipper plays a key role in the narrative of Hindle Wakes (1927) where the romance between the protagonists is played out against the backdrop of the Pleasure Beach.
One of the themes of Hindle Wakes is that the seaside leisure resort offers an opportunity to escape the limiting constraints of normal existence. This sense of hedonistic potential lies at the heart of the seaside holiday experience and is expressed through the sanctioned exuberance of carnivalesque transgression. Nowhere was this potential more forcefully expressed than at Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach and at Margate’s Dreamland.
Beyond the rides, the Pleasure Beach was defined by a visual style that spoke of an exoticism associated with the Orientalism first articulated through Brighton’s Royal Pavilion. The Pleasure Beach has an intricate skyline characterised by delicate tracery. The graphic expression of the seaside rides is communicated by the use of large-scale grotesque typefaces along with exotic Tuscan and Egyptian letterforms.
It is crucial to distinguish between exoticism and luxuriousness. Although the two are often combined, especially in their Orientalist manifestation, mere luxury lacks the powerful signifiers of dissolute popular hedonism that characterise the most successful and popular seaside leisure resorts.
The dippers and dredgers of the early seaside were recognised as brutal enforcers of aquatic therapy. Their later counterparts, the showmen mechanics and dancing girls, were mythologised as happy-go-lucky inhabitants of a coastal Shangri La. David Essex vividly conveyed the romantic appeal and easy charm of the fairground personality and social rebellion in That’ll be the Day (1973). Counter cultural rebellion became, almost immediately, more aggressive and anarchic as Mods, Rockers, Punks and New-Wavers each tapped into a generation of marginalised youth in Britain.
The thrilling structures of the Pleasure Beach are, by virtue of their modular and pre-fabricated construction, quintessentially modernist. Furthermore, the fantastic architecture of these structures speaks of technology, spectacle, ersatz danger and mass consumption. Together, these characteristics provide for a powerful discourse of pleasure that is quite specific to the seaside and specifically differentiated from the workaday realities of inland life.1
The architecture of the pleasure beach, ephemeral though it is, provides a powerful template for a modernist alternative to the functionalist tradition. Gordon Cullen first explored these ideas in the immediate aftermath of WW2 and up to the Festival of Britain. Later, in the early 1960s, Cedric Price developed a theory of megastuctures where large spaces were shaped and defined by the leisure activities they contained. The most influential of price’s schemes was the Funpalace conceived with Joan Littlewood.
Later Price’s ideas became the starting point for the architectural experiments of Archigram and the radical proposals of Rogers and Piano for the Pompidou Centre (Beaubourg) in Paris. Nowadays, these ideas survive in the bastard form of the suburban shopping, or strip, mall.
The flexible interior spaces of this new modernism were defined, like those of the pleasure beach, by intricacy and interruption, wallscape and lettering. Sadly, the corporate imaginations behind the organisation and facades of contemporary retail are much more limited than their seaside predecessors.
Our contemporary leisure economy, however sophisticated, has failed to deliver new variants on the pleasure beach. The new inland theme-parks offer little scope for the radical transgressions of the utopian resorts of yesteryear. The gentrification of seaside resorts confuses pleasure and shopping and defines the limits of contemporary hedonism by reference to a bewildering choice of coffees. The psychological liberation associated with the feelings and experiences of the Pleasure Beach are disappearing fast.
It is essential that the psychogeographical traditions of seaside transgression, fun and liberty, exemplified by the Kiss Me Quick hat, are retained amongst the ribbon developments of condos and malls that identify the commercial regeneration of the seaside.
Note
Something of the visceral excitement of the bigger dippers may be got from the internet. See for example, www.ride-guide.co.uk or the many files held on www.youtube.com
bibliography
Bibliography
Corbin A (1995) The Lure of the Sea London, Penguin
Gray F (2006) Designing the Seaside London, Reaktion
Hassan J (2003) The Seaside London, Ashgate
Inglis F (2000) The Delicious History of the Holiday London, Routledge
Jones B (1951) The Unsophisticated Arts London, Architectural Press
Lindsay K (1973) Seaside Architecture London, Evelyn Manning
Sanders R (1951) Seaside England London, Batsford
Marsden C (1947) The English at the Seaside London, Collins (BIP112)
Turner ES (1967) Taking the Cure London, Michael Joseph
Walton JK (2000) The British Seaside Manchester, MUP
Webb D (2005) Bahktin at the SeasideTheory, Culture and Society, vol 22(3): 121-138
Supplemental – June 2014
I have been reading Peter Wollen’s Speed and Cinema. He describes how the psychoanalyst, Michael Balint, triangulates the thrill of speed in relation to anxiety, excitement and desire. Balint identified the experience of speed as a kind of auto-erotic sensation…indeed, he claimed all thrills may be understood as a compound of speed and desire.
