ADDING LOCAL COLOUR
Colour is an important element in a model scene, helping buildings and structures to portray a specific location. CHRIS LEIGH explains why.
If we speak of ‘an English country cottage’ or ‘a northern city with street upon street of terraced houses’, we conjure up a particular picture in our minds. We’ll think of heavy granite construction in Cornwall, chocolate-box thatched cottages in Dorset and the honeycoloured stone of Cotswold villages. Building materials and types of construction are great ways of setting the location of your layout. For instance, brick construction and clay tiles are comparatively unusual in Cornwall because there was no significant local source and, being heavy, they were expensive to transport. We can, however, become so influenced by what is familiar to us that we choose the wrong styles or materials for the area we’re trying to represent. Back in the 1980s, I commissioned the well-known railway artist George Heiron to paint a picture of a train at Thorpe Lane crossing, close to my home in Staines. It was based on a photograph and it even has me as a schoolboy in the picture. However, the terrace of Victorian houses in the background is depicted in the pink sandstone of Bristol, rather than the yellow London bricks that they should be. George was a Bristolian and, in the absence of a colour guide, painted what was familiar to him. Some building materials are limited to very specific locations. For instance, Marland bricks are cream in colour and were made of clay from the Petrockstowe belt. This was quarried around the Torrington area and was served by an extensive narrow gauge railway, part of which was incorporated into the 1925-built Torrington-halwill Junction line. A quarter of a million of these bricks were used in the construction of the Lynton & Barnstaple Railway’s Chelfham Viaduct, yet Barnstaple itself boasts terraced houses built in Marland bricks (with attractive string courses of red bricks). Furthermore, the well-known former works of Shapland & Petter, on the south bank of the Taw, is of similar construction. I referred earlier to ‘yellow London bricks’ but the area where I grew up is 20 miles south-west of London and, though referred to as ‘yellow’, the bricks in question give an overall brown impression, or at best, a yellowish brown. Yellow London stock bricks were generally made from excavated London clay near the site of construction. They were widely used for housing, until displaced by the spread of Flettons; arguably the most common brick type. Flettons boast a pinkish red colour and are derived from clay pits near Peterborough, Stewartby and the Marston Vale area of Bedfordshire. Production rose to 1.5 billion bricks per year in the late 1930s, and at their peak, in 1973, these brickworks produced 2.88 billion bricks – 43% of the UK’S output. As a consequence, they’ve been used widely across England, save for further-flung areas. While it’s worth researching the primary building materials of the specific area you are modelling, the era in which the structures were built is also important. Modern buildings may well feature bricks that have been transported considerable distances, now that transporting them is simpler. Modern buildings also use fewer bricks, employed commonly as decorative rather than structural features, thus justifying the additional expense of ‘special’ bricks rather than those available locally.