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Today this poster is your starter for ten.

The question is, what’s so unusual about it?  (Other, that is, than it’s Manchester Piccadilly Station looking quite spruce; I regularly used to get the last train home from there in the early 80s, and it was a dump.  Always)

The answer is that it’s a railway poster depicting Manchester.  They are rarities indeed, don’t you know.  As are posters of Leeds, Liverpool and Birmingham too.  Although I did manage to find Perry Barr looking quite bucolic in 1928.

But generally the point remains: should you happen to map the world by railway poster, the industrial heartlands of Britain are pretty much invisible.  I can only find one exception and that’s this Norman Wilkinson poster of the Manchester Ship Canal.

Now I put this point to Mr Crownfolio, and he looked at me as though I was in pursuit of the blindingly obvious to no apparent purpose.  I can see where he is coming from with this.  Birmingham, Manchester and their ilk are not pretty, they are not by the seaside: in short they are places that you come from rather than travel to.  So why would the railway companies want to make posters of them?

But this is a point which is actually worth making, so bear with me.  Because there were several series of railway posters which could quite easily have taken in points in the industrial north.  Like Norman Wilkinson’s depictions of schools, for example.

Or indeed they could have been included in the endless series of churches and cathedrals.  Liverpool alone gets a chance here, and twice – posters by Fred Taylor and Keith Elleston respectively.

But Liverpool is, in all probability, a special case.  Having only been built a decade before, Giles Gilbert Scott’s cathedral was a modern marvel, built just ten years before, as well as simply a landmark to be visited.

Why this matters beyond just northern pride is that the railway posters are reflecting an important part of British culture.  When we think of Britain, it is a southern landscape we see in our mind’s eye.  Perhaps the most potent representation of it ever made is Frank Newbould’s wartime poster for ABCA.

And of course Newbould is a railway poster artist, so he knows exactly what he’s doing there.  This isn’t just a piece of countryside you want to visit, it’s a landscape that you need to believe in.

The writer and academic David Matless has called this vision of the countryside ‘Deep England’, and I have mentioned this idea before in passing.  Matless articulates the idea in a very good book called Landscape and Englishness, which I will revisit one day in a post  when my copy finally re-emerges from storage.  To summarise a subtle and well-documented argument in the meantime, Deep England is a version of Britain which has its greatest potency between the wars, and one of its many uses is to represent an eternal image of Britain to set against the forces of modernity and change.  And this timeless country is very firmly based in the south.

All of which adds some additional reasons why railway posters don’t mention the North.  Yes, it might not be somewhere you want to go to, but it is also, in a wider sense, not somewhere you want to see either.  Because railway posters weren’t just about suggesting you travel to a different place by train.  As David Watts suggests in his very interesting essay (discussed on here in the post I have already linked to above), they also rely for their impact on the implicit contrast between the bucolic idea that they represent, and the forces of modern industrialism, in the form of the railway, which surrounds them.  So sticking a picture of Mancunian cotton mills in there simply doesn’t work.

Although this does go some way towards explaining a small sub-genre of northern and midlands posters, which are designed to celebrate the modernisation of the railways.

Because of course it’s fine to mention these cities if you are actually enthusing about industry.  The Manchester Piccadilly poster at the top probably fits into this category too (these tend, as a rule, to be post-war).

All of which is not only important because of what it tells us about railway poster design and prevailing British culture.  To flip it on its head, it also reveals a great deal about why people like railway posters.  As I’ve said before, railway posters are a refuge, a form of Safe Art in a world of abstraction and conceptualism. But there’s more to the railway poster than simply nice old-fashioned landscapes.  By omitting the problematic north and Midlands, these images also tap into some of our deeper feelings about Britain and what we want to see.  No wonder they are so popular.

Now, some of you may be on the side of Mr Crownfolio and thinking that this is still, to some degree, a statement of the blindingly obvious.  But I think it matters now.  Because one thing that has been bothering me for some time is that the North has disappeared from our consciousness, taking Birmingham and Stoke with it on the way.  Back when I was a teenager and travelling in and out of Piccadilly Station, there was a very definite sense of their being a Northern culture and sensibility, taking in everything from The Smiths to Boys from the Blackstuff and all points in between.  Hell, I was proud to come from the North, even if they wouldn’t let me belong there.

But where is that now?  I can’t seem to discover its like anywhere.  Eighty years after its supposed heyday, Deep England has finally triumphed.  We all think like southerners, act like southerners and see like southerners.  And thus a whole swathe of Britain and its history has been made invisible.

This isn’t healthy.  But it also isn’t true.  We can’t help our railway posters, we probably can’t even help liking them.  But we can pay attention to what we see elsewhere.  For a whole set of reasons, both social and political and just sensible, we need to make sure that we look at the whole of the country, not just the easy, prosperous, reassuring parts.  So beware the lure of the deep landscape.  By all means look at it; but make sure it isn’t the only thing you see.

Two small addenda to that.  The first is that one of the very many wonderful things about the Olympics Opening Ceremony was the fact that it took a long hard look at Britain’s industrial heartlands, and what’s more saw something to celebrate as well as fear.  Something that makes us British.

