Rail poster for ramblers, 1936

This is the most colourful of the posters we have acquired through the project to date. It is the summer number in a series of four - one for each season - created by in-house poster designer Audrey Weber (1917-50) for the Southern Railway. Very deliberately, the countryside is visually depicted in the most attractive light in order to draw suburban commuters waiting on noisy and crowded platforms to the tranquil joys of rambling. The date is 1936, just a year after the formal creation of The Ramblers' Association which provided a national focus for what had become a highly popular pastime. The Southern Railway served counties to the south and west of London and had an obvious commercial incentive in promoting leisure journeys out into the countryside rather than just business travel into the city.

Escape from the town, 1920s

The two posters here, recently acquired, date from 1926. The message on both is central to the theme of this project and the relationship between town and country. They are by F.Gregory Brown (1887-1941), well known in the interwar years as a landscape painter, illustrator and textile designer. For the railway companies, the great popularity at the time of hiking and rambling offered positive marketing opportunities for their commuter routes in the off-peak weekend periods.


Writing of Manchester in this time, C.E.M.Joad wrote 'singly, in couples, in groups or organized in clubs young people have formed the habit of going on Saturdays and Sundays and, increasingly, for the whole weekend, into the country. You can see the living witnesses of this revolution at the Central Station at Manchester early on a Sunday morning, complete with rucksacks, shorts and hob-nailedboots, waiting for the early trains to Edale, Hope and the Derbyshire moors. Looking at them, one might be tempted to think that the whole of Manchester was in exodus' (from The Untutored Townsman's Invasion of the Country, 1946.