Model Ships and Railways

This coloured lithograph depicts the interior of the model shop run by toy manufacturing firm Bassett-Lowke at 112 High Holborn, London. In the centre is a display case containing ship models, including several small sailing vessels, a larger square-rigged ship and a steamship. To the left is another display case containing models of an anchor, a steam train and a railway wagon. The shop counter is visible on the right. Further models of sailing vessels stand atop the display cases.

The print come from a series of twenty-four lithographs of shops and businesses that Eric Ravilious produced for ‘High Street’, an illustrated book printed by Curwen Press and published in 1938 by Country Life with text by J.M. Richards.

Ravilious conceived the idea for the book together with his lover and fellow artist Helen Binyon, with whom he had previously planned to collaborate on an ‘A-Z of shops’. He took inspiration from Soviet children’s books featuring lithographed scenes of everyday life and French children’s books depicting shop fronts, such as those by Père Castor. Although initially declined by the Golden Cockerel Press, Ravilious’s illustrations were picked up by Noel Carrington, an adviser to Country Life Publications, and Richards was commissioned to write the accompanying text, which included quotations from the featured shopkeepers.

All the prints depicted real-life businesses that were operating in Ravilious’s time, but the project was also tinged with nostalgia. Many of the highly specialised shops selected for inclusion in ‘High Street’ were already anachronistic in the 1930s, a time when department and chain stores (‘big multiple stores’, as Richards calls them in the book) were on the rise, bringing greater uniformity to British high streets.

‘High Street’ sold well and was favourably reviewed upon its publication in 1938, and the book and its prints subsequently became coveted collectors’ items, especially after the original lithographic plates were destroyed in the Blitz, preventing the printing of further copies. Ravilious himself was another victim of the Second World War, dying on active service as an official war artist when his aircraft was lost in 1942.

Another print from ‘High Street’, depicting Siebe, Gorman & Co. Ltd’s diving supplies shop at 187 Westminster Bridge Road, London, is ZBB0505.