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  • The Shell Guides: Surrealism, Modernism, Tourism

  • Until Nov 2 2008
    • Critics' Choice
  • This event has finished
  • Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture, Cat Hill, Hertfordshire, Barnet, EN4 8HT

  • By Sara O’Reilly

    Posted: Mon Feb 25 2008

  • Opening on Tuesday at Middlesex University’s Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture is an exhibition on 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 aimed at the new breed of four-wheeled metropolitan tourists.

    The artists associated with the guides represent some of the best British creative talent of the mid-twentieth century, including Paul and John Nash, Robert Byron and John Piper. What they also had in common was an interest in architecture and the built environment and the ways in which these related to the landscape. Their fascination with the combination of old and new was demonstrated in the Shell guides by a graphic layout that blended the contemporary style of the Architectural Review with arcane nineteenth-century typefaces.

    It was also evident in the guides’ attention to both modern architecture and obscure pagan festivals. Illustrated using the most modern and often surrealist photographs, small intimate sketches by the authors and reproductions of English romantic and popular prints, the Shell guides  have become classic examples of good writing and understated modernist design, admired long after production ceased in the 1980s when the British discovered Abroad.

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