C O N T E X T 1 1 6 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 0 7 to enable detailed decisions to be taken about any redecoration, and the contractor to apply the chosen colours. The author contrasts this to the method commonly adopted for fine-art subjects. This often starts with a careful surface examination, but employs a limited number of cross-sections to confirm the perceived paint structure. At the Soane Museum, the unravelling of schemeupon-scheme of plain architectural paintwork required a more extensive series of cross-sections (155 in all). The final article looks at the work of the largely ignored architect George Smith (1783–1869) in Hertfordshire, the county of his birth. It outlines the context of the time, particularly the changes in architectural training and practice which had taken place prior to this period. It explores some of Smith’s public and residential buildings, in St Albans in particular. Your reviewer recently received for the first time The Institution of Civil Engineers Proceedings on Engineering History and Heritage, which may be an occasional source of interest to readers in future. Volume 163, issue EH2 (May 2010) deals with historic highways on the Antrim coast, in the USA and Italy, the Preston by-pass (the UK’s first motorway) and the M1. Some readers will recall the Twentieth Century Society’s concerns about the fate of the bridges of highly characteristic design on the M1 where carriageway widening is being contemplated. Considering the impact of roads on our history and culture, and on the character of our towns and countryside, perhaps we should consider ‘highway listing’ for the best examples? Bob Kindred MBE EngineeringHistory andHeritage volume 163 • issue EH2 May 2010 pages 63–136 Institution of Civil Engineers Engineering History and Heritage Highways The Antrim Coast Road – a civil engineering legacy Highway design by highwaymen Two pioneering American roadways Autostrade: the Italian interwar achievement Documenting New York’s Bronx River Parkway, USA Preston By-pass: the firstmotorway in the UK TheM1: Britain’s first inter-urban motorway www.engineeringhistoryandheritage.com ISSN 1751-9430 Proceedingsof the InstitutionofCivilEngineers volume163• issueEH2 May 2010 he ilEngineers ueEH2 From An Introduction to Railway Architecture by Christian Barman (1950) The men who built our railway stations had three important things to think of. The first was to build practically and strongly, to satisfy Wootton’s first two conditions of firmness and commodity. Their buildings had a job to do, and this job must be done in a sound, workmanlike manner. In the typical station house the job was a straightforward and familiar one; elsewhere, as in the cantilevered verandas and in the great train sheds, it was a novel and adventurous job requiring new kinds of skill and often a high degree of confidence and pluck. This kind of problem is a typical engineer’s problem, involving mainly physical factors and only incidentally concerned with human ones. There are great spaces to be bridged and covered, and the spaces must be encumbered with the fewest possible supports. Not since the days of the great cathedrals had the constructor of buildings been faced with such a challenge. The second thing these designers had to consider was the relation of their work to the prevailing visual environment. The craftsmen and engineers who made our railways were not themselves men of culture, but they understood and respected the great humanist tradition. They did not want their iron machines or their iron structures to offend against this tradition; they preferred that their work should be well received by the environment in which it was placed. It was inevitable that the assumption of power by a new social class should involve many breaks with the past; but the new leaders had no desire to break unnecessarily and indeed all their work shows how earnestly they strove to maintain a sense of continuity. Their buildings were often strange and curiously shaped, but the people who designed them did their best to show that they could fit in and belong. There was also a third problem to which the railway builders paid much attention. They were constructors, they were guardians of a great tradition, but they were at the same time the leaders and organisers of the greatest adventure in the world. For that is how the railways of England were regarded not only by their creators but by the more thoughtful of their contemporaries. These men were out to conquer space, they were out to establish civilisation in a new dimension, not only in their own country but throughout the world. They sought to express this sense of leadership in their architecture. The humanist culture had placed a high value on the idea of leadership. Its architects had known how to project that idea in terms of building. They had also been working on another idea, the idea of military victory. Vanbrugh’s great composition in honour of the victory of Blenheim had been followed on the other side of the Channel by a long, systematic exploitation of the same theme under Napoleon which went on until his eclipse at Waterloo was celebrated by the building of the finest classical bridge in the world. The railway builders knew, as everybody knew, that the day of great military victories had passed; but they also knew that another very different sort of victory was at hand. Napoleon has left bigger arches than Stephenson, but he never left a grander one. In the triumphal porticoes of Euston and Birmingham, of Newcastle and Huddersfield, the conquest over nature’s forces is even more apparent than is the dominant position attained by those who had laboured to bring that victory about.
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