Missing buildings, the blitz, town planning, etc.

[rockershovel]

PS: prefabs? Might a bomb gap in a northern city have been used to accommodate a few, or was that strictly a London thing?

I lived in Cambridge in the 1960s and 1970s and there was a sizeable estate of prefabs in the Coleridge Road area, the last of a number in the area

 

A quick google produces this, which quite surprised me

 

https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1wzvo_-XCGPh1vGcMkoS019zueWA&hl=en_US&ll=51.791727652123804%2C14.24828249999996&z=4

Edited January 26, 2018 by rockershovel

[wombatofludham]

Fascinating thread and one which chimes immediately with my plans.

 

Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s Midlands a lot of bomb sites had been redeveloped as the economy of the Midlands back then was overheating, such that when Rootes wanted to open an assembly plant for the Hillman Imp in Coventry the Government refused and directed the plant should go to Scotland where unemployment was higher. Hard to imagine such an interventionist policy today. However, I do remember odd pockets of derelict land, and the use of some city centre sites for car parking. I think the rate of development of derelict bomb sites varied with the economic wellbeing of the town or city. Housing sites were redeveloped quickly due to the housing shortage, but industrial and commercial sites would have been a different matter. Mention has been made of the Potteries which were very much in decline from the late 60s onwards so had quite extensive areas of not just bomb sites but also derelict factories: indeed by the 1980s large areas of the Black Country were blighted by industrial decline. So, for a layout set in the North in the 1960s I would expect to see large areas of slum clearance, with new high-rise, medium rise and low rise housing along side, and also areas of old, soot blackened buildings in bad repair clustered around traditional terraces. The juxtaposition of old, abandoned or poor housing and factories, and new development as slum clearance and redevelopment took place is something I do vividly remember from my childhood when visiting relatives in Walsall and Wolverhampton, together with the massive disruption caused by the various Ring Road schemes fashionable at the time (and in the case of Walsall, fashionable for nearly 60 years until they finished the last bit, just as Birmingham was bulldozing the inner ring road - Walsall, just 20 minutes from Birmingham and 50 years apart in everything else).

 

My planned shed layout featuring AC electrics will heavily feature 1960s redevelopment. The scenario is that the area around the station was heavily blitzed in 1942 and the Borough Council and the Railway Executive post war drew up a plan for the area, featuring a new Borough Council office (Kitbashed Kibri HO scale offices from the 1970s), a new Courts Building (repurposed Kibri "Neu Ulm" HO scale station of the 1960s), various 1960s shops (a mix of Hornby and Model Power RTP stuff), a new Central Library (a nice Chinese kit of a 1960s 3 storey "conference centre" from the Chinese eBay clone "Alibaba"!), but with a small group of surviving old buildings around the Market Square and Market Cross (various half-timbered and Georgian RTP and kit built building) with a ruined, bomb damaged church and war memorial on one side of the Market Square, which will lead into it's 1960s replacement church (kitbashed Vollmer and Faller), with another mixed residential/retail/commercial 1960s mixed use development, made up of various Faller, Kibri and Vau-Pe 1960s kits in HO. In addition the main station will be a rebuilt 1960s edifice rebuilt for electrification, using two Pola/Playcraft "Bletchley" stations kit-bashed together and 3d printed waiting rooms. I find that if you keep OO and HO scale apart, separated by roads or loading bays, you can get away with it and it allows some leeway with the older 1960s and 1970s German modern developments which can be relatively easily adapted to "Anglicise" them.

[TheSignalEngineer]

Fascinating thread and one which chimes immediately with my plans.

 

Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s Midlands a lot of bomb sites had been redeveloped as the economy of the Midlands back then was overheating, such that when Rootes wanted to open an assembly plant for the Hillman Imp in Coventry the Government refused and directed the plant should go to Scotland where unemployment was higher. Hard to imagine such an interventionist policy today. However, I do remember odd pockets of derelict land, and the use of some city centre sites for car parking. I think the rate of development of derelict bomb sites varied with the economic wellbeing of the town or city. Housing sites were redeveloped quickly due to the housing shortage, but industrial and commercial sites would have been a different matter. Mention has been made of the Potteries which were very much in decline from the late 60s onwards so had quite extensive areas of not just bomb sites but also derelict factories: indeed by the 1980s large areas of the Black Country were blighted by industrial decline. So, for a layout set in the North in the 1960s I would expect to see large areas of slum clearance, with new high-rise, medium rise and low rise housing along side, and also areas of old, soot blackened buildings in bad repair clustered around traditional terraces. The juxtaposition of old, abandoned or poor housing and factories, and new development as slum clearance and redevelopment took place is something I do vividly remember from my childhood when visiting relatives in Walsall and Wolverhampton, together with the massive disruption caused by the various Ring Road schemes fashionable at the time (and in the case of Walsall, fashionable for nearly 60 years until they finished the last bit, just as Birmingham was bulldozing the inner ring road - Walsall, just 20 minutes from Birmingham and 50 years apart in everything else).

