This is a painting by the British artist William Coldstream. It shows St Pancras Station, London, from 1937.
Coldstream is an interesting artist for a number of reasons…
He was a founder and member of the Euston Road School in London. This was a group of artists who worked in a new realist style at the end of the 1930s. They were based in and around the Euston Road and Fitzrovia – Historically and geographically the Euston group are between Camden Town and the School of London.
You can see form the style of the painting that it is all very carefully observed. There’s a note in this diary entry about the original photograph used by Coldstream
http://archiveadventure.wordpress.com/
Actually, it’s so carefully observed that is can seem all a bit tentative. There’s a sort of anxiety in the painting which comes from a repression of feeling. It’s odd because the muddiness is also a characteristic of the later, expressive, paintings of the School of London. The paintings don’t look the same, but they are each equivocal in their way.
After WW2, this kind of approach to painting moves to the Slade School and to Camberwell.
I’m also interested in Coldstream because he was part of the GPO Film Unit. This group was an important part of cinema history in Britain and made a huge contribution to the development of the documentary film movement.
Peculiarly, the surrealist movement and cinema history are closely linked in Britain. For various reasons, the Jungian idea of “collective unconscious” was important in Britain during the 1930s. (I guess it was to do with an anxiety about the scope of emerging popular-front politics in Britain and around Europe).
Mass Observation was an anthropological group established to map the collective unconscious and to get a handle on the identity issues of the mass of the population in Britain. MO used literary and cinema forms to record the subjective reality of British national identity and the temper of society. This task was given even greater urgency during WW2.
I’ll be coming back to the GPO Film Unit because they made on of my favourite films, “Night Mail.” This is a film about the Travelling Post Office (TPO) and combines music, verse and film in the documentary form. You’ll see that, in this film at least, travelling and trains are the same.
Anyway, Coldstream was part of this conjunction of art, film and surrealism in the 1930s.
Later, Coldstream was influential in the development of art education and its integration to the systems of the University.
This is a post about JMW Turner, probably Britain’s greatest artist (of the 19C anyway), and trains.
This is a picture that was painted at Maidenhead, where IK Brunel’s Great Western Railway crosses the Thames. The picture was exhibited at the RA in 1844. You can see the painting in the National Gallery, London.
The painting is an important precursor of impressionism. The sensations and feelings of speed, and machinery, and light, are what Turner is interested in.
These themes would be explored by the 20C avant-garde.
I’ll let the picture do the talking…
Later, I’ll be posting about other artists, paintings and trains.
This is a post about model trains and a trip to Margate.
We were driving over to Broadstairs on the Kent coast to have a cup of tea with Graham Ward at his Festival Cafe. On the way, we stopped off at the old Hornby factory which has become a visitor attraction.
Before I describe what we saw, here’s a bit of history…
Hornby was named after Frank Hornby, of Liverpool, who invented the engineering and building toy Meccano. It was a small step from there to tin-plate model railways. Hornby models were pioneers of the conveniently room-sized HO-OO scale. These models could be built into an impressive lay-out within the space and resources of middle-class families. By the 1950s and 1960s Hornby was the market leader.
Nowadays, they have a massive factory in China and build models for a whole host of international companies. These companies each produce a range of models that is appropriate for sale in their own country. The model train market is nothing if not chauvinistic.
Actually, that’s part of the model scene that I think is really interesting. When you see big layouts, they are a kind of utopia. Hornby now have a range of buildings, to scale, that can be used to fill up the centre of the lay-out and to add detail. When you look at the range of buildings available, it becomes obvious that there is something weird going on. All the buildings are relatively modest structures – terrace houses and workshops and so on. The favoured architectural style is definitely utilitarian; nothing too modern or too fancy here.
The towns build up to appear busy with lots of shops and workshops. There’s a lot of metal bashing going on. In fact, this is a scene that has more or less disappeared from Britain.
If you were to visit a big model engineering show with international exhibits, you would notice that each type and nationality of railway model has a corresponding form of utopia. Each one made-up in fantastic detail.