Obviously, and in relation to the cinema or train ride, it isn’t necessary for the spectator to be moving themselves. So, it can be an entirely vicarious experience. A sort of out-of-body experience.
Balint was writing, in the first instance, about the thrill of fairground rides. Wollen applies this thinking to the cinema and Hitchcock, and I have applied it to the train ride….
That’s a wonderful loop of train-track, up and down.
Virilio P (2006) Speed and Politics LA Ca, Semiotext(e)
Here’s a picture of a wonderful machine. It’s a converted pick-up truck that can be driven along the thousands of miles of abandoned railway track in Mexico. It is a kind of spaceship that explores distant, now lost (disconnected), worlds plunged into isolation and ruin by market forces.
A similar kind of project has been exploring the derelict shopping malls of the mid-western US. The project is by Seph Lawless, from Detroit.
There are quite a few posts, on my other blog, the new pampleteer, about the degradations of modernity and of Detroit in particular.
Owen Hatherley, architectural critic and historian, describes modern architecture in terms of ruins. It’s about the spirit of Ozymandias – a sense of awe, understood as fear and contempt.
It’s easy to imagine all this in the context of really big countries, like the US or Mexico, but the same thing is happening in the UK. The dereliction is smaller in scale, but it is just as profound. Even in London, the veneer of shiny modernity is not especially deep.
Look behind the front-facing Georgian facades of old Soho, and there remains a Dickensian warren of shanty structures…the view from the railway track, towards the backs of houses confirms this.
This is a small notebook of drawings from the train window approaching Waterloo. The image, book and train all synchronised…well done BAGD graduating student, Maciej Rackiewicz.
The World Cup in Brazil reminds us of how football became the global game – it travelled by train! More accurately, it travelled with the engineers that built the railway system in Latin America.
For example, the introduction of football to Brazil is credited to Charles Miller. In Argentina, it was Thomas and James Hogg who introduced the game. In Chile, the game was introduced as an element of schools providing the refined sensibility of English gentlemen to the local elites.
It’s a sugar lump with a promotional wrapper for the Russian railway. We travelled on this train in the 1980s. But, the wrapper looks as though it was designed earlier than that. I remember that the Russian trains were big old things and not quite as streamlined as the drawing suggests.
Back in the day, there were lots of things to collect…advertising key rings, sugar lumps with promotional wrappers and cocktail bar matches. All of these things seem to have disapperared!
How to Design a Railway Poster – by combining Power, Economy and Sparkle
Introduction
The artist can be a law unto himself…Not so, the commercial artist
Austin Cooper 1938
The question of how to design a railway poster may seemdaunting when one is confronted by a blank sheet of paper, or considers the many possibilities exemplified by the many posters reproduced in this survey…except that the railway poster does not begin with a blank sheet of paper…It’s a kind of standard product.
Over the long history of the railways, there have been many forms of advertisement. In general what we have in mind, here, are posters that present a pictorial landscape or view. The apotheosis of this form of poster design occurred in Britain during the period between the two world wars.
The history of posters is, nowadays, well documented in terms of the poster images themselves. The way that posters were designed and actually made remains more obscure. Luckily, there are a number of books that describe successful poster design for the would-be commercial artist and designer. These books were produced during the 1930s, the so-called golden age of the railway poster. I’ve used some of these books as my source material for this essay.
This essay aims to describe the theory and practice of designing a successful railway poster. My aim has been to describe the process of design as a system of organisation. Obviously, the would-be designer needs a certain level of practical and artistic ability – drawing, and colouring-in, for example. These practical skills are less significant, in my opinion, than the ability to co-ordinate the various parts of subject and composition into a successful design. So, this essay considers the principle elements of successful poster design individually, in relation to each other, and considers these parts in proportion to each other…
The instruction to design a railway poster usually arrived from the Advertising manager of the railway company, and usually included a note of the proposed subject matter. The manager was generally responding to an order for advertising from a resort town or tourist destination. So, from the first, the designer had to work to a brief.