 

My planned shed layout featuring AC electrics will heavily feature 1960s redevelopment. The scenario is that the area around the station was heavily blitzed in 1942 and the Borough Council and the Railway Executive post war drew up a plan for the area, featuring a new Borough Council office (Kitbashed Kibri HO scale offices from the 1970s), a new Courts Building (repurposed Kibri "Neu Ulm" HO scale station of the 1960s), various 1960s shops (a mix of Hornby and Model Power RTP stuff), a new Central Library (a nice Chinese kit of a 1960s 3 storey "conference centre" from the Chinese eBay clone "Alibaba"!), but with a small group of surviving old buildings around the Market Square and Market Cross (various half-timbered and Georgian RTP and kit built building) with a ruined, bomb damaged church and war memorial on one side of the Market Square, which will lead into it's 1960s replacement church (kitbashed Vollmer and Faller), with another mixed residential/retail/commercial 1960s mixed use development, made up of various Faller, Kibri and Vau-Pe 1960s kits in HO. In addition the main station will be a rebuilt 1960s edifice rebuilt for electrification, using two Pola/Playcraft "Bletchley" stations kit-bashed together and 3d printed waiting rooms. I find that if you keep OO and HO scale apart, separated by roads or loading bays, you can get away with it and it allows some leeway with the older 1960s and 1970s German modern developments which can be relatively easily adapted to "Anglicise" them.

 

About 30 years ago when I asked one of my staff what it was like in Walsall he replied "An eastern European city with a McDonalds"

[Jamiel]

Thank you to everyone for the replies. Fascinating thoughts.

Mark (wombatofludham) it sounds as though we are thinking in similar ways. The fictitious town I am modeling would have been prosperous during the Victorian times and would have built a lot of north European influenced architecture like Leeds, Huddersfield, etc. Consequently Kibri kits are a good source for some buildings.

Here are a couple of photos of the station building and the newsagent next door, getting near to being finished. The newsagent is a facade from a Kibri kit with the ground floor extended, the back is scratch built and the roof kit bashed a bit. I have not worried too much about the scale of the upper floor as Victorian buildings seemed to have a lot of variation in their scale.

The station building, scratch built, is based on a fairly standard Midland design used on the St Pancras extension in the 1860’s, specifically Finchley Road and St Johns and the Hendon stations. I was fortunate enough to see and photograph the plans for one of these at the National Railway Museum.





Here is a link to an interesting thread with some advice on kit-bashing  kits for urban settings for those looking to find suitable sources for buildings to alter.

http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/52348-large-building-kits-city-centre-style/

The rest of the Kibri kit is the same as the one beautifully anglicised on Wibble’s Wibdenshaw layout. I am going to ditch the 'wizards hat' though from my version (just visible at the top of the photo).



I am also going to bash together two of the Walthers Argossy book shops kits to make a large town building, which reminds me a bit of the Queens Hall in Leeds. I am not sure whether to go for a flat roof on it like that, or the pitched roof Grime Street added to their version of the kit.

My gut feeling is that much of the town centre buildings will remain in their Victorian form, maybe with some rebuilding signs, differing brick and mortar colouring, and then a few modern buildings slotted in between.

For the back streets behind the town centre shopping areas Fat Controller’s suggestion of advertising signs and parking areas using space between buildings seems like a very good suggestion.

I feel giving some history to a layout's construction makes it more life like. Even on the station building I wanted to make it feel as though the roof on the platfrom steps was a later addition and it covers a window that would have originally been clear. Bomb damage and reconstruction, or otherwise adds a much more powerful sense of history to a layout.

Again, thank you for all the discussion.

