Today, a miscellany of stuff which has arrived here over the last few weeks and around which I may or may not be able to construct a narrative thread. Watch and see.
To start with, lots of you responded to Paul Durham’s request for images of posters from Heals’ Mansard Gallery.
So thank you to Kiki Werth, Martin Steenson and Mike Ashworth, as well as other people who have offered other kinds of help.
The image above is by William Roberts and is taken from McKnight Kauffer’s Art of the Poster Book.
Martin Steenson, who sent that one to me, also included this rather wonderful image with it too.
It’s by Harold Sandys Williamson and dates from 1926 (the London Transport Museum have it on their website). Now quite apart from being a lovely poster, and an exhibition I’d rather like to have seen, it’s also further evidence of Underground Posters being exhibited quite heavily during this period, and in a more varied set of galleries than I had imagined. Was it because Frank Pick had the contacts, or where gallery owners and curators (and furniture store owners) genuinely inspired by his vision of a popular form of modern art. Perhaps someone will come along who knows more about this and tell me.
Of course there are still exhibitions now. I haven’t bothered to mention the London Transport Museum’s current one. on 150 years of Underground design, simply because it has been in every newspaper in the country, and so I assumed you would have heard by now. What you might not know, however, is that as a result you can now buy poster stamps.
Which is a novelty. And I’ve always liked the James Fitton on the right below.
If you want to know more, there is a full and factual BPMA blog here.
Finally – and this has no link to anything else at all apart from just being interesting – a leap back to a post from nearly two years ago, in which I rhapsodised about some wonderful drawings of shops by John Griffiths, from Motif magazine.
Any excuse to show them again.
But the most mysterious and intriguing, despite being in black and white, was always this one, for an animal costume shop off St Martin’s Lane.
I got an email the other day, from someone who, as a big Beatles fan, was very pleased to see this. It turns out, you see, that the costumes for Magical Mystery Tour were purchased here in 1967. And what’s more, the receipt is floating around out there on the internet.
One walrus mask, hood, feet and flippers. I am the Walrus indeed.