Furthermore, railway posters were always produced within an industrial and commercial framework and always to specific technical standards. Developments at the printing office were directed to improvements in quality, speed and efficiency. This progress aimed to reduce the costs associated with poster advertising and, accordingly, to make it more profitable.
The defining characteristics of the modern poster (evident from about 1870 onwards) were of bright colours and large scale… Both of these characteristics devolve from the technical standards applying to the production of posters. The standardisation of colour palette and size was facilitated through the industrial development of colour lithography during the late 19C.
The formats of the industrial printing press quickly standardised the railway poster around the quad-royal (50×40 inches) and double royal (25×40 inches) sizes of paper. The display environments of railway stations adapted themselves eaqually quickly to the organized display of posters in these sizes. Conveniently, these paper sizes gave the posters the proportions of the windows in railway carriages. So, the images on posters were always understood, subliminally at least, as corresponding to the view from the train!
In general, railway posters were displayed on railway platforms and amongst the crowds and bustle of the station environment. The railway station provided for a wide range of experiences. Whatever the range of experiences associated with the railway platform and waiting room, it was very different from the quiet concentration of the picture gallery. The modern poster was the first kind of image to be developed so as to be seen dynamically and from a distance.
These considerations mean that the successful poster designer was both an artist and a technician. The designer had to understand the process and system of production and be able to work within its parameters. The artist had to be able to realise the composition.
The Theory
Railway Views and Railway Vision
The poster should be so fashioned that he who runs may read…
Austin Cooper 1938
During the 19C, Hermann von Helmholtz conceptualised the cognitive model of the intelligent eye. This understood the human eye and brain to be connected. Accordingly, he proposed that physiological, cognitive and epistemological considerations had to be made holistically and in relation to each other. The eye became understood as part of a pattern-recognition approach to cognitive formation and problem solving. Later, the Gestalt psychologists constructed a theory of psychological development around this idea of holistic cognitive organisation.
Over recent years, the development of technology has been re-assessed as having profound impacts on the internal balance of the Helmholtz model. Briefly, the acceleration of the machine-ensemble, associated with modern industrial society, changes the vision and perception of the world. In turn, we change the world so that it becomes more like what we perceive.
This may seem a straightforward idea in relation to, say, the visual technology of the cinema (invented 1894); but, the same applies to the mechanical accelerations of railway, motor-car and aeroplane. By the 1930’s, technology and the world were experienced as vision in motion.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1986) has described the impact of railway technology on perception thus, the experience of railway travel also shaped the way landscape was viewed…the conventional way of looking at landscape prior to the railway was to observe a receding vista from a static viewpoint, a detailed and closely observed foreground giving way to a more generalised middle ground which guided the eye to towards a specific distant object of interest. From the moving train perspectives were always changing, eye catching focal points in the middle distance were alternately visible and obscured, close and distant, while the foreground whizzed past in a perpetual blur. The speed of travel by railway made it impossible to form such a well-ordered and closely observed landscape in the mind’s eye.
Schivelbusch also connected this insight to the developing 19C spectacular and its attendant ocular entertainments of the diorama and panorama. Indeed, Schivelbusch suggests that the railway experience became the, defacto, optical entertainment before cinema. In this context, the railway poster becomes a kind of visual appetizer to the journey ahead, whilst at the same time, only being really discernible to travellers already familiar with railway vision.
Since railway poster designers were also railway travellers, we can assume that they absorbed these experiences and developed their designs accordingly. The pioneers of the modern poster (Cheret and Lautrec, in France, especially) were quick to adopt a two-dimensional and flat-colour representation derived from the Japanese woodcuts of the floating world (ukiyo-e).
In practical terms, the elaboration of flat-colour design didn’t necessarily require a knowledge of Japanese woodcuts. The same illusion could be derived from the techniques of theatrical scene painting. The elaboration of a design as a succession of scenic theatre-flats helped provide a convincing three-dimensional space within the two dimensional frame.
The scale of theatrical work also helped provide a style of simplification suited to the requirements of the poster to carry beyond its immediate display. Two further points need to be made about arranging the picture in this way. The conventions of flat-colour illusion usually make use of the black key printing to draw the eye into the picture space and to make the illusion from two to three dimensional work. Using this powerful visual trick also had the effect of implying a heightened level of illumination. In its most extreme form, this makes the poster seem as bright as if the scene was illuminated from within.
