A visual feast of British nostalgia that was three years in the making

THE Travelling Art Galleries film documentary, a history of railway carriage prints, is a joint project between Greg Norden, his film-maker son James (with additional help from his eldest son, Sam), and TV presenter Nick Crane, and has been in the making for three years.

An initial three-day visit by Greg and James to Yorkshire secured still and aerial camera drone shots of various carriage print locations in the county, including Robin Hoods Bay, Scarborough, Pickering and Whitby, and was followed by the pair visiting Northfields and Upminster stations on the London Underground filming 1938 Tube stock.

Further visits were to Wolverton viaduct and other eastern England carriage print subjects, two days on the Llangollen Railway in north Wales, where they were joined by Nick, and another two days at the Bluebell Railway and the Locomotive Storage Ltd facility in Margate, where a SR 4-SUB EMU brought memories back to Greg of commuting on the Southern Region.

Location

January 2020 saw Greg, James and Nick filming in Lincolnshire, firstly at Boston and then Deeping St James, where Greg met ‘Wolfie', the professional darts player Martin Adams, in the local pub during a break in filming. “I rather wisely declined an offer to play him,” reminisced Greg.

Meanwhile, in a large manor close to Greg's Northampton home, Sam, a carpenter, was busy building a mock railway carriage compartment for filming carriage prints, photographs, advertisements and maps, which were interchanged in the frames for the different themes.

Nick spent a day presenting in the ‘railway compartment' and in a makeshift ‘art gallery' in an adjacent room, and Greg was also filmed recording pieces to camera. “I was very wooden at first, but slowly improved,” he said. Voiceovers were also carried out, and the bulk of the filming was completed just before the first Covid-19 lockdown, which ironically provided Greg and James with the opportunity to carry out months of editing.

In the film, which also includes black-and-white, colour-tinted and sepia photographs of Britain and the development of maps, Nick puts under the microscope the artists who drew the carriage prints and also recalls memories of one of those artists, his great-aunt Freda Marston, who exhibited countrywide and was the only female artist commissioned by the LMS, LNER and BR to produce carriage prints and posters.

Result

Travelling Art Galleries is filmed in HD for streaming and downloads, and produced as a DVD, while a six-minute trailer is also available. The finished work is, says Greg, “a visual feast of watercolour art, railway history and British nostalgia.”