I remember that, at the end of the 1960s, BBC TV Blue Peter had a railway lay-out. It took me ages to figure out that the model included practically one-of-everything in the Hornby catalogue. Considering that, back then, it was impossible to buy anything else; it was product placement on a grand and unabashed scale. It was all a bit odd because, elsewhere, the BBC were busy removing trademarks and so on.
I’m especially interested in the trees… there’s a whole subset of model makers there.
This is a post about the English illustrator, Edward Bawden, and the poster for the Ealing film comedy, The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953). It’s also a post about films (culture) and politics in Britain after WW2. As you can see from the poster, the railway engine looms large in the story…so, it’s also a post about trains.
You can watch the whole film on the internet…
Edward Bawden
Edward Bawden was an English artist and illustrator working in the middle part of the 20C. He attended the Royal College of Art where he was taught by Paul Nash and became friends with Eric Ravilious.
Bawden was an artist who was happy to work across different fields. His style of illustration was derived from his interest in lino-cutting and often features elements of Victorian typography and folk-art. The link to the comic and nonsense drawings of Edward Lear is evident. It was natural, in the circumstances, that Bawden should produce book illustrations, posters and advertising material throughout his career.
Ealing
Ealing has a special place in the history of British cinema with an association dating back to the earliest days of cinema in Britain. Will Baker established a studio in Ealing at the beginning of the twentieth century. By 1912 the studio was possibly the largest in Europe and certainly the largest in Britain.
Will Baker had begun making films on a Lumiere hand-cranked camera at the end of the 1890s. His first efforts were of the Mitchell and Kenyon topical kind. These films required a minimum of post-production and were therefore economical. At Ealing, Baker’s productions became more ambitious and the studio developed large glazed stages to accommodate the theatrical and historical epics produced before 1920.
The early history of the commercial exploitation of cinema is fascinating. The technology of cinema was developed, more-or-less simultaneously, in France, Britain and America. Business people whose skills were in theatrical presentation, distribution and production succeeded the early pioneers.
In the 1920s there were large industrially organised film production facilities in France, Germany, Britain and the USA. The story of how Hollywood came to global dominance combines commercial ruthlessness, political expediency and ineffective policy-making decisions.
Michael Balcon became Head of Production at Ealing Studios in 1938. The glory-days of the studio date from 1943 through to 1959, when the studios closed.
Films and Comedies
The term Ealing is usually synonymous with a distinctively English form of light-hearted comedy satire. The force of these films comes from them being simple exaggerated extensions, in the tradition of Dean Swift, of everyday realities.
Goodness knows, the circumstances of war, austerity and reconstruction provided plenty of scope for satire. This was especially the case in relation to the extension of state powers in the guise of progress and welfare provision. This extension was often presented as well intentioned but muddled, and as always unlikely to deliver the benefit as planned. Usually, the muddle is resolved by appeal to common sense. Nowadays some of this survives in the concept of the nanny state.
There are probably about six really well known Ealing comedies: Passport to Pimlico (1949), Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Man in the White Suit (1951), The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953) and The Ladykillers (1955).
The comedies were not the only films made at Ealing. There are social-realist and police investigation films. But, with one or two exception, it’s the comedies that are remembered.
Titfield Thunderbolt
The story of The Thunderbolt is straightforward. An underused rural branch line is threatened with closure. Railway administrators and unscrupulous bus operators collude in a progressive rationalisation of transport so as to kill off the railway.
The local people are outraged by this plan and gather forces to make their case. In the great tradition of Ealing, the ancient forces of land and church combine. Usually, the local community meet at the local pub. In The Thunderbolt, the forces gather in the restaurant and buffet car!
Ealing Posters
The posters for these Ealing films are remarkable. The posters were produced, from 1943 onwards, under the direction of S John Woods who reported directly to Michael Balcon. Woods had trained as an artist and graphic designer. He assembled a stable of artists and designers to make posters for the studio’s films. The process was made possible by Woods extensive list of friends and contacts and his ability to match artist and theme.
Some of the artists recruited by St John Woods include John Piper, Edward Bawden, Barnet Freedman, John Minton, Mervyn Peake, Edward Ardizzone, James Boswell and James Fitton.
