The Holy Grail was up for sale on Ebay earlier this week - well, the Holy Grail for me, anyway. Here it is:
This is David Gentleman's 1975* Victorian London poster for London Transport - & it is a beauty, signed in ink , no less.
It also features on the London Transport Museum’s online catalogue.
Designed to advertise the booklet Victorian London, written by the fledgling Victorian Society for London Transport, it is the only artwork in Gentleman's prolific oeuvre that uses non-naturalistic colours. It captures a faintly surreal vision of London as a stage for adornment by those industrious yet artistically-minded Victorians, here personified in the figure of a youthful Queen Victoria. Stepping straight out of the Penny Black & entering stage right (or should that be the players' left?), she is placing a final sculpture group into the scene. The camel indicates that this is Africa, & it is destined to join Asia, Europe & America on the podium at the feet of her beloved Albert on his National Memorial at Kensington (also pictured, in a rather fetching lavender blue).
These were uncertain times for the conservation of our architectural heritage, as the opening paragraphs of the booklet make clear:
“All the buildings & other items mentioned in this booklet are standing at the time of going to press, but the face of London is constantly changing, and there can be no guarantee that they will continue to do so. The Victorian Society and London Transport would be grateful for any information about the disappearance of items which are dealt with in this booklet.”
Victorian London is a modest little booklet, a standard London Transport issue of the time, matching the well-known Country Walks productions in format, but very much slimmer in content. It is un-illustrated & David Gentleman’s decorations are limited to the elaborate period typography of the covers. But it must have been very influential in reaching large numbers of London residents & visitors, persuading them to take a fresh look at the virtues of the long-derided Victorian buildings that formed the familiar backdrop to their daily lives. The text ends with a stirring call to action:
“London belongs to us, to our children and their children, and only we can save it from the bulldozer, from the march of concrete, from de-humanization which has been the fate of many American cities. Will you help, by joining one of the societies fighting for its survival?”
The buildings selected by David Gentleman from the Victorian Society’s tours by Underground or bus are the cream of the city’s Victorian heritage. His proscenium arch is formed of ribs & cast iron quatrefoils from Thomas Page’s 1862 Westminster Bridge, while the flanking ‘flats’ are facades of the Prince Consort Building on Farringdon Road (dark blue) & a Wapping High Street warehouse (dark green). Gathered on the stage are the main players, those that still define the look of London for us today: Barry & Pugin’s Houses of Parliament, Waterhouse’s Prudential Assurance Building at High Holborn, the Whitehall Foreign Office (a controversial commission by Scott, the Great Goth), Street’s Law Courts & another Scott tour de force (& a personal favourite): the Midland Hotel at St. Pancras.
With the recent opening to huge acclaim of the long, long-awaited conversion of this gaunt fairy-tale palace to upmarket hotel, we might now feel that the battle for the conservation of our Victorian heritage is won. But these are uncertain times, just as the mid-70s were, but in different ways. The pace of physical change may be slower, the system may contain checks in the form of conservation areas & statutory listings, but the economic challenges are greater & hard-won reforms in many areas of public life are being steadily unpicked. We should not be complacent.
To return to Ebay, after a week of anxious watching & no interest shown, I was pipped to my Grail in the last 3 seconds. Final sale price was £130, a colossal amount (in my view) for a poster of relatively recent date. Obviously someone else appreciates this unsung poster as much as I … and in the highly unlikely event that they are reading this – (through gritted teeth) Congratulations! Should you ever grow weary of it, I am here to give it a good home …
Actually, the Victorian London booklet tells us that full-size reproductions of David Gentleman’s poster are available at 75p from the Publicity Poster Shop, 280, Old Marylebone Road, London NW1. So there must be more out there. Surely? Is it too much to hope that one might come my way? Perhaps even one bearing the legend ‘This is a Reproduction of a Poster Designed for London Transport’ at its foot, the subject of recent discussion on the wonderful Quad Royal Vintage Poster blog. I expressed positive sentiments for these Cinderellas of the poster-collecting world – but, I’m sorry, flaky & inconsistent, I know ... on this occasion & where this particular poster is concerned, only the original & best will do.
If I can afford it.
* The London Transport Museum website dates this poster to 1973, but the booklet for which the poster was produced (which is likely to be correct) says 1975
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