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43 minutes ago, AY Mod said:

 

I had heard the news a few weeks ago; quite sad. Aside from her modelling credentials and her place within the business she was a tremendous character and I feel for Dave and the family. We saw a fantastic family album of Dave and Shirley pitching in with their daughter's barn conversion (Dave had the good sense to make a model before they transformed it) with pictures of Shirley hodding bricks up the ladder. Lovely, lovely people.

 

Barn_3.jpg

Just amazing, I had never seen that model. 

 

One of the greatest pleasures of acquiring Wild Swan was the opportunity to get to know Dave and Shirley a little better, having admired their work from my teenaged years and the old Bristol show.

 

I hesitate to have "announced" the information here, I heard as you did a few weeks ago Andy, but thought others better "qualified" than I might have said something.

 

I last saw them at Mike Sharman's funeral and it is a real shock to think that she isn't still with us, they are/were an amazing and lovely couple in so many ways as you say, a very sad loss indeed.

 

Simon

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Ordered mine this evening and taken the opportunity to order some back issues as well. 

I don't often go into my local town (only Smiths generally stock it) and given the current situation, much easier to order on line.

 

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On 30/09/2020 at 15:23, Not Jeremy said:

..A decent letters page contains a wonderfully indignant letter from one John Bennet in Towcester which had me re-reading Tim Watson's piece from last month...

I think I touched a raw nerve with this chap with my deliberately provocative personal opinions on exhibition layouts. I apologise if it seems to others that the MRC does not recognise and encourage high standards in exhibition layouts; that is emphatically not the case. However, the article set out to show why CF was built the way it is rather than following well known formulae. It is also worth pointing out that the standards which we espouse and are now commonplace were quite novel 36 years ago when we set out on the project.
 

Mr Bennett finishes with some helpful criticisms of CF: “It is totally sterile and thus unconvincing. The scenic areas are too tidy, the street scenes are devoid of population, the baseboard gaps are ugly, the buildings are too uniform in build and colouration and the ballast is too clean.” I’m not sure if these are born out by the evidence from the pictures in the article, but we do need more animal droppings on the roads, one could use ruder expressions...
 

Tim

 

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9 hours ago, CF MRC said:

I think I touched a raw nerve with this chap with my deliberately provocative personal opinions on exhibition layouts. I apologise if it seems to others that the MRC does not recognise and encourage high standards in exhibition layouts; that is emphatically not the case. However, the article set out to show why CF was built the way it is rather than following well known formulae. It is also worth pointing out that the standards which we espouse and are now commonplace were quite novel 36 years ago when we set out on the project.
 

Mr Bennett finishes with some helpful criticisms of CF: “It is totally sterile and thus unconvincing. The scenic areas are too tidy, the street scenes are devoid of population, the baseboard gaps are ugly, the buildings are too uniform in build and colouration and the ballast is too clean.” I’m not sure if these are born out by the evidence from the pictures in the article, but we do need more animal droppings on the roads, one could use ruder expressions...
 

Tim

 

 

Perhaps he needs to go to SpecSavers. Would the local streets have been heavily populated, except possibly at rush hour?

 

 

 

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10 hours ago, CF MRC said:


 

Mr Bennett finishes with some helpful criticisms of CF: “It is totally sterile and thus unconvincing. The scenic areas are too tidy, the street scenes are devoid of population, the baseboard gaps are ugly, the buildings are too uniform in build and colouration and the ballast is too clean.” I’m not sure if these are born out by the evidence from the pictures in the article, but we do need more animal droppings on the roads, one could use ruder expressions...
 

Tim

 

If he put that statement  on FaceBook they'd flag it as untrue..........

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2 hours ago, Joseph_Pestell said:

What a strange criticism that the "the architecture is too uniform". When modelling a real location, what is the modeller supposed to do about that?

I am put in mind of an area in my old home town.   Between the railway and the gas works a builder had put up 4 streets of 2 up 2 down terraces over a period of about 4 years in the late 19th century.   As I remember them in the late 1950s/early 1960s they were all private rentals owned by the same landlord.   Every single one was painted the same colour (a sort of s**t brown).   3 streets had a shop on one corner, the 4th had a pub on the equivalent corner - it looked exactly the same as the shops!   The only way you could tell the streets apart was by the name board at the end.

 

John

 

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17 hours ago, CF MRC said:


 

Mr Bennett finishes with some helpful criticisms of CF: “It is totally sterile and thus unconvincing. The scenic areas are too tidy, the street scenes are devoid of population, the buildings are too uniform in build and colouration.
 

Tim

 

In my (very small) art collection I have a painting by Henry Silk. Now while it represents a scene a few miles to the east of CF (Bow) and is a few years earlier, it does to me capture the spirit of lesser known and more ordinary parts of London. I think Mr Bennett would view the painting in the same way as the model. I think it shows that both the people behind CF and Henry Silk exhibit a very high level of observance of detail. I bought the painting as my grandad worked round the corner near Bromley station and the figure could well be him.

Bernard

Silk-94478.jpg.35c8561da0915576ade21008dc6ceb17.jpg

 

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Indeed, arrived here today. With Martin Nield as editor and contributor of the principal layout article, it has an interestingly different feel - definitely into dark satanic mill territory, Simon Fountain's splendid grubby 1930s ex-LNWR locomotives epitomise the atmosphere.

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the buildings are too uniform in build and colouration

 

And here is the architectural critic Sir John Summerson, from Georgian London :

 

"The Act contributed largely to what the later Georgians and early Victorians conceived to be the inexpressible monotony of the typical London street, a monotony which certainly must, at one time, have been overpowering and which can still be felt in the lonelier tracts of Islington..."

 

So CF may have got it spot on....

 

If the gentleman knows a perfect way to disguise baseboard joints, perhaps he could share it with the rest of the world in the form of an article in MRJ......

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8 minutes ago, Ravenser said:

 

If the gentleman knows a perfect way to disguise baseboard joints, perhaps he could share it with the rest of the world in the form of an article in MRJ......

 

"We need a bigger baseboard......."

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On 07/10/2020 at 11:28, Doncaster Green said:

I am put in mind of an area in my old home town.   Between the railway and the gas works a builder had put up 4 streets of 2 up 2 down terraces over a period of about 4 years in the late 19th century.   As I remember them in the late 1950s/early 1960s they were all private rentals owned by the same landlord.   Every single one was painted the same colour (a sort of s**t brown).   3 streets had a shop on one corner, the 4th had a pub on the equivalent corner - it looked exactly the same as the shops!   The only way you could tell the streets apart was by the name board at the end.

Back in the 1970's, I was doing some survey work in Ebbw Vale, and there were rows of houses (as above  in John's note) on the other side of the Valley from the former LNWR Station, 'Row A', 'Row B', 'Row C', etc.,
I think these are now called 'Western Terrace', 'Colliers Row' etc.,

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16 minutes ago, Ravenser said:

 

If the gentleman knows a perfect way to disguise baseboard joints, perhaps he could share it with the rest of the world in the form of an article in MRJ......

 

No names. But there was a club that proposed a exhibition layout on which the baseboard joins would be invisible. The only slight snag was that they needed to set the layout up 24 hours before opening.

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