1930-1940 Britain

[Maz066]

Although I call Australia home I have traveled to the UK a few times to see my daughter. One of those times I visited the Pendon Museum which changed my ideas on model railways. My layout is set prewar Britain- Still with the GWR. It is supposed to represent a town - not village- in Britain that is large enough to have a high street and possible some light industry, a Bank and Police station as well as a small railway station. So a couple of years ago I established this



yes it is basically Superquick buildings





Hardly indicative of what I have seen for a town in the 40's
Does anyone have any ideas about where I can source photos of that era? Or even existing layouts in any of the magazines. I have a range of R/M's

[Mountain Goat]

Not sure about photos. As far as I know the main difference was that it was rare to have houses without chimneys unless one was lucky enough to have gas in the area. Down my way today they have gas in the towns but not in villages or hamlets unless ones near a town where they've extended the gas supply to the surrounding villages. It used to be only some large towns and cities that had gas so chimneys would be everywhere. Oh. Also chimneys usually stayed on better then one of your houses has...
You have the shops which are good. They did have a lot more shops back then.
Advertizing would be far more common place for spare disused walls and fences etc.
Another noticeable thing was that few people had cars and there would be many walking. Motor cycles and bicycles, tricycles (For the wealthier) and horse drawn transport were common. It would be very common to see lots of people walking in the villages during the daytime. Today, people seem to hide more in cars and this decade there is a noticeable lack of children playing after school which one assumes is due to the internet.
For a village you could count all the cars it had with your fingers. However, a small petrol station with a single handpump would occasionally be seen, especially if the village was on a principle route.
Some of what I'm saying is through observation of what I've seen in pictures and heard from others. I wasn't there in those days!
Houses themselves and the materials varied from one area to the next. Local stone was the most popular material along with brick which had well been established. Where I live there used to be several brick works and stone quarries and clay quarries (And others), along with lime milks, lots of coal mines of various types. During WW2 we even had a small opencast coal mine to enable the quickest way to get at the coal due to the shortage of war.
The 1930's in Britain were years of recession. USA had it more suddenly during the 1920's. It is why the big four railway companies were in financial difficulties even before WW2 came along, and after that the solution came in the government taking over the companies to form British Railways (1948 onwards). Only in the more populated South East of the country that the railways tended to do better, mainly due to the wealthier people and the masses of things that needed moving.
Also of note regarding building materials and designs etc. Certain parts of Britain which were poorer areas or more isolated areas could have a village that was 50 years or more behind the rich areas. For example, when my dad got a car (A Reliant Regal saloon as my dad only had a motorcycle licence... (Most people had motorbike licences a long time before they had a car licence as not many could afford to buy a car. Motorbike and sidecar or a three wheeled car were very popular for families if they could afford a vehicle but that was the 1950's to '60's where I live) which was in the 1970's I remember travelling through Wales where it was very common to see houses with yellowing whitewashed walls and lead painted wooden windows (A few were metal windows) single glazed, and roofs were either slate or for a few which hadn't had that luxury, thatch with tin sheets on top. The corrugated tin sheets could extend the thatch life three or fourfold. My parents bought a property and one house was like this which had been abandoned and the other was lived in with a slate roof. My dad had to pull the thatch roof down in the heatwave of 1976 when the nearby mountain had caught fire and it spread to the field behind.
Today's listed buildings look nothing like they did in the 1970's as today they will whitewash them every year or so. No one could afford to do this years ago, so rarely did whitewash look white. A flakey off white to yellow in various patches were common.
Other areas of the UK had a very different look to them. My nearest town, nearly everything was a slightly faded red brick as that town was a new town which sprang up during the late 1700's.

[Walkingthedog]

Gardens were generally fairly neat in those days. Some grass and a vegetable plot plus some flowers. A coal bunker and a shed would have been common.

[Mountain Goat]

Ah. Something I've forgotten. The Ty Bach.... These would be common and would be at the bottom of the garden. Even houses that later didn't need them would have the Ty Bach's put to use as a shed instead.