The benefits of high-lighting the design cannot be overstated…as evidenced by the continuous use of this technique over the last 500 years or so – from the stained glass of the middle ages through to the back-lit screens of TV and IT, via the illuminations of advertising poster sites. At a cognitive level, the intelligent eye understands back-lighting as transcendent…this is obviously derived from our early religious training and is certainly useful for the advertising industry, who make the same claims for products and services.
The extra illumination, implicit in the flat-colour arrangement of the poster also provides for brighter, and more solid, blocks of colour. This lighting is perfect for rendering views associated with seaside and open air – the traditional subjects of the railway poster.
These pioneers understood intuitively that the flat-colours of Japanese woodcuts had a visual correspondence with the way that the world appeared from a moving railway carriage window. The successful railway poster made the connection between experience, form, and image, explicit to the onlooker. It did so by establishing a virtuous connection between the space, illumination and colour of the design.
The commission to design a railway poster still required the designer to complete several tasks and to combine the outcomes in a satisfying and pleasing whole…the next part of this essay examines the practical considerations of designing a railway poster.
The Practice
A poster is never just a story. It is a decorative design and its best qualities are broad simplification, power and pattern
Walter Shaw Sparrow 1924
As I’ve mentioned before, the subject of the railway poster was usually included in the brief. So, the designer’s work is to combine power, economy and sparkle so as to produce a dramatic, dynamic and attractive composition.
Power: Position, Scale, and Point-of-View
It is usual to begin by positioning the main subject of the poster in the centre of the design. This frames the subject; but this can lack dynamism and drama. The subject can be moved so that it is ranged, left or right, up or down, within the frame.
Obviously, the scale of the main subject in the design provides an important clue as to its significance. Usually, we recognise scale as an important signifier of status. In conjunction with position, this should draw the eye to what is important in the design.
The poster provides a frame (or window) to the view. By bringing the frame closer to the subject, we can make the subject appear larger. This add’s significance. At its most extreme, we can move so close to the subject that the frame can no longer contain the whole subject. The subject bleeds beyond the edge of the poster.
Suddenly, the subject can be understood as extending beyond the frame of the view…this implicit perception makes any subject seem much more significant. If the image crop makes the subject seem bigger; the resulting effect can be monumental.
Nowadays, everyone is familiar with this idea from the cropping of digital images. But, until relatively recently, these considerations would have seemed arcane to all but a few professional pictorial technicians. The advent of high-quality and portable photographic cameras (Leica 35mm viewfinders in the 1920s for example) allowed for a new approach to photography; where the photographer framed the picture in the viewfinder. The advent of photographic art-direction in fashion magazines also developed these ideas. Before WW2, the modern poster was a proving ground for the professional development behind this kind of design decision making.
The frame could also be tilted. This provided for a point-of-view that could be elevated or lowered. Both of these options carried significant implications. The bird’s eye view gave the observer a larger and more expansive view of the composition. Also, feelings of soaring freedom and excitement could be provoked by the hint of vertigo implicit in these elevated perspectives.
Conversely, a lowered point-of-view could make the subject seem to tower over the viewer. This provided dramatic monumentality, but at the cost of the subject looming over the viewer. This very powerful perspective was often used so as to produce the domineering images associated with political propaganda. But, this perspective was also useful in conveying the scale of medieval ruins or modern industrial plant.
Tom Purvis
A good poster should not puzzle people
Tom Purvis quoted by Leonard Richmond 1933
There are a number of international names that are important in the development of these ideas in relation to poster design. Chief amongst them are the Franco-Russian designer, AM Casandre, whose travel posters exemplify the principles of dramatic composition described above. In the context of British railway poster design, the greatest exponent of these principles was Tom Purvis.
Purvis was one of five designers retained exclusively by William Teasdale and Cecil Dandridge of the LNER. Between 1923 and 1945, Purvis produced over one hundred different poster designs for the railway. In addition to the expert composition of his designs, Purvis favoured the use of cut-out shapes and flat colours. The subjects of Purvis posters – generally romantic landscapes and the pleasures of the English seaside – allowed for the expression of something that was both dramatic and attractive.
Purvis belongs with Lautrec, Hohlwein and Bernhard, as one of the artists whose efforts contributed to the development of the visual language of poster design. Some designers and artists used coloured-paper and scissors to elaborate these deceptively simple looking designs.
