Somewhere in Surrey

Illustration of the month: by S R Badmin

A post about the illustrator S R Badmin by Peter Ashley of Unmitigated England reminded me that I’d not uploaded an Illustration of the Month recently, and that I had an illustration I particularly wanted to share. It’s the artwork that represents Surrey in the old Shell and BP Guide to Britain (1964); in a slightly expanded version it also adorns the cover of one of the Shell Shilling Guides to the county, part of a series of short guide books – booklets really – designed to distill the essence of a county and present its highlights, in the interests of people getting in their cars to explore, using Shell petrol to get them there.

S R Badmin was one of the mid-century’s best illustrators of places, and one of the best artists of all for trees. Buildings frequently feature in his work, often in typical local styles that make them effective markers of location. His Shell and Picture Puffin books on trees have beautiful illustrations – many thousands of people must have learned the difference between oak and ash from his artwork.* Another favourite is Village and Town, a Picture Puffin he did showing different styles of local architecture, which I’ve mentioned before on this blog.

The Surrey image brings together a beautiful wooden landscape in the Surrey hill county with a good-sized house in the rural tradition of southeast England – red tiles on the roof, more red tiles hanging on the walls, white-painted window frames with small panes of glass. Badmin’s fine brush also pictures a domestic scene: a small girl runs to greet her arriving father who, hatted and briefcase-carrying, has just got home from the office. His wife, holding a trug and dressed in trousers, is also welcoming him – she has been gardening and has no doubt heard the car pulling up.

The composition is striking: although the view is unmistakably English, there’s something rather Japanese about the way it's laid out –  the way the tree trunk slices through the right foreground, echoed by some other trunks slightly further back, including straight pines and bendy silver birches. They lead the eye to the house, but also to the far distance, where successive layers of wooded hill country recede towards the far horizon. As usual with Badmin, there’s platy of detail to enjoy – plants and roots on the woodland floor, a National Trust sign, and, best of all, at the very top right, a perching bird surveying the scene. He’s a bit indistinct, this bird, and seems to have a pigeon shape but a bit of speckle to his feathers. Badmin was not an ornithological specialist (neither am I) so perhaps he’s just ‘a bird’, put there to stand for the viewer, taking in this very local scene, this typical bit of architecture, and a fleeting moment in a family’s day.

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* The illustrations in the Shell Guide to Trees and Shrubs were also used for a series 12 outstanding tree posters, produced by Shell for use in schools; collectors seek these out on eBay.

Badmin's England (2)

As a follow-up to my previous post about the book Village and Town, written and illustrated by S R Badmin, here is one more of his evocative illustrations. This is "A limestone village", Badmin's portrayal of the architecture of the limestone belt that sweeps up England from Somerset, through Gloucestershire, parts of Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire and Rutland, to the eastern part of Lincolnshire. From this broad band of stone country, Badmin has set his imaginary stone village in the Cotswolds – it is all rolling hills and golden walls.

The houses have the rows of parapetted gables typical of the region, together with the stone-mullioned windows and tall chimneys mostly placed at the gable ends. A church tower, reminiscent of the one at Chipping Campden, looks down on the scene, and the field in the foreground has a drystone wall. To the right is a large stone barn (based loosely on the barn at Bradford on Avon on the fringes of the Cotswolds in Wiltshire), on which the Cotswold stone "slates" are laid in the traditional way, large stones at the bottom of the slope near the eaves, smaller ones at the top, near the apex.

As with other illustrations in Village and Town, Badmin has brought together buildings and objects from different places to create his village scene. And not just the buildings. That cart in the foreground looks like something Badmin had spotted and drew and couldn't wait to incorporate into a bigger picture. (In the same way he incorporated a wonderful crane into a woodland logging scene in his Shell Guide to Trees and Shrubs.) But made-up as it is, this Limestone Village scene is convincing in terms of both architecture and landscape.