[Pannier Tank]

Lovely work and wonderful photo's. Made all the more impressive by the fact you live on the other side of the world from your subject matter.

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

I note that you live in coastal NSW. I live in a suburb of Melbourne. So in a sense I am stuck with a similar problem to you. My research comes from studying the photos in magazines such as British Rail Illustrated; its sister publication Railway Bylines and others like Steam Days etc. These magazines concentrate on the years of steam especially into the British Rail period. Photos of cities and towns in the immediate post war years abound. What strikes me is the similarity to the inner suburbs of Melbourne or for that matter Sydney in terms of the architecture although the semi detached house which seems to be a staple of English suburban housing is not very common here.

The late 19th and early 20th century industrial architecture is very similar. As are the rail infrastructure that survives from this period. In Melbourne, especially travelling on one of the eastern suburban lines it seems that every separate station is designed to reflect the architecture of railway buildings from different areas of England.

Of course once one moves from the immediate suburban areas the regional and what we would call country towns are quite different. One thing to note is that ours have much more spacious building blocks while in Britain suburban areas are much more densely settled with far greater use of two storey housing as opposed to our single story houses with a larger footprint. However suburbs of Melbourne like Hawthorn, Armadale etc. have very similar streetscapes, or did until redevelopment started. In the inner suburbs places like Carlton have a genteel density of style while the older areas of Collingwood or Richmond, those few remaining ungentrified areas are very much based on worker housing of 19th Century England. Most of the older areas are long gone but I can remember what they like before they were swept away in the public housing renewals of the 50s and 60s.

What isn't similar is that there was a far greater density of rail lines in the English cities - our cities while similar in architectural styles didn't have the populations to warrant that multiplicity of competing services.

[Maz066]

You are right Malcolm. Sydney suburbs such as Alexandria and Surrey Hills would be good to observe. Similar to Richmond and Carlton without the wide streets Melbourne is blest with.
Mg- of course, the thunder box and veg garden.
I think I will weather the buildings. Reduce the bright colour.
What about roads? I have assumed they would be sealed and not cobbled on a smaller town.
In the last photo, there is a dead end street. I might turn this into an unsealed road ( I used powder from a timber sander dust collector, excellent) with some street kids playing . Even a street cricket match! Now where will I get figures for that?

[IanAlan]

You might like to have a street of red brick semi detached houses with big bay windows and orange tiled roofs sloping on four sides. I'm writing this from one which was built in 1936. And the trees in the street would be young. These houses would be for the middle classes of the time. A few of whom would own a car - parked in the street, not on a drive. Rather a nice place to live, all new and respectable. Ian Alan

[Mountain Goat]

An interesting thing to model is a winch at the top of a steep hill. There was one near where I live to help horses pull their carts up the steepest part of the hill and early motor vehicles also needed it as well to get up. It is a 1 in 4 hill. (25%). It would make an interesting talking point in a model. The winch would also be used to steady things going down the gradient as well. Horse with a cart used skates under the wheels to help prevent the carts going down the hills too fast. Skates were rather like skis and were attached to the wheel or wheels depending on the gradient. However if there was a winch that would be used as it was safer.
Car brakes were not up to much in the early years so a winch would be used for them as well.
Though I will point out that by the time thew 1940's came in most cars could make such steep hills, though there were quite a number of vehicles still being made that couldn't. I heard that the old Commercial vans needed help up the steepest hills if they were carrying a load and those are 1950's vans. Someone I know used to be a young man and his job was to get out and help push to get the van up the steepest hills.
Austin 7's would need to ensure they didn't go down long steep hills. My grandad bought one secondhand in bits somewhere in the 1930's and built it up. He said the little 7" hub brakes were useless for stopping on a hill. There was one hill where going down he would be trying to judge his speed just right so the car would go through a set of traffic lights at the bottom while they were on green as there was no way his car would stop on the gradient if the lights turned to red.

[cheshire lines]

This was taken in 1957, but probably hadn't changed much in the previous 20 years.

http://www.historyworld.co.uk/photo.php ... gs+etc&l2=