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Obres de John Minnis

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Leeds: Pevsner City Guide (Pevsner Architectural Guides) (2005) — Col·laborador — 29 exemplars

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Minnis, John
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This is a scholarly exploration of the nature and history of railway architecture, combined with fascinating photographs, often in luminous monochrome, of railway buildings and scenes now disappeared. Indeed, the book claims that every scene pictured has now changed utterly, even the handful of buildings that (nominally) still exist.

The author puts forward the view that railway architecture has suffered on a number of fronts: by their very nature, railway buildings are vulnerable to being swept away by the expansion of facilities, or their modernisation. But they also suffered from the mid-Twentieth Century snobbery over Victorian architecture; and indeed, much of the railway estate wasn't even considered to be "architecture" by those who dictate aesthetic opinion.

The rebuilding of Euston station in London, especially the demolition of the Great Hall and the Euston Arch in 1962, focussed attention on Victorian architecture in general and railway architecture in particular. The next major London station threatened with demolition was the great Gothic pile of St.Pancras, and various campaigners declared George Gilbert Scott's masterpiece to be the pole they would nail their colours to: this far and no further, said John Betjamin and the Victorian Society.

But although they succeeded, all through the 1960s, 70s and 80s, British Rail were demolishing buildings at an alarming rate. It was only as the 1980s progressed and conservation became a cause more widely embraced did the policy change. Even then, the nature of railway stations changed as so much of the street furniture and other operational equipment and installations associated with railways was swept away. Signal boxes have almost all been replaced with regional signalling centres; the mechanical semaphore signals themselves have been replaced over a period of some seventy years with colour lights. Each country railway station used to have its own goods handling facilities, with a shed for the secure transhipment of goods from rail to road and a yard for the wagons that brought all goods and consumables into a town or village in the days before road transport. These have nearly all disappeared as goods transport shifted from rail to road and the space released by this change became ever more valuable as building land.

Given that the book is called "Britain's Lost Railways", that might be thought to be a misnomer; but the author has selected photographs that pay attention to the whole range of railway activities swept away by the winds of change (sometimes for change's sake). Although the bulk of the book is devoted to stations, goods yards, engine sheds, bridges and the wider railway environment are all covered. Many of the photographs illustrate not only the buildings, but the lives of the staff and passengers, the road transport of earlier days, the advertising and fashions, and (by inference) some of the social events. For instance, there is a photograph of a goods station in Sheffield, taken in about 1925. A tram is just pulling away from a street corner, and it looks as though a number of men have just got off it. Others look as though they have been on that street corner for a while. Across the road, what at first sight appear to be two loafers are, on closer inspection, seen to be a couple of burly chaps standing on either side of the entrance to the goods station; they are most likely there as security to prevent pilfering in those days of depression. Many of the older photographs, taken with the large plate cameras of the day, show remarkable detail and all sorts of stories and speculations can be drawn out of these scenes from the past. Even photographs taken in the 1950s, 60s and 70s have historical interest for us today.

The book is presented on good quality paper and has a robust binding. All in all, this is one of the best books on the subject that I have seen in recent years.

I have to declare an interest; through the 1970s and 80s, I was photographing buildings and railway installations, and my own book on the subject was published in 2012. A few of the buildings I photographed are included in this book, most notably Derby Midland station, which was rebuilt in a modern style in 1985, replacing the original structures dating in part from 1840. In more recent years, I have turned my camera on more modern and less distinguished commercial buildings as they, too get demolished to make way for even more modern and economic buildings. Office blocks, factories and civic buildings are all at risk, but I see some of the same snobbery once directed at Victorian architecture now levelled against the ordinary buildings of our age. Often, they are not architecturally remarkable; but people devoted their lives to designing, building and working in these buildings, and sweeping them away without a thought obliterates parts of people's histories that may be otherwise unrecorded elsewhere.
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RobertDay | Oct 27, 2021 |

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Obres
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128
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#157,245
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4.0
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1
ISBN
21

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