The illusion associated with this transition from two to three dimensions is deceptively simple. It requires great skill in drawing to achieve the visual illusion of mass, weight and perspective expressed as a two-dimensional shape. This is particularly true when working to large scale. The drawing requires the confidence so as to combine accuracy with scale and monumentality.
The internal illumination effect, implicit in flat-colour design, also helps with the modeling of these flat shapes. The addition of air-brushed shadow effects could be used to provide additional drama through volume and mass.
Case Study One – Power
Tom Purvis East Coast by LNER 1928
This flat-colour design is probably the most famous of inter-war railway poster images. Purvis has grouped his figures beneath an over-sized parasol. This contrives to give an impression of sunshine, emphasized by the shadow on the ground; although on the east coast, the parasol was just as likely to have to act as a windbreak.
The position and scale of the parasol provide the power in the composition. The slightly lowered point-of-view raises the visual drama an extra notch.
The stripes of the towel catch our eye and draw us into a three-dimensional space entirely defined by two-dimensional shapes. The shapes have to be drawn with real precision to carry this off.
Economy
A simplified treatment is easier read…
Horace Taylor quoted by Leonard Richmond 1933
The evolution of the railway poster can be traced through three distinct phases of technical development. The first stage and up to about 1923, was based on the interpretation of a design by technical specialists at the printing press. The second stage, lasting through the period between the wars, involved establishing rules of economy so that the artisan process of poster make-ready could be made quicker and less expensive.
The third stage, roughly corresponding to the period after WW2, proceeded to an increasingly mechanical process of reproduction whereby colour separations and make-ready at the press were transformed into a process of entirely technical and mechanical procedure.
Accordingly, early railway posters are naturalistically rendered as complex designs with lots of detail. The many colour separations required to achieve these designs were costly and time consuming. Simplifying design was, first and foremost, a question of reducing the number of colours used. For practical purposes, simplicity and economy were combined.
The standard lithographic press prints a single colour. Colour lithographs (chromolithographs) were first elaborated by printing each colour successively and building up the design progressively. More complex machines combined stacked rollers so that two colours could be printed in a single pass. Later, four rollers were arranged in series to produce the first four-colour printing. This became the standard CMYK process. This is four-colour printing on white in ceyan, megenta, yellow and key, or black, as a subtractive model.
The technical staff of the print-shop were at the forefront of efforts to improve the economics of printing through speed and efficiency. Accordingly, they made mechanical improvements to the press machinery – adding rollers and power to the press to speed it up. They also developed split-duct printing which allowed for two colours to be printed at a single pass through the machine and were systematic in their documentation of effects made possible by overprinting. The technical manuals published by Thomas Griffits are the standard works on this subject.
Griffits (1940.2) itemises the tasks in making a lithographic poster thus
Examine the original
Decide the number and sequence of the colours
Select paper
Draw the key transfer
Determine whether to print from stone or plate
Prepare plate or stone
Transfer key
Roll up key
Make the offsets
Draw the colours
Etch and roll up stone
Prove colours
Finish print
Within the railway context, single and two-colour designs were used only for the most prosaic of notices. Travel posters were usually printed in between four to twelve colours. The number of workshop tasks is multiplied accordingly.
The main skill associated with simplification was to choose the appropriate range of colours, so that the subject could be rendered successfully. The choice of colours had to combine naturalism with contrast. Furthermore, the architecture of the design had to be considered so as to lead the eye into the obviously two-dimensonal picture plane. The most effective way of doing this was to make the black, key, printing work as an optical gateway into the design. You can observe the effectiveness of this in the posters of both Tom Purvis and Frank Newbould.
Austin Cooper, designer and principal of the Reimann School of Design, London, described the “carry” of various colours. This was a function of tone and contrast and, crucially, allowed the poser to attract attention over distance…
Ernest Biggs (1956.15) lists the following rules…
Yellow is the colour with the highest visibility
Colours at the red end of the spectrum have higher visibility than colours at the blue
Pure colours are more visible than shades
The visibility of a colour is increased when placed in juxtaposition with its complimentary colour
By the 1930s, colour theory, gestalt psychology and print, had combined so that both the science and meaning of colour were understood.
Frank Newbould
Frank Newbould was a skilled exponent of simplified design. He was a commercial artist and poster designer who made substantial contributions to the development of British advertising art during the 1920s and 1930s.