The second is a bit of a tangent but still worth noting, and that’s the way in which the north still has – or certainly had last time I looked – its own very distinctive visuals.  Fifty years after the railway posters, Factory Records set the style which made Manchester look different.

I was very surprised to arrive in London and discover that not everything worth finding out about happened in sans serif.  Or that the clubs were nowhere near as interesting.

But this is worthy of a whole post of its own on another day.  In the meantime, don’t forget the factories.

Another day, another post, and once more we’re back on the subject of auctions.  This is partly because I am so occupied with cleaning floorboards and painting walls that I haven’t had time to write the big post on The North that I want to write.  But it’s also because the blighters just keep on coming.

Although today it is not a new auction but the Christies’ sale just gone, which I can’t ignore for two reasons.  One is that the prices were insanely high, again, and the other is that it gives me a chance to be smug.  But you’ll have to wait until the end for that.  First, the prices.

The Christies’ results page offers you the ability to sort by price achieved, an opportunity I couldn’t resist.  The first few are either Russian or Mucha (a name which, for reasons too complicated to explain, is always pronounced in my head as Muuu-ka in a broad Lancastrian accent).

The first British showing is this LNER poster by Andrew Johnson, which fetched a mindboggling £11,250.

Clearly people who play golf and collect posters have more money than they know what to do with, a point which explains the next stop on our journey too.

That fetched only just short of £10,000 too.

After that, it gets more interesting though (I’m ignoring lots of film posters along the way because I don’t understand them, apologies if this is annoying).  We’ll zip past the Cassandres and the Cuneos, along with the job lot of Fougasse posters that fetched £5,000, and stop at these two, which both fetched £3,500.

Either way – for a David Klein or for a purely graphical 1930s railway poster – that’s quite a lot of money.  It’s also worth noting that most of the posters that I picked out in advance of the sale were not the ones which fetched the highest prices.  That’s good news, idiosyncratic taste means that I may yet still be able to buy posters.

But not for long.  Some of the big surprises were further down the rankings, like this Abram Games which fetched £2,000 (and I did actually single out).

But even more surprising is this Reginald Mount, which also went for the very same amount.

Now what on earth is going on here?  The Games I can accept, it’s a classic design by a classic designer and prices probably are going up (well they certainly are if Christies is having anything to do with it).  But the Mount?  I am utterly bewildered.  It’s not so many years ago that Mr Crownfolio and I were at Onslows, hoovering up job lots of Mount/Evans posters for £20 or £30 a go, posters which I believe came from Eileen Evans’ own archives.  It’s not even his nicest design – if that’s worth £2,000, what’s a reasonable price for this then?

Or this?

Answers on the usual electronic postcard please.

I am, however, preparing to eat my own words.  Back in the day, when this blog first started. I wrote about how Christies had increased their minimum lot price.  I thought that this was a bad thing for the market in artists like Eckersley and Games (I hadn’t even considered Reginald Mount in there) as without the Christies prices, the value would fall.  And for a year or two it looked as though I’d called it correctly.  But now, well, I stand corrected, and surprised to boot.  Will it last though?  We will have to wait and see.

Further down the listings though is this Eckersley Lombers.

One thousand two hundred and fifty pounds worth of Eckersley Lombers to you at Christies prices.  But rather pleasingly, not to us, as we’ve just bought a copy on eBay.

It’s not framed, it needs a bit of smoothing out, and it’s still the most expensive poster we’ve ever bought.  But it’s wonderfully bright and comes with a rather pleasing sense of having beaten the system.  You can’t get that at Christies these days.

Sorry it has been a bit quiet on Quad Royal these last few days, a normal service will return next week.

In the meantime, though, can I just point you at this.

It’s the second book I’ve done for Shire, not about posters this time but why and how Britain fell in love with the modern in the 1950s, and just how much the Festival of Britain actually has to answer for.

I’ll tell you some more about it in the next couple of weeks – and there might even be a competition to boot – but Amazon have just informed me it’s for sale right now, so I thought I’d tell you that.   And show you a couple of the pretty pictures you will get if you do buy a copy.

So here’s a type sample from the Festival of Britain, and a lovely post-war poster by Dorrit Dekk to brighten up your Friday.  Hope it works.

To my intense annoyance, the site seems to have been hacked at some point in the last few days, apologies if Quad Royal has been offline or not as you expected during this time.

I think it has all been fixed, so this should be the only pharmaceutical advertisement on here now.

If you see any more, could you let me know?

I need to write about the Christies’ sale and will do that tomorrow, but in the meantime I have to show you this, because it is one of the oddest posters I have come across in a long while.

It’s a GWR poster by John Hassall (him of Bracing Skegness fame) and, well where to begin?

The caption isn’t the most obvious way of enticing visitors to anywhere, I would have thought,.  But what really fries my brain in this picture is the faces.  They look like people pushing their heads into one of those a seaside attractions, or as though photographs have been glued onto the artwork and then painted in.

In short it is weird and inexplicable and not like anything else, which is why you needed to see it.  End of broadcast.