The Ealing film posters are remarkable on two points. Firstly and against all the odds, they are recognisable works of art by artists whose work extends beyond the usual concerns of graphic design, cinema and fine art. Secondly, they embrace and give expression to the political dimension of satire and social-realism in relation to post-WW2 reconstruction and the prevailing ethos of relentless progress.
The Thunderbolt story was played out across the country through the rationalisation of the railway network in the 1960s.
This is a shameless plug for my appearance on BBC Breakfast TV; speaking about Magritte and advertising. There’s a big Magritte show at Tate Liverpool over the summer.
The steam engine emerging from the fireplace is just the sort of juxtaposition of ideas that Magritte, a Surrealist, is famous for. It’s a bit odd, but charming and fun. Everyone can understand the association between the fire, the smoke and steam of the engine and the fireplace. The architect, Le Corbusier, called houses machines for living. So, it was obvious for Magritte to connect the family hearth to mechanical engineering. The metaphor is delightful and surprising.
The Surrealist movement used art to investigate the unconscious. Freud’s investigations of dreams and desire offered a starting point to delve into the unconscious. The unconscious can be a pretty dark place.
When the advertising industry began to promote products by association to desire, rather than need, they turned to Magritte. Co-incidentally, at an early stage in his career, Magritte had worked for an agency and produced a few poster designs.
The use of psychoanalytical ideas in advertising was pioneered by Edward Bernays in America. The emergence of a consumer based economy driven by credit and desire is the background for the TV series Mad Men.
In England, the Surrealist movement expressed itself most clearly through film. After WW2, when the BBC began to develop TV seriously, it was natural for them to recruit from the ranks of Surrealist film-makers, animators and puppeteers. Many of these characters found a home in the nascent world of childrens’ television.
The impact of surrealist images on young minds cannot be overstated.
All the stuff that happened in the 1960s was made possible, in part at least, by this ground work.
This will be a post about Buster Keaton, Charles Babbage, war, silent cinema, and the machine; oh, and the railway! I’ll build it all up over a few days.
The image is from Buster Keaton’s film The General (1926). Orson Welles once said thatThe General is the greatest comedy film ever made, the greatest train film ever made and possibly the greatest film ever made. That’s high praise indeed, as Welles often tops any list of the greatest film directors ever. Citizen Kane (1941) by Welles, is usually acknowledged as the best film ever.
The General combines Keaton’s famous dead-pan approach to physical comedy with his love of trains. There’s an extended sequence, in the film, of Keaton riding on the cow-catcher at the front of the engine.
You can watch the whole film on the internet and there are many clips from it. There are specialist entries on Keaton and the film too.
The cow-catcher, or railway pilot, was a distinctive feature of wild-west engines. It was designed to deflect bison and cattle that had strayed onto the line. It had two main purposes; the first was to avoid serious injury to the animal and the second was keep the engine moving. So, it was an entirely practical and safety orientated addition to the train.
Obviously and in the context of the great plains of the American mid-west, cattle and livestock were quite a likely to stand on the tracks. This was especially the case when the tracks weren’t fenced off. The cow-catcher implicitly reflected the relative value of cattle, bison and livestock to the economy of the mid-west and to the railroad companies.
In fact, the cow-catcher was invented by Charles Babbage; mathematician, logician and pioneer of computing machines and system design! Babbage was Lucasian Professor at Cambridge University. That’s the same as Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking.
Babbage is best known, nowadays, as a pioneer of mechanical computing. The development of his engines remained largely theoretical during his won lifetime. Babbage was a difficult personality and the close engineering required for his machines was beyond the scope of most of the workshops he sub-contracted. In the end, the absence of agreed standards and specifications for small, but accurately, machined parts proved insurmountable.
Joseph Whitworth eventually proposed a series of “standards” for machining and engineering in the 1840s. The agreement of consistent standards is a characteristic of the organisation of modern life. This is as true in graphic design and typography as in engineering and manufacturing.
The practical difficulties of accurate manufacturing, caused Babbage to reflect upon the logical and most efficient organisation for workshops and factory labour. The consideration of the factory and workshop as a complete system of interactions made Babbage a pioneer of system design. It was natural, in the circumstances, for Babbage to be appointed as a director of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.