Jame


 

Edited January 27, 2018 by Jamiel

[TheSignalEngineer]

A Mk 1 'doodlebug'- or flying bomb - Silently glided on its decent over the roofes of our block of flats in Deansbrook road, Edgeware and  totally flattened Langley Park, a small private estate just off Bunns Lane, Mill Hill. - I remember it well as it appeared to be heading straight for our bedroom window as my Mother stood there, hands clasped, praying out aloud "Lift it ! Lift it ! Please  God, Lift it ! "  Well, I'm not a religious man, far from it, but I swear someone acted in our favour that night

 

 Anyway, about 65 years on and totally rebuilt, my brother and myself went back there once and, surprisingly, not one of the residents that we spoke to on the estate knew  anything at all about it and some didn't even know what a 'doodlebug' was !

 

Cheers.

 

Allan

My Mother used to tell of watching the Doodlebugs when she was stationed in Kent, and the efforts of the RAF fighter pilots to "divert" them or shoot them down. She was well versed in the Blitz, as in one night her house was obliterated, the gap remaining until clearance of the area in the 1960s. She refused to stay at the reception centre the family were sent to and set of for Granny's only to meet Granny coming the other way because there was an unexploded land mine in the back yard. The family headed to the other Grandparents for the night, then when she went to work the next morning she saw that the reception centre had been hit and most of the occupants killed. Shortly after she joined the ATS a training camp she was attending was attacked. Rumour had it that a certain Elizabeth Windsor attended a training course there around the same time.

[rockershovel]

I do like the composition and colour palette of that photo, very well observed, atmospheric and effective.

 

I’ve seen it said, more than once that “model railways are an illusion” and THAT picture definitely captures that illusion

Edited January 27, 2018 by rockershovel

[Jamiel]

I digress a little, but if you want to see more of the wonderful work of Wibble and others modelling diesels in EM gauge, have a look at:

http://www.emgauge70s.co.uk/

In addition to Wibdenshaw, the Shenston Road layout has some wonderfully realistic modelling and photos.



There are threads for that http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/85490-on-shenston-road-a-few-bevs-and-a-western-chieftain/ and Wibble's new layout Hornsey Broadway on the forum http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/7989-hornsey-broadway/

Back on subject their layouts do show the kind of empty spaces being discussed here.



This is taken from http://www.emgauge70s.co.uk/project_buildings2.html which has a few other run down areas which give the same feeling of time passing I am asking about.

Jamie

 

Edited January 27, 2018 by Jamiel

[monkeysarefun]

Although it only covers the London area,

 

http://www.bombsight.org/#17/51.50918/-0.09352

 

is an interactive mapping site  that purportedly details every bomb dropped during the blitz.

[Jamiel]

Sorry to be suddenly flooding the thread with posts, but I was looking at roof details in central Leeds and the buildings highlighted in red on the lower part of this image suddenly stood out to me as the kind of thing I was looking for.



Either side of the highlighted area the buildings are ornate, and largely symmetrical Victorian buildings. The right half of the one with arch looks like it may have been symmetrical at some point, and then the bank at the end of the row look to be in a Victorian style too. I wonder if the lower, simpler and more modern architecture of the highlighted buildings is exactly the kind of rebuild I am asking about?

Monkeyscarefun I could do with a bomb map of Leeds to confirm this theory.

Jamie
 

Edited January 27, 2018 by Jamiel

[petethemole]

Having identified the buildings on Google maps, I'd say the one on the left with the white centre is probably 1920s/30s, the other two look 19th century. They are plain rather than modern. The left hand one is rendered with incised lines to represent stone, a late 18th and early 19th century feature.

[rockershovel]

Although it only covers the London area,

 

http://www.bombsight.org/#17/51.50918/-0.09352

 

is an interactive mapping site that purportedly details every bomb dropped during the blitz.

That’s very interesting, because this

 

 

... is certainly consistent with the pictures I posted earlier, particularly in the St Margaret’s Grove area

 

Looking at the Mildmay Road/Wolsey Road junction, we find gaps in the terrace pattern which have either been incorporated into the adjacent gardens (remember that like many such houses, these were all owned by a single estate, so could have been changed as the owners saw fit) and in the case of the N side of Mildmay Road, the 1950s school constructed, along with a small block of lock-up garages (which I clearly remember in the 1960s, and I’m amazed they have survived to appear on Google Earth!

Edited January 27, 2018 by rockershovel

[brianusa]

Having survived the Plymouth blitz from the comfort of a Morrison shelter with my Dublo layout on top, this book is recommended reading.

http://www.chrisrobinson.co.uk/product/ictod/

 

Brian.

