Transporter Bridges

A little more on the subject of these fascinating structures that transport their passengers through a Pullman-esque nether region; not quite flying, certainly not sailing but suspended over water, courtesy of 19th. century engineering excellence. The ancient part-work, Wonders of World Engineering featured this colour cover of the Pont Transbordeur crossing the Vieux Port in the great city of Marseille. Inside was a six page feature packed with facts and figures about the development of transporter bridges. For a spectacular image of a ship passing under the bridge near Bilbao please click here. A dedicated pool of photos on Flickr can be seen by clicking here.

Newport Transporter Bridge

One day last week I made a journey to view one of the last two working Transporter Bridges in the UK at Newport Casnewydd in South Wales. It’s a remarkable structure and a survivor from the Golden Age of heavy engineering. It was constructed to a design by a French engineer, Ferdinand Arnodin and brought into use in 1906. Arnodin was a specialist in the design of this type of bridge and there were four other examples of his work in France, in Brest, Nantes, Rouen and Marseille, none of which have survived.



Structures like this formed the basis of the Constructivist approach to the visual arts in the days of the Great Soviet Experiment in the 1920’s. A decade later the American Precisionists would form their own response. For photographers the opportunities for exploring the visual dynamics are limitless. Rodchenko, Moholy-Nagy and Germaine Krull all aimed their lenses at these wonders of engineering with brilliant results. I allowed myself the luxury of following these illustrious forebears and these are a few of the results.

Soda Fountain Nightmare

If it were possible to compile an Atlas of Human Happiness there is no doubt in my mind that its very epicentre would be at the soda counter in an American drugstore as portrayed in Coca Cola publicity between the 30’s and 50’s. Such a concentration of ecstatic smiling faces, unblemished complexions and perfect teeth is a wonder to behold. The talk is all of proms, math tests, barbecues, football games, Saturday night dances and the innocent pleasures of the wholesome Christian life. I like to imagine the intrusion of a long dark shadow into this idyllic scene, as the door swings open to admit the figure of Robert Mitchum in his role of Max Cady or the Reverend Harry Powell. Smiles freeze and all colour drains from the picture as Mitchum slowly crosses the store, takes a seat at the counter and tips his hat to his fellow customers with affable insolence.


Artists of the calibre of Andrew Loomis and Haddon Sundblom were employed to create these radiant visions of the triumph of commerce over human isolation and misery. Week after week they graced the pages of ‘Saturday Evening Post’ and ‘Life’ gradually accumulating into a vast aggregation of happiness unlimited until the default position of the American consumer would be that the soda fountain is the undisputed and exclusive territory of the Coca Cola corporation. The text makes much of the democratic virtues of soda fountain culture, open to all in the spirit of companionship and good humour. The imagery possesses an intensity that promises a quasi-religious transfiguration into an elevated condition of exhilaration – no mean achievement for a blend of sugar, water and colouring agents.

Metroland on the Water

The Grand Union Canal follows the Colne Valley and passes through Rickmansworth, pearl in the oyster of Metroland, on its journey to Birmingham. The area around Rickmansworth is unusually watery, a legacy of 19th. century gravel extraction that gives the town one of its few notes of distinction. The arrival of railways rapidly diminished the revenue potential of the canal and its survival is almost exclusively as a leisure facility.



The canal banks are home to a linear community of a marginal character completely unlike the rest of the town which is commuter belt par excellence. The residents of the converted narrow boats and floating homes belong to a very different world from their near neighbours occupying sprawling residential estates of 4-5 bedroom detached homes. They have no space to park 4 by 4’s or executive cars and no large gardens to mow and weed and strim into submission. What they do instead is to colonise small pockets of land adjacent to the towpath and create modest flower gardens with outdoor seating areas. They use bicycles for overland travel and to the casual observer their environmental footprints are a fraction of that of their neighbours.



This is a territory where improvisation and eccentricity prevails. Some boat owners succeed in maintaining an uncluttered appearance and a high standard of decoration and trim. At the other extreme, some vessels are an agglomeration of miscellaneous shapes and forms haphazardly attached to something close in spirit to a floating contractor’s shed with patio doors. All this variety provides the visual pleasure to be enjoyed by the towpath flâneur.



The M25 is only 2 miles away and crosses the canal a few miles to the north at King’s Langley. In terms of environmental impact, it’s difficult to conceive of a greater contrast. The motorway is a raucous, convulsive, snarling corridor of road rage and particulates. The canal is an unfrequented, insulated ribbon of serenity and its continuing existence is certainly something to celebrate.

Greetings from the Back Garden

This is one of a series of postcards issued by Guinness in 1977 to commemorate the Silver Jubilee. It is a fine celebration of the banal, composed in the uninspired style of conventional multi-view postcards and executed with a studied absence of flair. The finished artwork would not look out of place in a Ladybird book – high praise indeed. The idea that summer holiday travel could be restricted to a circuit comprising fridge, TV, front and back garden is not without a certain appeal to those of us with highly developed sedentary instincts.

Through the Window

This is the third in a short series of trackside guides. ‘Through the Window’ was published in 1924 by the Great Western Railway (GWR) to encourage passengers to take an interest in the wonderful things to be seen from the train on a journey from Paddington to Penzance. Apologies for the less than pristine cover, a view of St. Michael’s Mount, but the conservative character of GWR graphics and publicity can be clearly seen. Inside the book the text is accompanied by reproductions of etchings by a number of different artists of which this view of Paddington Station is the best. Compared with the LNER (and to a lesser extent, the SR), the GWR was unadventurous in terms of design and not so successful in developing a house style. It would be unfair to be over critical of their efforts since they did employ the services of Edward McKnight Kauffer on a regular basis. Please click here to see a well known example.

Atlantic Coast Express

This book was published in 1937 and like yesterday’s subject was designed to serve as a guide to the route followed by a train, in this case, the Atlantic Coast Express. The cover is the best part with a sharp contemporary graphic quality that, sadly, is not maintained inside the book. The landscape outside the train is viewed through a slot cut into the cover. Inside, the linear illustrations are by Anna Zinkeisen and these examples give a flavour of their whimsical quality. The subject matter is conventionally romantic, smugglers, pirates and Spanish galleons at the seaside and churches, castles and packs of hounds in the country. The text is by the ever-dependable S P B Mais in a rich rhetorical style typical of the times. The Southern Railway had a much less co-ordinated approach to publicity by comparison with the LNER and it is common to see a wide variety of graphic styles, not all of which sit well together. There is an excellent selection of SR publicity to be seen by following this link.


Every summer weekday morning between 10.00 and 11.00 am from 1926 until 1964 the Atlantic Coast Express would charge out of Waterloo Station with singular determination in the direction of Salisbury and Exeter. Even before reaching Exeter it would begin to fragment, dispatching portions to Sidmouth and Budleigh Salterton in East Devon and many hours later it could still be found, much reduced in length, meandering the rural byways of West Devon (for Ilfracombe and Bideford) and North Cornwall en route to its final destination overlooking the fishing harbour at Padstow. None of its multiple destinations are still served by railways but the track from Waterloo to Exeter survives to this day as a rather sorry affair operated by South West Trains with a tangible lack of enthusiasm. West of Salisbury it has been reduced to a single track with the occasional passing place with the result that the best frequency on offer is a train every 2 hours with a strong possibility that your train will be held up while it waits for an oncoming train to clear a section of single track before it can proceed. The stations have been stripped to their bare essentials and every inch of track or siding unable to justify its continuing financial viability has been ruthlessly eliminated.