The Liverpool and Manchester provided the first commercial railway service in the world when it opened in 1830. The opening of railway was also the site of the first railway accident when William Huskisson. MP for Liverpool, was fatally struck by the train. It’s possible that Babbage’s mind turned to safety, and the cow-catcher, or pilot, proposal, as a result of this accident.
Keaton’s film is a romantic comedy where the usual romantic confusion is played out against the chaotic circumstances of the American Civil War. A train engineer is wrongly thought a coward by his fiance. He has to win her back and, in the process, reveals himself to be a brave and selfless hero. His beloved railway engine provides a dynamic and hilarious backdrop for his adventure.
The romantic confusion is based, partly at least, on a misunderstanding of the strategic significance and importance of railway logistics in war. For the Confederate forces, the role of railway engineer was understood as a reserved occupation.
The strategic significance of the railways became quickly evident to the military command. The new machines were both a system of logistic and an engine of war. The railway could provide mobile artillery platforms of a size, and range, hitherto impossible. The railways could also be used to transport men and arms at speed and over great distance. The American Civil War (1861-1865) was the first in which the new theories of mechanised war could be played out.
The story of The General is loosely based on the history of the war. The Union forces were served by a railway engineer, Herman Haupt, who intuitively understood the military applications of railway logistics and planning. The Confederacy was undermined by its fractured and mis-aligned railway system. After Haupt, there was always an antagonism between railway and military professionals.
The railways were just one element in the industrialisation of war. New mechanical arms were conceived each with greater accuracy and deadlier firepower. The military-industrial complex emerged, during the American Civil War, as a strategic entity and with the railway network as an important part of its supporting infrastructure.
The efficiency gains theorised by Babbage through the co-ordination of the system were evidenced by the very much larger casualties of war thereafter. Daniel Pick and Christian Wolmar, amongst others, have written about all this.
It wasn’t just military mobility that was transformed by the railway. Up to the mechanisation of the military, over half of military logistic capacity was devoted to animal welfare. The reduction in horses allowed for a greater concentration of arms and men. So, the decisive force of military power became much more brutally focussed.
This is the strategy of the machine sentinals in the Matrix.
AJP Taylor took the combination of efficiency and supply to its logical conclusion by suggesting that WW1 was, in fact, a war between the time-tables of military railway deployment. Although Taylor overstates the case, it is certain that military planning, supported by techniques of scientific management and operational research, has tended to see the railway timetable as a form of implacable algorithm of force. The scenario-planning of modern warfare and capital markets is entirely derived from this algorithm.
Helmuth von Moltke, Joseph Joffre and Leon Trotsky were all pioneers of railways. warfare. The brutality of mechanical point-of-attack is expressed visually in El Lissitsky’s Red Wedge poster from 1919.
The American Civil War was also one of the first to be photographed. Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner recorded the American Civil War. The conjunction of military and observational technologies evidenced by these developments provided for an especially brutal evolution of economy, military technology and perception.
Bibliography
de Landa M (1991) War in the Age of Intelligent Machines NYC, Zone
Pick D (1993) War Machine (Rationalisation of Slaughter) New Haven CT, YUP
Schaffer S (1994) Babbage’s Intelligence (Calculating Machines and the Factory System) Critical Inquiry 21
Virilio P (1989) War and Cinema (Logistics of Perception) London, Verso
Here is a fabulous film by Jean Mitry called Pacific 231. It’s a film sequence of trains edited to the music of Arthur Honneger. The film is from 1949.
This film essay is in two main parts.
The introduction has scenes of make-ready with engines and rolling-stock being moved about against the background sounds of metal, steam and machine. The industrial noises of the machinery are a kind of music. There’s a wonderful sequence of images of the engine on a turntable.
The second part of the film is of the engine at speed and its journey. The train leaves from the Gare du Nord and is the northern express towards Lille. I’m guessing that, based on my knowledge of the shape of the train shed canopy in the film.