[rockershovel]

Here, St Jude St Garden, which I remember as a dozed-over bomb site in the early 1960s - note the hedge, forming an otherwise-irrelevant boundary, the stubs of former garden walls in the rear boundary wall and the characteristic “mounded” appearance resulting from the rubble just being dozed over as not worth salvaging

 

 

Again, this bomb strike appears on the website

[Jamiel]

Having identified the buildings on Google maps, I'd say the one on the left with the white centre is probably 1920s/30s, the other two look 19th century. They are plain rather than modern. The left hand one is rendered with incised lines to represent stone, a late 18th and early 19th century feature.

 

Thanks Petethemole.

 

Really interesting insights.

 

Would you suggest that they are a later build than the more ornate buildings to the left, and possibly the bank to the right?

 

I know it is only guesswork, but would you think that they were simply using underdeveloped space, or that some sort accident befell that building with the large arch.

 

EDIT: This would appear to be Vicar Lane in Leeds with The Headrow to the right of the image. Th building with the large arch is the County Arcade which has a date stone saying 1900. (I don't know if datestone is the right term).

 

Many thanks.

 

Jamie

Edited January 28, 2018 by Jamiel

[petethemole]

The large ornate buildings are typically late 19th century (so 1900 fits) and probably replaced a row of buildings similar to the two on the right.

[Jamiel]

Town planners doing the opposite of what they have done in the last 50 years, taking down buildings and replacing them with something far more ornate and interesting. I am sure there were those at the time who complained about modern monstrosities being put up where buildings with class and history had been.

It would explain the rather interesting chimneys on the right of the highlighted section if the bank building is newer as well. I did find those hard to explain.

I really should not be in favour of the adding of very ornate buildings to replace the older and more functional ones, I was educated my modernists at university and am a fan of modern design, art and architecture (when it is done well), but I suspect that growing up near Leeds the ornate Victorian buildings are what I was used to being there. There was also Quarry Hill Flats to challenge any lover of modern design, quite a monstrosity that was demolished after a fraction of time that the buildings we are discussing stood for.

Another interesting thing to consider looking at Leeds was the discolouration of the stone buildings there. Here is the town hall in the 70's when my father told me it was made from coal.




And here it is after the stonework was claened.




I don't think I would dare weather my buildings as much as that. Perhaps this was worse in Leeds for some reason.

I all shows that modelling a time before you were born, or a time beyond your earliest memories is full of details and incidents that can change the character of the location a great deal.

Jamie
 

Edited January 28, 2018 by Jamiel

[wombatofludham]

From what I can remember of my "Townscape and Architecture" courses when studying for my Town Planning degree, as a general rule of thumb the kind of ornate "Kibri-esque" architectural style dates from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By Edwardian times styles like "Art Nouveau" were becoming popular. Mid Victorian architecture tended towards Classical or High Gothic influences, whilst early Victorian tended to follow the Georgian style of simple rational symmetry. Generalisations of course, but as a rough rule of thumb it helps to give an idea of dates. Following WW1, there was a brief return to Classical styles and a dabbling with Arts and Crafts styles before the move towards more modern architecture in the late 30s and what most people think of as "Art deco" (strictly Art Deco encompassed a number of styles ranging from Greek and Roman influenced classical to the streamlined and rational styles of "Moderne" but it is the latter which would more likely be seen in things like cinemas and shops and hotels in the North). Post WW2 it took a while for new developments to come forward but in the mid to late 1950s there would have been a general swing towards "International" style architecture, square, large windowed, orderly, rational but not entirely concrete, early 60s architecture in provincial towns made use of a mix of materials and would also have included some decoration such as modern sculptural panels on walls, many of the 60s shopping developments in Birmingham have sculptural panels or decoratively coloured elements. The 1951 Festival of Britain was an influence on this style, sometimes dubbed the "Atomic" age with an emphasis on lightness, simplicity and looking forward. By the mid to late 1960s there was a trend away from the decorative finishes towards strong shapes, bare materials and the style called "Brutalism" which of course comes from the French word "Brut" meaning strong, not our word "brutal". This is the style the modern architecture haters love to moan about but it wasn't applicable to all post-war architecture and some Brutalist buildings are actually quite striking. Although most people associate Brutalism with concrete, in many places brick was also used. Brutalism is often characterised by smaller windows than the earlier "International" style. By the mid to late 1970s there was an increasing reaction against Brutalism which saw the growth of "retro" architectural styles, mock art deco, mock classical, the growth of the "crinkly tin shed", bright primary colours, coloured cladding and the like as new technology allowed cheap space-frame buildings to be erected and clad with pretty much anything the local planning office said it wanted. This was also the era of the massive increase in listed buildings, conservation areas and the conservation movement. One unfortunate side effect of this laudable emphasis on conservation was the occasional example of "Fascadism", where an attractive protected fascade was kept whilst an entirely new building was built behind it, often to a completely different floor and ceiling height with the unfortunate effect of mismatching floors with the original window layout on the front. The architectural equivalent of putting Max Factor lipstick on a pig.