Newbould worked extensively for the London and North Eastern Railway and for other clients. During WW2 he was appointed a colleague of Abram Games and designed a series of evocatively nostalgic posters for the Army Bureau of Current Affairs.
Case Study Two – Economy
Frank Newbould Electrical Plant 1932
This design combines the scale of industrial plant and low-level point-of-view to produce a dramatic and imposing design from a relatively uninspiring subject. The sharp contrast between the sunflower yellow, black, red and grey; gives the design exceptional carry. This design is an exemplar of the virtues attaching to economy in design. This idea was famously expressed through the architectural maxim – less is more.
Sparkle and Patterm
Pattern and decoration (should be) free from an excess of realism
Walter Shaw Sparrow 1924
Power and economy are not enough, though, in poster design. The design also has to have an element of sparkle to attract the eye. This is a form of optical disturbance equivalent to a fluttering movement. It’s this apparent movement that catches the eye.
Traditionally, printers and designers have exploited the inherent sparkle of letterforms and typography. You can see this clearly in early 19C letterpress playbills and notices.
At the beginning of the 19C, most local printers were traditional letterpress printers. Notices about theatrical entertainments and local events were elaborated entirely from the available stock of metal or wooden type in various styles and sizes. Most printers carries a relatively limited range of type styles and sizes with relatively few styles in large sizes. Accordingly, it was practically impossible to print these kinds of text-based notices in the single and consistent typographic style we are familiar with today.
The creation of a vibrant contrast between the blacks and white of the print was made possible by exploiting the differences between various letterforms. Thus italic, shadow, and fat-face, letters were each used in close proximity and in different sizes and weights. Elements of this design tradition may be seen in the earliest railway posters produced in the 19C.
By the 1920s and 1930s, new considerations of typographic consistency, made possible by monotype machines, and corporate identity were combined with economy to severely limit the range of typographic variation allowed.
In poster design, the letterforms were usually hand drawn. Indeed, the technical skills of accurate letter drawing provided a platform for the development of the commercial artist. During the 1920s and 1930s, large-scale sans serif letterforms were elaborated as exemplifying the characteristics of power and economy identified, above.
These styles of letterform were powerful, but at the cost of a plain style. To compensate for this shortfall, designers sought to integrate elements of optical disturbance into the main, pictorial, elements of their posters. By populating a scene with many visitors, the poster designer contrived to make a destination seem popular and interesting. The crowds sprinkle a sparkle upon both the beach and promenade.
The same effects can be seen in the way that architectural detail is defined as sky-pattern along the roof line of many buildings.
Even in landscape painting, the subtle use of light and shade can provide a gentle background of optical disturbance to attract the eye. The greatest exponent of this landscape dazzle was the maritime artist Norman Wilkinson.
Norman Wilkinson
Norman Wilkinson was a distinguished British maritime painter and landscape artist who worked during the first half of the 20C. The artist also made important contributions to maritime camouflage, during WW1, and to the development of poster design in Britain. Wilkinson was a prolific poster designer for the London Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) during throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
During WW1, he served on a submarine in the Eastern Mediterranean and on a minesweeper in the English Channel. Wilkinson’s maritime and artistic experience was acknowledged in his appointment to investigate the problems of camouflaging shipping.
The advent of heavily armoured Dreadnought type battleships, before WW1, transformed the terms of engagement in maritime conflict. Firstly, the new battleships provided for much heavier calibre cannon. Secondly, the hydraulic control systems of the gun platforms on the new battleships allowed for a greatly increased rotation and elevation of guns. In consequence, both the range and the arc of fire of the big guns became greater. The risks to shipping were correspondingly increased.
In order to minimise these risks, Wilkinson was invited to consider the advantages of camouflage on shipping. The specific context of maritime engagement in modern war, with ships at some distance from each other and moving at speed, suggested a need for new forms of camouflage. These were designed to confuse the range-finding calculations of estimating the target’s speed and direction, rather than to disguise the ship from view.
Perhaps surprisingly, Wilkinson found that the most effective forms of camouflage were based on the optical disturbance of dazzle patterns. These were, typically, geometric and angular shapes that broke up the outline of the ship. The resulting confusion was sufficient to cause enemy range-finding calculations to go awry.