The second part has the musical soundtrack by Honneger. Honneger’s music is an orchestral evocation of the power and speed of the train. It’s the music of industry and engineering and speed…
You can find out more about Honneger, here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Honegger
and about Pacific 231, here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_231
It turns out that Jean Mitry was one of the first people to write about film and cinema in a seriously academic way. His work covers aesthetics, psychology, semiotics and analysis. There’s a little about Mitry, here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Mitry
Honneger was not the only person to be thinking of the musical quality of industrial noise. The connection goes right back to the beginnings of the avant-garde and the willingness to interrogate the formal and structural qualities of art, music and literature.
The poetic experiments of the Italian Futurists kick it all off with Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tumb (1914). The experiments of concrete poetry and everything else followed.
It wasn’t long before the musical avant-garde adopted the Dada strategy of making art with whatever was to hand. That opened the door, so to speak, for a repertoire beyond the established instruments.
It’s amazing how difficult people find it to accept “noise,” or even silence, as music. In the end, it comes down to a kind of political tolerance.
In the UK, this gave us the experimental music movement of the 1960s and the “scratch orchestra.” This was a kind of musical “flash-mob.” In Germany, Kraftwerk recorded a piece of music called Kling-Klang (1972) and gave the name to their recording studio.
If you watch the Mitry film titles, you’ll see that the sound recording is by “Klang-Film.” So, “Klang” is a sound that’s loaded with meanings.
I’ll be posting more about art, films, trains, music and sounds…There’s more of it than you think.
No one left and no one came (no one got on, no one got off)
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop – only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
Edward Thomas 1917
Thomas is one of a group of poets associated with WW1. Perhaps less widely known than Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and Seigfried Sassoon.
This poem was written in 1917 and recalled an unscheduled stop at a small country station… we’re all familiar with that, although most of the small country stations have gone.
The Arch was the gateway to the old Euston Station and, in the other direction, to London. Here it is, in 1955; black and impressive. It no longer stands.
The Arch was pulled down in 1962 as part of a scheme to redevelop and modernise Euston Station. This was interpreted as an act of spiteful administrative and political vandalism. This kick-started the popular architectural conservation movement in Britain.
Recently, there have been plans to rebuild the Arch and integrate it into the proposed improvements to Euston. See http://www.eustonarch.org/
So, the Arch was both a bit of architecture and a symbol…and it became the symbol of something else too. Its destruction set a fault-line for British architectural debate for the next 50 years!
You can interpret the story of the Arch as a series of shifts in its meanings. First, as a symbolic gateway. Second as a symbol of the old and, in its absence after its demolition, as a symbol of modernisation, progress and a movement forward. Thirdly, as a sign of synthesis and compromise between past and present.
Background and Geography – The Old Euston
Euston station was the conceived as the London terminal of the London and Birmingham Railway Company. The station opened in 1837.
The LBR was the first major railway into London. The scheme was constrained by the difficulties of access to the metropolis, the political problems of redevelopment, and the costs of compulsory purchase etc. These issues forced the railway to approach London obliquely and from the west and to use tunnels under the London hills. This line of approach provided a severe limitation on the possible choices of site for the station.
In the event, the site for the station was distinguished by its small size and the narrowness of its approach. Accordingly, the railway architects were obliged to scatter facilities where they could. In the end, the station was developed as a series of separate facilities laid out along the line – the entrance, the waiting room and the train shed.
The engine shed, where engines were steamed-up and made ready, was located some distance north of all this, at Chalk Farm, Camden. This is now called the Roundhouse.
Furthermore, the immediate exit from the station forced the trains up quite a steep incline. In the first instance, engines had to be pulled out of the station on ropes and chains! Later, engines would double-up. By the 20C, powerful steam engines could slowly make the climb; but only by blowing out lots of steam and soot! This was all very dramatic, but it reduced the surrounding area to slums. Drummond Street, Camden, Chalk Farm and Primrose Hill were only rehabilitated after the clean-air act and the electrification of the railway during the early 1960s.
It’s amazing to think of these areas of London as so recently blighted. The first people to move into the area were media professionals from journalism, TV and the stage.
The Arch
The Propylaeum is a special kind of monumental arch associated with the classical architecture of ancient Greece. It’s big and it’s usually the doorway to something important.
It was entirely appropriate that, given the tastes of early Victorian England, the Directors of the London and Birmingham Railway should choose this kind of structure to be the gateway of their railway and to the metropolis.
