Back street shop front

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The British character is traditionally supposed to be low key, reserved, eschewing ostentation and brashness. There is an element of truth in this view. However, there have always been plenty of exceptions to this rule, and the internationalisation of many aspects of life have introduced more "showy" elements into British culture.

When I first crossed the waters that separate our island from the rest of the world one of the first things I noticed was how much more intrusive advertising could be in some European countries. Large cut out letters forming names on top of buildings were commonplace in Greece and France but very rare in Britain. Store fronts often had names on that stretched right across the facade where in Britain they were usually more modest. Roadside adverts were more noticeable even given the lower population density. But, things change, ideas are imported, and Britain now exhibits more of these kinds of features despite having planning regulations that seek to control them. I came across this example in Hull recently. The shop's location off a main thoroughfare clearly prompted the owner to come up with this large, eye-catching advertisement that could be seen by anyone glancing down the side-street. And, despite the colours having begun to fade, it worked, hence my photograph!

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 14mm (28mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/1000 sec
ISO:200
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Beautiful and odd aircraft and Buccaneers

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On a recent visit to the Imperial War Museum (IWM) site at Duxford, a location that specialises in military and civil aircraft (though there is a tank museum too), I began reflecting on British aircraft design. Looking at the exhibits on display it occurred to me that a number of British  designs count among the most beautiful aircraft to fly.

In this group is, obviously, the Supermarine Spitfire, but also the Hawker Hunter, the Avro Vulcan, Concorde (honours shared with France), the Vickers VC10, the BAe Hawk and quite a few others, including, I think, the subject of yesterday's post, the De Havilland Dragon Rapide. But our country's designers were equally capable of producing inelegant designs, aircraft that look like they are made for an environment other than the sky. I'd put the Handley Page Heyford, the Fairey Gannet, the Blackburn Beverley and the Britten-Norman Trislander in that group. Then there are what I call the interesting oddities - aircraft that are not out and out beautiful but equally, are not without a certain charm. The English Electric Lightning and the Blackburn Buccaneer (above) definitely fall into that category for me.

I came upon this Buccaneer, an example of the aircraft that has been dubbed "Britain's last bomber" (purpose-built bomber that is) in a hangar at Duxford. Its wings were folded, showing its origins as a carrier aircraft with the Royal Navy. However, all the Buccaneers were eventually transferred to the RAF and this example is in the colours of 208 Squadron. The Buccaneer's oddness is seen in the air-brake that protrudes at the back of the body, the "hump" below where the fin starts, and the nose which is hinged to make the body shorter to fit on an aircraft carrier elevator. The saving grace - the beautiful bit if you will - is the elegant curve of the fin with its "T" tailplane. The arrangement of the aircraft and adjacent exhibits stopped me getting a good photograph of this feature but I liked the head-on view and so took that one instead.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Nikon D5300
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 52mm (78mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/80 sec
ISO:900
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

A London street in Lincolnshire

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Tucked away in an area of woodland in Kew Gardens there is a timber-framed brick cottage with a thatched roof. It was originally single storey but later had an upper floor added. It was built between 1754 and 1771 for Queen Charlotte, a cottage orné to serve as a destination for her rural walks, a place to rest and take tea; to experience what she imagined to be the bucolic lifestyle of a yeoman farmer without getting her hands dirty. The desire to build in old styles was a notable feature of the Georgian period. Alongside the styles that they invented they also built using features of Greek and Roman architecture, invented a style of Gothic architecture sufficiently different, yet like the original that it came to be called "Gothick".

The Victorians continued this trend emulating the Italianate villas of the Mediterranean in their suburban detached and semi-detached housing, and at the most extreme borrowing details from Egyptian, Saracenic and Indian architecture. They too plundered Gothic with abandon. However, like the Georgians they built much that owed little or nothing to past styles. And, unlike the Georgians they built it virtually anywhere, too often heedless of vernacular and local traditions. The twentieth century followed suit with, for example, watered down European "Moderne" influencing suburban houses of the 1930s, Georgian columns and bulls-eye windows favoured in the 1970s and Victorian tile-hanging, plinths, roof cresting and fake half-timbering being popular in the 1990s. The same style of house appeared on estates and streets the length and breadth of the country.

