“And the winner is….”

Art UK recently ran a competition with Railway 200 to celebrate the best artistic depictions of the railway. They scoured the resources at the NRM and provincial art galleries nationwide to come up with their top two hundred entries. These were then whittled down to a top 20 by public vote and subsequently the winners were announced after further voting from the shortlist. The winner was Train Landscape by Eric Ravilious. Second was Rain Steam and Speed by JMW Turner and in third place was David Shepherd’s Service by Night.

Art UK do a great job in bringing a vast array of original artwork to the public view via their website and many artists have given permission their work to be included there. However, in this instance its worth mentioning that a lot of extremely good railway artwork was presumably excluded from the process because it is not on public display or owned by galleries around the country. Consequently, contemporary work of high order by Barry Price, Don Breckon, Rob Rowland and Barry Freeman does not feature, and even some reputable historical figures like James Tissot have been overlooked.   

Nevertheless, I enjoyed sifting through the list and finding artists who were new to me and some attractive paintings that I would otherwise be unlikely to have come across. As for the winner, the back story is fascinating and can be followed online. If you want to see the real thing you need to go to Aberdeen Art Gallery, where, UK Art added on their web page, “it has now been placed on public display”, suggesting that maybe it had been languishing in a vault somewhere until the spotlight had suddenly descended on the Granite City - but perhaps I’m doing them a dis-service here.

“When a man is tired of London….”

 

Not yet, anyway! Primarily this time for Neil Young at Hyde Park, and after escaping from the heat outside with JMW Turner at Tate Britain the next day, we ended up at the redeveloped landscape behind Kings Cross and St Pancras stations. I never got to 34A Kings Cross sheds, nor the portals of Copenhagen tunnel and its surrounding streets where the Ealing Comedy, The Ladykillers, was filmed. It’s also taken us some time to get there after renewal, though I’d been told it was well worth a visit.

The land north of and between the approaches to Kings Cross and St Pancras had been railway land since the mid-nineteenth century. The goods yards and sidings of the Great Northern Railway included warehouses, gasometers and coal drops, where goods trains arrived from the Yorkshire collieries on the upper levels and dumped their coal onto the carts [and later the lorries] below. Coal also went to make coal gas, which was stored in grey, cylindrical gasometers, once a common feature of most towns and cities. Coal was also distributed along the Regents Canal, connected to the Grand Union Canal at Little Venice, beyond Paddington station.  

In a major renewal programme begun at the start of the present century, the old has been impressively incorporated into the new in a series of imaginative designs. The canal provides a leisure walkway and barge rides, the gasometer frames are now wrapped around modern apartments, high-tech’ office blocks provide employment, and the coal drops, themselves, have been preserved and adapted to attract top-end retailers, bars and restaurants. The tree-lined square that sits between the canal bridge and these redevelopments has plentiful seating, an outsize TV screen [showing an embarrassingly one-way Wimbledon ladies final on the afternoon that we were there], paved areas with fountains to the delight of the children getting thoroughly soaked on a hot summer’s day, outdoor art displays – currently a summer seaside photographic exhibition, and all surrounded by lively bars and cafes. I found the whole scene most uplifting. What a triumph it is, showing just what can be done where there is a determination to retain important elements of our built history and at the same time bringing new opportunities to formerly run-down inner urban areas and successfully breathing new life into forgotten corners of our old cities.