The Art of the Model

My eldest daughter and her partner came to stay this weekend. It provided an excuse for a family trip to Manchester.  I've always loved Manchester, but unbelievably it was the first time Issy had visited, despite it being on our doorstep.

Needless to say, despite the disruption on the tram network, Issy fell under its spell in the same way I have. I loved introducing the family to a place I know so well, not so much as a guide, but as someone encouraging them to see the city through their own eyes. Although perhaps that is what a true guide is.

Han the Daughter. Henceforth, HtD fell in love with the art gallery the way I first did 40 years ago. Meanwhile, Issy and Richard escaped to the excellent café. I highly recommend the toasted sandwiches, as long as you haven't eaten anything else all day.

There is something special about a gallery you've known for years. My education owes as much to endless weekends in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery as it does to school, and the early years of my so-called career often involved the Tate. 

You see the works in a different way, you build a narrative around them, you learn how they were made, and you learn to think.

HtD, Richard and I spent ages in front of a painting by Valette, Lowry's art teacher, that spoke to me of the Manchester I knew around 1969. The great thing about this gallery is you can get right up close to the works, and the closer you look at some of the works, the more they make sense. This isn't the place for a lecture on how Valette's impressionism led to something in Lowry's art that is so much more than the cliched image of matchstick people.

Look at this detail of a scene of civil dignitaries laying a foundation stone. Every figure has a personality.

Lowry and Valette are instantly likeable artists, but you can learn from those artists and paintings that aren't immediately accessible.

This is a detail from a Dutch landscape.

I stowed it away in my mind because of something I read about Constable recently. There is a real skill in portraying  a distant landscape in a way that has more depth than the simple fore, middle and background that I was taught.

It was brought home to me the next day, when we were walking on the Chatsworth Estate.

Back in Manchester, we wandered through what is now known as the Northern Quarter.

And there you will find one of my favourite bookshops, the HQ of The Modernist

The Modernist extolls the virtues of Brutalism, but not at the expense of all else. I really recommend a subscription to any of you who love postwar design.

I picked up two important books with relevance to modellers. The first was Small Shops. An incredible study of the sort of shop that has now disappeared from the High Street.

The other was a reprint of Nairn's Towns

There is an argument, and Nairn would have loved an argument, that he is the architectural historian who saved what is left of British town centres.Much more so than Betjeman.  But he is also brutally honest.

If you model British railways between 1960 and 1980ish you need to read his books to understand the reality. I see so many layouts that sanitise post-war urban life. It was dirty, murky, like a painting by Valette, populated by pinched-faced people from a painting by Lowry. 

And Breathe!

Is it only two weeks since my last post?

I've lost track of what day of the week it is, working across multiple time zones, usually until 11pm every night, to turn around the second draft of the book, ready for publication at the end of the month. Even before publication, the beta draft has been read by well over 300 people, which is quite scary.

Suddenly, all those modelling projects I keep putting off seem very attractive distractions, which is an all too familiar pattern.

I have high hopes of next week, though. I want to at least get some baseboards built and some half-built projects into primer.

A penny has also dropped about a possible use for the Tim Horn cameo baseboard, and following my own advice that sometimes a smaller space suits a larger scale.

The baseboard kits for the East Coast based light railway have also arrived. The next thing I need to do is to search out the manual point motors I bought with TAoC in mind. That, needless to say, frees up the baseboards that I originally had in mind for it for another project, possibly even a return to Apa.

Then there are other distractions.

I have one set of bookshelves that are groaning under the weight of books about the smaller vessels of the Royal Navy in WW2, those most associated with the RNVR and the RNR. It is years since I (tried) to build one of the Airfix 1/600th scale kits, but I find myself being drawn to 1/350 scale. This is a cheap and cheerful model of HMS Swale, a  River class frigate. There are much more detailed ones available, but this one is primarily intended for wargaming. Even so, it is enlightening to see how much detail is moulded/printed in. In theory it should be a quick build, though I do want to add a few enhancements.

Why this ship? Well, whilst HMS Compass Rose is a well known fictional corvette, Nicholas Monserrat's last two real life commands were a River class and an American-built version, the Colony-class HMS Perim.

Ten Days

 It all started so well.

Somehow I got the first draft of my new book on AI Governance out the door, and everybody seemed pleased with it, although it isn't the book I would have written given a free hand.

And Steph gave birth to our fifth grandchild.

I cracked open a bottle of fizz...prematurely.

Poor Teddy ended up in intensive care with an infection, but was home by the weekend.

I spent the weekend helping to run a training course in the USA, based on the book I'd only finished on the Friday...

We finished the course at 10pm on Sunday, just as Issy returned from her church group.

Then she got the phone call.


Steph was in hospital with two defective heart valves and a suspected blood clot.


The last week has been Hell.


Unless you are a parent, you probably can't imagine the emotions, the pain, the feelings of hopelessness.


Issy and I barely slept all week, I certainly lost all focus on the second draft of the book, though fortunately my second family in the company, spread across London, Greece and India, couldn't have been more supportive.

Steph should be discharged by the weekend. It is too risky to operate, but they think the heart issues were caused during labour, when she also managed to split a tooth. They think the valves will heal in time, but her blood pressure is still fluctuating wildly.


Meanwhile, my copy of the new edition of Cameo Layouts arrived, a much more interesting read than my book, and I picked up this bargain from Dapol.

It is making me hanker after a return to a pastiche of the Tanat Valley, although I don't think the moguls ever ran on it.. I have a vague idea in mind, based on a concept from many years ago.

I've also been doing more playing around with TT:120. An option I'm kicking around is a version of TAoC, or possibly two, beginning with it reimagined as a BR blue SLT.

This weekend, if nothing else goes wrong, I'm hoping to begin painting various models, including the Gubbin Box Caldon tramway stock. I'm still not sure what I'll do with it, but as a minimum I might make a display box featuring Hettys

Buxton or Bust Part 2.

When I arrived at the show there were no signs to the second room, and a lot people were still expecting to see stands on the stage in the pavilion, which has alway been used before.

Fortunately, that had all been dealt with by the time I went in search of the extra display space.

There were some excellent layouts in it, and a lot of other layouts.

In S gauge, Emswell was very attractive.

Dent reminded me of  a Railway Modeller cover from April 1970, of David Jenkinson's Garsdale Road.

Middleton Top was a stunning model of a location I know on the Cromford and Highpeak

And, perhaps my favourite layout of the show was Bessie Bulls. Not least, because of how well the canal was modelled.

And that was it. Nothing else appealed to me, although the other layouts did have people taking an avid interest in them, so perhaps it is just me.

I was in a hurry, because Issy was sat outside with the dogs, but I was in and out in under an hour.

Was it a good show? On balance yes, because of the layouts that were very impressive, though possibly over-exposed in some cases.

What I'm a lot less sure of is whether it was worth spending £15 to get in, and, in contrast to Macclesfield, whether best use was made of the extra space this year.