Hull Streetlife Museum

Hull is one of those cities that is automatically disparaged even by people who’ve never been there, on the basis that however mediocre your hometown may be, it is demonstrably superior to Hull. It’s a useful rule that any universally despised place is well worth a visit and almost always much more interesting than many more over-valued places. Despite being one of the Luftwaffe’s most favoured and easily accessible targets, Hull still possesses a fine group of Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian buildings, significant medieval churches and a great collection of swing bridges and lifting bridges. There remains a strong sense of local identity and civic pride typical of Northern cities. One of Hull’s many attractions is the Museum of Streetlife – an ambitious title that perhaps promises more than it can deliver. It’s really a collection of vintage transport, imaginatively presented in a series of recreated street tableaux that provide context for the exhibits – at one time it would have been called Transport of Yesteryear.

The museum presentation is a masterpiece of compression in which a signal box, a complete level crossing, and a parade of small shops serve as a backdrop to a collection of road and rail vehicles. The world of manual labour is memorably evoked in a dramatic presentation that includes stacks of hessian bales and heavy wooden crates loaded on to a 1933 Scammell 3-wheeler plus trailer, familiarly known as a Mechanical Horse. My only complaint is the absence of litter and detritus – the odour of stale tobacco and burning coal would have been a bonus. It’s interesting to speculate on what might be included in such a museum in the future. Looking back half a century or more to today’s shopping streets might find a place for Betfred, Greggs, Wonga, a Food Bank and a Charity Shop from the days when charity was still a legal activity. The vintage vehicles might include an Ocado van and a selection of delivery vans from Yodel, Hermes, Interlink, DHL and Fed-Ex. Dioramas could feature a crowd of juvenile inebriates spilling out of a pub on a Friday night or a road rage episode involving a cyclist, a black cab, an Uber driver and a Night Bus.

Postcard of the Day No. 50, Paris rue Saint-Lazare

A horse-drawn omnibus has stopped in Place Gabriel Péri on the corner of rue Saint-Lazare. Passengers tumble off and set a course for the great railway terminal across the road. The upper deck appears to be almost fully occupied – the prospective passengers, adults and small children in summer finery, await a female straggler making a slow descent of the winding staircase. Pedestrians amble casually through the busy traffic, some with heads bowed, trusting to providence. The bus has travelled south from Batignolles down rue de Rome and will continue towards the Grands Boulevards. Thanks to Google Streetview (below) we can see that many of the buildings remain broadly unchanged and this location remains in use as a bus terminal although a century has passed since the card was posted in 1908. Finally we have a card that shows the view the bus passengers would have seen as they approached the station in the form in which it was rebuilt in the 1880s.

Postcard of the Day No. 48, Paris, les Guichets du Louvre

Today we have two postcards based on photographs taken on virtually the same spot, just a few years apart. The location is the great arches through which road traffic passes enroute from place du Carrousel on to the Quai François Mitterand. Two open-top vehicles pass – one with four wheels and eight legs, the other with four wheels and twelve legs. The vehicle on the right has trundled up from Porte de Versailles on the southern fringe of the 15th. arrondissement via rue de Sèvres and passing Saint-Germain des Près on the way. An elegant touch is the provision of colour-co-ordinated teams of horses. In the second card, the stench of dung gives way to the smell of petrol as one of Paris’s first double-decker motor buses heads south through the archway. The bus is a Brillié-Schneider P2 introduced in 1906 and probably travelling from Montmartre to Saint-Germain des Près. These new buses were built by recycling the coachwork from redundant horse-drawn vehicles. The interest in these cards is due to the photographer waiting for the buses to enter the viewfinder before taking the photo – without the buses we would be left with a dull and undistinguished view. Even today there are five RATP bus routes that pass through the arches.

With Eric Rohmer in Parc des Buttes-Chaumont

Eric Rohmer’s films sharply divide critical opinion. Those with a taste for leisurely exposition, extended dialogues and philosophical complexity find much to commend. Others find them to be without equal when it comes to pretentious tedium. I can see both sides of this but the visual quality is the one I most appreciate - the sense of place and the curious intensity of observation in the way the camera is directed to record and scrutinise the surface of reality.


When filming La femme de l’aviateur in 1982, Rohmer selected the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont as the scene for the central encounter between the naive and emotionally confused twenty-something François and the precociously self-assured, articulate and animated fifteen year-old Lucie. François follows the aviator (with whom he suspects his girlfriend is deceiving him) and his female companion from Gare de l’Est to rue La Fayette where the three of them board an eastbound 26 bus. Unnoticed by François, Lucie also got on the bus and in order to keep the aviator under observation he moves to a seat opposite her. All four leave the bus at the Botzaris entrance to the park where Lucie and François collide with one another and strike up a conversation. What follows is a comedy of errors in which François, desperate not to disclose the secret object of his pursuit, tells his new companion an elaborate sequence of contradictory untruths.


The orbital meandering pathways in the park mirror the convoluted dialogue that results from François’s obfuscations. As his subterfuges unravel under Lucie’s spirited cross-examination she becomes his accomplice and takes the lead after they exit the park on to the rue Armand-Carrel and follow their target to the nearby office of a lawyer. Lucie weaves a web of deceit that in terms of invention easily surpasses the modest efforts of François. They sit at a café table in an attempt to maintain observation on their target where Lucie continues to baffle and befuddle the increasingly exhausted François to the point where he simply falls asleep. The film concludes with an interminable exchange between François and his neurotic girlfriend, Anne, that feels like the very worst of Rohmer and comes as a serious disappointment.



