Rundfahrten

The tour bus never goes away - every major city has fleets of these vehicles, usually open-topped, finished in garish colour combinations and accompanied by teams of outriders roaming the streets to sign up new customers.  It’s sightseeing at its most basic,  sit back and let the sights come to you.  Seconds later your photos can be glowing on Instagram.  In the interwar years the tradition was for a jobbing photographer to capture the tour bus and its passengers before its departure.  Darkroom technicians would swiftly do their magic and sparkling prints would be sold to passengers on their return.  The results were often surprisingly good considering the time pressure and as you might expect, these examples from German cities achieved a remarkable degree of definition.

We begin with the Berlin tour guide posed in front of the bus on the Unter Den Linden - like everyone else she squints into the glare of low autumnal sun. Hats, overcoats and furs offer protection from the cold, the date is October 6th. 1922. Most passengers make the effort to smile for the camera and have the air of belonging in upper income groups.  A potential subversive loiters second from the right, his prominent facial hair indicative of a non-conformist nature.  Moving on to Cologne in 1910 we meet a horse drawn charabanc outside the west doors of the cathedral. Uniformed staff in top hats are in charge and the group are perched high on upholstered benches. Not so many smiles in 1910 and some notably grumpy veiled faces. Three further examples from Cologne, all posed outside the cathedral and examples from Munich and Nuremberg complete the selection. 

 

Bridge Postcards of 2018

It turned out to be a very good year for acquiring bridge postcards with 89 examples added to the collection. This is a selection of the best of them. It includes the pioneering Iron Bridge from Shropshire and the now lost splendour of the Spiral Bridge in Hastings, Minnesota. There’s the ramshackle Cane Bridge near Darjeeling, roped together from locally sourced materials – not for the faint-hearted. Some locals pose for the camera by another timber built footbridge, across the River Wey at Guildford. Another lost bridge is the Shoreham Suspension Bridge opened in 1833 (as the Norfolk Bridge) across the River Adur and replaced in 1922. There are lifting bridges from Cleveland and Amsterdam and a view of Brunel’s 1859 Great Western Railway bowstring bridge across the River Tamar that includes the departure of the Torpoint Ferry.

A Bridge in Cologne

There’s a great triumvirate at the heart of Cologne – the Hauptbahnhof with its mighty single-span cast iron roof, an intimidating heavyweight Gothic cathedral, 600 years in the making with the largest façade in the world and the Museum Ludwig, home to one of the most comprehensive collections of the art of Modernism. This is also the point at which the railway crosses the Rhine on the massive structure of the tied arch triple span Hohenzollern Bridge. The present bridge is essentially the third at this location although the two latter bridges (of 1911 and 1948) are of similar size and appearance. They were preceded by the smaller Dombrücke (also known as Feste brücke), completed in 1859. The 1911 Hohenzollern was blown up by the Wehrmacht in 1945 to obstruct the Allied advance. 

A great feature of the Hohenzollern is the provision of pedestrian footways, much enhancing the attraction of Cologne as an ideal city for bridge-walking – cross bridge A, walk to bridge B, cross that and walk to bridge C and carry on until the supply of bridges or energy runs out. Since the summer of 2008 thousands of young romantics have attached love padlocks to the bridge. The bridge operator, Deutsche Bundesbahn, was forced to back down on its plan to remove them, since when they’ve proliferated to the point where virtually no space remains. Meanwhile on the river bed there’s a long ribbon of keys to confound future generations of archaeologists. 

Super-sized equestrian figures of various Prussian Kaisers and Kings in full battledress stand, combat-ready on both sides of the bridge. Some appear to be survivors from the original 1859 bridge and remind us of the special value that military strategists place on lines of communication. This figure is Kaiser Friedrich III whose reign lasted a mere 99 days in 1888.