Norman Wilkinson’s posterdesigns reveal a remarkable facility for both landscape painting and for the detailed depiction of machinery. This was especially important in relation to the railway and shipping interests associated with the LMS. Accordingly, Wilkinson was best placed of all the pictorial advertising artists to benefit from the patronage of the LMS.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Wilkinson became one of Britain’s best-known poster designers. Wilkinson claimed to be the originator of the modern pictorial poster. His idea was to replace the piecemeal visual presentation of the traditional railway poster and to offer a single, larger, picture as the focus of attention. Wilkinson also understood that in order to assure the effectiveness of this advertising the image would require a level of sensitive simplification.
Wilkinson’s landscapes are deceptively simple. The shape of the landscape is defined by light and shade so as to provide a background of gentle optical disturbance integrated into the composition. The successful incorporation of Wilkinson’s camouflage experiments into the generic forms of British landscape painting was an enormous and significant achievement.
Case Study Three – Sparkle
Norman Wilkinson The Snowdon Range by LMS 1930s
The ability to render the complex topography of dramatic landscapes through simple shapes and colour was a great achievement of Wilksinson’s. Here, he finds sparkle in the contrasts between light and shade that guide the eye from foreground to the high mountains. The result combines visual simplicity and optical sophistication.
Conclusion
A poster must create a new experience in the mind of the passer-by
Bernard Venables quoted by Leonard Richmond 1933
After WW2, railway posters were increasingly produced by photo-mechanical and offset lithography. For practical purposes, this allowed more complex designs to be produced economically through photographic colour separations and four-colour printing.
This allowed for a wider variety of visual styles to emerge by removing the technical constraints that had contributed so importantly to the golden age of the railway poster. Paradoxically, the more realistic forms of design facilitated by photography have been, typically, much less dramatic in their effects.
Case Study Four – Photo Sparkle
Scarborough by LNER Fred Taylor 1920s
The larger seaside resorts always made appeal to the crowd. They present themselves as social resorts with lots of attractions and activities for every taste.
Here, Fred Taylor has turned the crowds in the winter garden and on the promenade into a compelling visual sparkle. Taylor was a pioneer in working from photographs. The complexity of the architectural modelling in the design required a great level of precision in the elaboration of the colour separations. Likewise, the crowd effects.
Paradoxically, the technical and mechanical developments that allowed for greater realism tended to diminish the visual correspondence between the poster and the experience of looking from the train window.
The railway posters produced in Britain between the wars are, nowadays, rightly considered to the highest exemplars of railway advertising. This is based on the considerations and techniques itemised, above, as power, economy and sparkle. Combined with the evident graphic skill of the many artists, featured in these volumes, these images attest to the successful interaction of eye, hand and brain.
The conceptual considerations described here are not merely historical though. The effects of internal illumination, evident within these designs, allow us to see them as proto-typical pieces of web design. The transcendent potential derived from this illumination connects these posters to forms of image making associated with both the medieval church building and the world-wide-web. Accordingly, the future appeal of these posters and their design is assured.
Bibliography
Beaumont M and Freeman M (2007)
The Railway and Modernity – Time, Space and the Machine Ensemble
Bern CH, Peter Lang
Especially Chapter 1
Vadillo AP and Plunkett J The Railway Passenger, or The Training of the Eye
Biggs E (1956) Colour in Advertising London, Studio
Cooper A (1938) Making a Poster London, Studio
Eckersley T (1954) Poster Design London, Studio
Griffits T (1940) Technique of Colour Printing by Lithography London, Faber
Griffits T (1944) Colour Printing London, Faber
Kauffer E McKnight (1924) Art of the Poster London, CP
Purvis T (1939) Poster Progress London, Studio
Rennie P (2010) Modern British Posters London, BDP
Richmond L (1933) Technique of the Poster London, Pitman
Shaw Sparrrow W (1924) Advertising and British Art London, Bodley Head
Here’s something we found earlier…it’s a coloured photographic print of the French resort of Juan Les Pins, near Nice, in the South of France. The long landscape format is distinctive of railway carriage prints.
![welsh-railway-travel-poster-the-snowdon-range-north-wales-by-norman-wilkinson-and-lms-464-p[ekm]288x236[ekm]](http://bagdcontext.myblog.arts.ac.uk/files/2014/05/welsh-railway-travel-poster-the-snowdon-range-north-wales-by-norman-wilkinson-and-lms-464-pekm288x236ekm.jpg)