 

As I say, a very general overview, omissions and exceptions excepted and all that, but it might help you get an idea of how to create a sense of place and time in general terms.

[Jamiel]

Thank you Mark.

A wonderfully informative post, and it gives a great deal of scope for people to consider their layout's buildings, their dates and history.
 

Jamie

[darrel]

There are places in Glasgow and Clydebank where there are gaps in the tenements. Some have had more modern flats built in between the old buildings.

In cardross there is a bombed out church still standing some of the gravestones around it still show signs of shrapnel damage.

[Nearholmer]

The one style that I think Mark might not have mentioned in his excellent post is ‘bauhaus’, which in a British context often gets confused, or lumped together with the ‘moderne’ end of Art Deco. I mention it mainly because a great many so called ‘deco’ railway stations owe a direct debt to Bauhaus, which greatly inspired Holden’s work for the Underground, which in turn inspired, or was shamelessly copied (Hoylake, LMS) by others.

 

Long, boring article about how all this influenced commercial model railway stations, down to HD, in a TCS Journal a couple of years back, by yours truly, if the subject interests you.

 

Kevin

Edited January 29, 2018 by Nearholmer

[Jamiel]

I just discovered this slide show of Memories from the40's and 50's which has some nice images that are relevant to the thread.

https://www.slideshare.net/LIMASSOL/the-1940s-50s-remembered

Here is an example.



Jamie

[Joseph_Pestell]

I just discovered this slide show of Memories from the40's and 50's which has some nice images that are relevant to the thread.

 

https://www.slideshare.net/LIMASSOL/the-1940s-50s-remembered

 

Here is an example.

 

 

Jamie

 

Which one are they describing as damaged? One on the left seems in remarkably good order considering that the other semi has been obliterated.

[2mmMark]

On Copenhagen Fields, there is a model of a collapsed building with timber baulks holding up the adjacent structure.   As the layout is set in the inter-war period, people often ask if that was the result of a WW1 Zepplin raid.

 

It wasn't and the supposed reason for the model is that a lot of London's 18th & 19th century spec-built housing did not have adequate foundations. It wasn't unknown for skimpily built structures to just collapse. 

 

The real reason behind the model is that there is an inconveniently placed  baseboard joint and it was a good way of avoiding the need for a loose building to cover the gap.

 

There was an episode of Grand Designs where a property in Hackney was being redeveloped and the foundations were found to be only a couple of feet deep at most, needing substantial underpinning before any work could proceed above ground.

 

So what might be a "bombsite" could have an entirely different reason - Georgian/Victorian cowboy builders!

[Jamiel]

I guess modern image modellers could emulate houses where they have excavated a cellar floor and then the whole thing has come down judging by a few news reports recently.

Houses without foundations are not that uncommon, I live in a houses built in the 1840s (we think) and a builder friend suspects that there is very little in the way of foundations on this by modern standards. The walls are think and it probably stands on rubble and or and clay. Not problem until the satnavs picked up our road as a run thought from a motorway. All the houses in the village shake a bit now in the early morning lorry run.

Jamie

[PhilJ W]

On Copenhagen Fields, there is a model of a collapsed building with timber baulks holding up the adjacent structure.   As the layout is set in the inter-war period, people often ask if that was the result of a WW1 Zepplin raid.

 

It wasn't and the supposed reason for the model is that a lot of London's 18th & 19th century spec-built housing did not have adequate foundations. It wasn't unknown for skimpily built structures to just collapse. 

 

The real reason behind the model is that there is an inconveniently placed  baseboard joint and it was a good way of avoiding the need for a loose building to cover the gap.

 

There was an episode of Grand Designs where a property in Hackney was being redeveloped and the foundations were found to be only a couple of feet deep at most, needing substantial underpinning before any work could proceed above ground.

 

So what might be a "bombsite" could have an entirely different reason - Georgian/Victorian cowboy builders!

Number 10 Downing Street was jerry built. During the 1970's it had to be completely rebuilt.