I was reflecting on this the other day when I was looking at Barkham Street in Wainfleet All Saints, Lincolnshire. The centre of this small country town is filled with modest brick buildings of the Georgian and Victorian periods, usually two storey, often with the door opening on to the pavement. Consequently to turn a corner and see a London street plonked down amongst the unassuming Lincolnshire housing is something of a surprise. And it is a London Street too. A plaque on the buildings notes: "Barkham Street. Built in 1847 for Bethlem Hospital according to the design of Sydney Smirke, their architect, and named after their benefactor. A number of similar terraces stood in Southwark near Bethlem hospital." Smirke is best known as the architect of the circular Reading Room of the British Museum. Both sides of his street have the same rather grand elevations with the main living storey slightly elevated by a basement and emphasised by steps to the front door and stone framed windows. The relative importance of the two floors above is signified by differing window treatments. The houses make a fine sight, though a very unusual one for this locality.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Sony RX100
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 14.1mm (38mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/50 sec
ISO:125
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Politics, ripples and reflections

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The present British coalition government is the most inept that I have known in my lifetime, a period lest I forget, that includes the woeful Conservative government led by John Major. Today we are governed by people who have the best education that money can buy but promote policies that display little evidence of commonplace, basic intelligence, an elite drawn almost exclusively from the rich, with a background of public (i.e. private) schools and Oxbridge, a majority of whom are millionaires. They exhibit a dearth of experience of the people they govern, have an air that suggests they think they are born to rule, and manifest few deep political beliefs or understanding beyond a "private sector good, public sector bad", "the market knows best" dogma.

In the two years they have been in power the coalition has made, at the last count, 29 policy U-turns, converted a modest recovery into a double-dip recession, mis-read the steps necessary to stimulate the economy, made the poor shoulder the the cost of the economic mistakes of the rich, and actively promoted legislation that has increased inequality. Moreover, their policies have reversed the reduction in child poverty achieved by the previous government. Following the inverse Damascene conversion of the Work and Pensions Secretary, Ian Duncan-Smith, they now assert that there is no link between poverty and low wages, that it results from either a conscious choice, fecklessness, or is the consequence of too generous state benefits! Today I read that Duncan-Smith's Centre for Social Justice admits that in arriving at these conclusions it "missed in-work poverty" i.e. didn't take account of the fact that 62% of children living in poverty (under the current definition, that the government wants to change!) are in families where one or more parent is working. What kind of society is it that is unable to pay someone a living wage for a full week's work? Inept doesn't begin to describe people who don't notice this and can't appreciate its consequences.

It seems to me that one of the problems of politics today is that too many politicians are responding to the dominance of consumerism, one of the areas of people's lives over which individuals think they have real control. So, instead of offering us, for example, a national education system, organised, standardised and quality controlled across the country, politicians seek to give us a selection of school types, managed by different bodies, in quasi-competition with each other. In recent years they have imposed this consumerist/market ethic on virtually every public institution, from the utilities of gas, electric, water and telephones to aspects of defence and the civil service. The result has been baleful. Now they want the individual's contract with the health service to resemble buying a can of baked beans - "Would you like Tesco, Sainsburys, Asda or Morrisons to replace your hip sir?" The motivation behind all this is to remove community enterprise and provision and replace it with market-driven, self-serving individuality, to make every social transaction financial, to bring to fruition Margaret Thatcher's pernicious claim that there is no such thing as society. What we must never forget is that when that moment is achieved every government we elect will look like today's, our lives will be ruled by financial transactions, and the inequalities within our society will have returned to Victorian levels.

Isn't it odd what thoughts can be prompted by staring at the colours, reflections and ripples in the water of Lincolnshire's South Forty Foot drain?

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 42mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/640
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -1.00 EV
Image Stabilisation: On