Reyner Banham described it thus..(Philip) Hardwick’s Propylaeum, completed 1839, is very Early Victorian and represents an attempt to express a progressive theme, the London-Birmingham Railway, in an idiom of an accepted high style of architecture, Greek Doric. The structure served no operational railway function but gave monumental form to an impressive sentiment.
As an exercise in style it was faultless. It’s giant scale gave it a gravitas that grew daily more austere (and) commanding as the soot settled blacker on the stone. One could say that it was more perfect even than the Parthenon – a mortuary perfection.
The Arch was one of those building that got better with age. As it got dirtier, the hulk of the structure became more imposing. The gilded sans-serif letters of the inscription became more impressive against this sooty backdrop.
The Demolition
The scheme to redevelop Euston involved pulling everything down and starting again with shops, offices and a station combined. The opportunity to link the redevelopment of the station to commercial property development transformed the project. The project got hi-jacked by the special interests of the property speculators. In the circumstances, the Arch was never going to survive.
The demolition has passed into folklore. The contractor, Frank Valori, was so upset by this destruction that he offered to rebuild the arch. Although his offer was rebuffed, he numbered each piece anyway. Eventually, the stones were dumped in the River Lea. Dan Cruickshank found the stones in 1994.
The New Euston
The new station was conceptualised as an office development fronting the Euston Road with a functionally designed, international style, train shed behind. In principle, the narrowness of the site required that the station facilities be stacked one-on-top-of-the-other. The engineering complexity of this, expressed as costs, meant that the station remained a long, flat shed. All the money went on the offices. It was entirely appropriate that, some 40 years later. the privatised railway company, Railtrack, had its offices there.
There’s a wonderful document about the new station, here
http://www.eustonarch.org/britishrail1968.pdf
Anyone who is familiar with Euston, as is, will be struck by the fantasy of this shiny future. It’s a kind of airport – without the glamour and style. However, the redevelopment was instrumental in bringing together a number of architects – amonst them Theo Crosby and the founders of Archigram.
You can see what a properly vertically-integrated transport hub look like in Berlin. I posted about it, here http://areopagitica.blog.co.uk/2010/09/18/moscow-berlin-paris-and-new-york-cities-and-people-9415018/
The Debate
The decision to pull down the Arch was roundly condemned. John Betjeman became a sort of spokesperson for the conservationist movement. Many architects also opposed the scheme. Alison and Peter Smithson published a book as a memento mori of the Arch.
The debate became polarised between traditionalists and modernisers. In the context of the 1950s and 1960s this was described by Michael Frayn as a battle between herbivores and carnivores. It’s not always as simple as that though – some modernisers are roundheads and some are cavaliers. Some of the rationalists are gentle herbivores and some are brutal and puritanical carnivores. These cultural labels cut across the usual class and political demographics of British society.
To their credit, the next generation of modernist architects embraced the sense that buildings were about feelings as much as function. The puritan business culture of Britain remained suspicious of the hedonistic feelings associated with the counter-culture. In this context, the ideas of Archigram were rejected in favour of a disciplined, but generic, form of commerical development. Mostly, this expressed itself as a kind of shopping mall.
The ideas of Archigram, expressed theoretically through the fun palace, were eventually realised in the Beaubourg Centre in Paris, France, by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. Elsewhere, these ideas were theorised in Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi.
Bibliography
Banham, Barker, Lyall and Price (1996) A Critic Writes – Essays by Reyner Banham Berkley CA, UCP see Carbonorific p.79-80 reproduced from the New Statesman 1962
Betjeman J (1972) London’s Historic Railway Stations London, John Murray
Sissons M & French P (1964) The Age of Austerity London, Penguin see Frayn M Festival p.330-352
Smithson Alison and Peter (1968) The Euston Arch London, T&H
This is a coloured photo-litho print of the LNER A3 Pacific Class Flying Scotsman.
I think this was made as a carriage print – it’s about the right size in landscape format.
The engine was built at Doncaster in 1923. You can find out all about it on the www and from the National Railway Museum in York. The engine has been restored and is currently painted in matte black, as during WW2. It’s quite impressive like that.