But does this scene represent an idealized view of England? It certainly looks very neat and tidy – neater and tidier than the Cotswolds I remember from my boyhood a couple of decades after the picture was made. Back then there was much poverty, houses were often badly maintained, and you were more likely to meet a heard of cows than a traffic jam. Now everything is tidier and in better repair, but there are cars everywhere.*

To be fair to Badmin, he does show us that this is a working place. The barn is in use; the cart stands ready; chickens are scratching around (it all becomes clearer if you click on the image to enlarge it). In the distance is the farmland that kept people alive in Badmin's time and brought prosperity to this area in the Middle Ages, making possible all this upmarket stone building. A mixture of cornfields and sheep pasture extends into the distance, over the hills, between the woods, and towards the far horizon.

*And it sometimes feels as if you have to have the income of a movie star to live here.

Badmin's England (1)

When I'm not actually looking at buildings or reading about them, I often seem to find myself looking at pictures of them. One of the artists whose work I have admired for longest is S R Badmin (1906–89), a British painter whose artistic responses to landscape were celebrated because of their clarity, detail, and sensitivity to the character of places – and because they were much used to illustrate the covers of magazines such as the Radio Times and British editions of the Reader's Digest. I first came across Badmin as the illustrator of the Shell Guide to Trees and Shrubs, a classic of the 1950s. But I didn't realise until later that the hand that could delineate both arboreal verdure and the architecture of branches and twigs was also at home with actual architecture. If Badmin was brilliant at trees, he was also rather good at buildings.

The books that brought this home to me were two that Badmin illustrated for the children's series Picture Puffins – Sir George Stapledon's Farm Crops in Britain (which includes a striking depiction of an upland northern farm – and the lovely book Village and Town, which Badmin both wrote and illustrated. Here are a couple of illustrations from Village and Town, a book that is much concerned with the ways in which traditional architecture varies from place to place.

A Timber, Plaster and Thatch Village, from Village and Town

These villagescapes are generic: they don't, I think, represent specific places, but bring together examples of the building types and styles of particular areas of England. This first is titled "A timber, plaster and thatch village". It is of a place somewhere in eastern England – in Essex, perhaps, or the eastern part of Hertfordshire – where the lack of good local stone meant that people used timber for framing and thatch for roofs. In some of the houses, the timber frameworks have been left exposed, but in many buildings the frame is hidden behind a coat of plaster, which is sometimes coloured pale pink, sometimes, as in the house on the left, white and decorated with the moulded patterns known as pargetting. Some of the buildings – such as the shed or small barn in the foreground and the church tower in the distance – are boarded, and the tower is topped with a kind of splay-footed spire found quite widely in the south and east. If there is any stone, it's flint, as in the flint and brick wall next to the pargetted house.

 A Brick and Tile Village, from Village and Town

The other picture shows "A brick and tile village" and must be in Sussex or Kent, another area where there is not much good stone (though, again, there is some flint, as in the wall behind the pigs), but where there is plentiful clay for brick- and tile-making. Some houses are brick-walled, some have timber frames with brick filling the gaps between the timbers, and some have tile-hung upper storeys. Other wall finishes on display include weatherboarding, this time painted white, as is the stucco-fronted shop towards the top of the street.

These two illustrations wonderfully show how use of local building materials gave places in different parts of the country their own visual character. But they also show what is less often noticed: that vernacular and traditional architecture are not just about materials but also concern local fashions and aesthetic preferences. The timber, plaster and thatch village shows a love of plaster decoration that is much more common in eastern England than in the Midlands or west. The close-set vertical timbers of the central building – apparently now a pub – are another visual feature common in the eastern counties. In the brick and tile village, on the other hand, delight has been taken in the patterns of hung tiles and the clean lines of white-painted boarding. All these features, from the plasterwork to the white boarding, show local visual sensibilities at work. People in past centuries were not slaves to their materials and made aesthetic choices just as we do – and S R Badmin clearly realised this too.