The Shell Guides: Surrealism, Modernism, Tourism

This exhibition looks at The Shell County Guides which began life in the 1930s when John Betjeman, then a young assistant editor for the Architectural Review, persuaded Jack Beddington at Shell to sponsor a series of guides to the counties of England, beginning in 1934 with Cornwall. Aimed at car-borne metropolitan tourists, the guides sought to be neither too serious nor too shallow and, thanks to contributing artists and authors including Paul and John Nash, Robert Byron and John Piper, have become classic examples of good writing and understated Modernist design, admired long after production ceased in the 1980s.