Rohmer’s fascination with Buttes-Chaumont began in 1964 when he made a short film of 13 minutes, Nadja à Paris in which the camera of Nestor Almendros follows a young overseas student across Paris as she exchanges the superficial pretensions of Saint-Germain des Près for the dependable working-class values of Belleville and the peace of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. The brief scene in the park is soon after the start of the second section of the film. There’s a melancholy epilogue of tragedy and unfulfilled promise to La femme de l’aviateur. Of the two young actors at the centre of the drama, Philippe Marlaud (François) would be killed in a campsite fire less than 6 months after the premiere and Anne-Laure Meury (Lucie) would go on to appear in no more than handful of movies (including another for Rohmer) before virtually disappearing from view in 1989.

Finally, my thanks go to Chris Mullen who brought this to my attention.

Postcard of the Day No. 28, La station des omnibus

This is the sort of card that the French describe as a CPA animée. Hardcore postcard collectors are always in pursuit of animation in topographical cards of which this is an exemplar. It’s packed with anecdotal detail of city life a century ago at the moment when the horse gave way to the internal combustion engine on the grands boulevards. On the right we have two horse drawn vehicles, one of which appears to be in the capable hands of Henri Matisse. The atmospheric mix of horse dung and carbon monoxide emissions would have made for a torrid summer afternoon. The percussive effects of horseshoes on paved streets and the throbbing of primitive petrol engines would have assaulted the eardrums. The chaos and disorder of the modern city in all its raucous splendour was busy being born.

Vous devez valider votre titre de transport

Seasoned visitors to Paris will often tell you that the bus offers the best way to see the ‘real’ Paris. They do have a point – the open-air street level views are endlessly fascinating and for the most part, tourists use the Métro leaving the buses to ‘genuine’ Parisians. The route network often leads through some of the most neglected areas into some of the most opulent providing a more diverse experience than the Métro. The street scene is not the only diversion. Fellow passengers tend to be working Parisians with an aversion to the Métro. Most bus drivers will find that there is always one passenger who will stand next to him at the front of the bus and keep him entertained with an interminable monologue. Invariably male and of advancing years they often have the air of former employees. Travelling on an 86 bus from Bastille to Saint-Mandé we noted that they were operating a relay system, as one got off at Nation, another got on board. To be fair, the bus drivers appear grateful for the company and actively participate in the conversations.


Another point of interest is to observe how few actually pay for their journey. Tickets (or Navigos) have to be validated as you board but only a minority seem to do so. Most seem to have calculated the cost of being fined in an inspection would be less than the amount spent on paying for tickets. It’s quite common to see people manoeuvre items of furniture on board, my favourite being a wardrobe which was manhandled on and off a bendy-bus.


When it does happen, an inspection is a sight to behold. A group of 10 to 15 paramilitaries in navy blue uniforms split up to cover every exit and entrance to the vehicle and send a task force on board to check every passenger. Despite the mob-handed security there always seems to be at least one that makes a break for freedom and disappears at speed into the crowds. The impact of Parisian buses on art and literature has not been great but a notable example is Raymond Queneau’s virtuoso Exercices de Style (1947) in which he retells a brief anecdote set on a bus in 99 different, and always entertaining, ways. The 84 bus, on which Queneau posed for a photograph, still runs from Panthéon to Porte de Champerret.

Go Greyhound

Today we return to a subject I wrote about last summer, the Greyhound Bus and its distinctive corporate image. All the mainland US states are stitched together by this network of bus routes and the Greyhound survives to this day as one of America’s enduring icons. In terms of visual style, its greatest impact was in the 1930’s and 1940’s when the company constructed a vast number of city centre bus terminals in a highly developed Art Deco-derived idiom making liberal use of streamlined forms, gleaming tiled surfaces in corporate colours with muscular visual branding and signage. The examples shown here come from linen postcards of the period and present an attractive but somewhat idealised image of the company architecture. The postcards are the subject of a recent book, Greyhound in Postcards: Buses, Depots, and Post Houses, details can be seen by clicking here.


While air travel was the preserve of the wealthy, the company’s main competition came from the railroads. The heyday of railway station building was long past by the 1930’s and the railroads were left with oversized and expensive to maintain structures that had become to look antiquated. The strategists at Greyhound exploited their advantage by developing compact structures with a high degree of visibility and an indelible association with Modernism and Streamline Graphics. From 1937 the lead architect responsible for these designs was William S. Arrasmith (1898-1965) of the Louisville firm of Wischmeyer, Arrasmith & Elswick. According to The Encyclopedia of Louisville he designed more than 65 terminals, beginning with this example in his hometown in 1937. He also invented the enamel colouring process with which to clad the buildings in “Greyhound Blue”. The result was that these buildings were extremely effective in the way in which they echoed the blue and chrome trimmed styling of the buses themselves to provide the passenger with a sense of a complete all-embracing experience. In 2006 a book on the subject was published, The Streamline Era Greyhound Terminal: The Architecture of W.S. Arrasmith by Frank E. Wrenick, to read a review, please click here.


Finally, a few examples of Greyhound publicity from the pages of Life and Saturday Evening Post. The Art Deco idiom was not favoured when it came to mass circulation advertising. It would have been exciting if the services of someone like Joseph Binder or A M Cassandre had been employed but more conventional combinations of image and text prevailed. Even so, there’s much to admire in the ingenuity with which the copywriters emphasise the association with the freshness of the great outdoors, thus neatly sidestepping the odour of hot diesel fumes. The advertisers were not slow to spot that the blue livery of the coaches was perfect for making the connection with the air-conditioned interiors. All the discomforts of bus travel, the lack of ventilation, the proximity of strangers of doubtful probity and personal hygiene, the claustrophobic experience of being wedged into your seat, were artfully eliminated from the picture!