Now & Then An English Art

This is a joyous example of english creation - the painstaking, low-key and unselfconscious recreation of an entire railway station, and its temporary installation on the original site on a fine day.

I have also put a picture of the station in 1937. This railway closed in 1940.

Both pictures are taken from a great site about this railway, and a link is given to it in the list on the right.

Edward Thomas And The Suburbs

Here are two things from Edward Thomas's 'The South Country' (1909):

in a suburb, I have had the same yearning when, on a fine still morning of May or June, in streets away from the traffic, I have seen through the open windows a cool white-curtained shadowy room, and in it a table with white cloths and gleaming metal and glass laid thereon, and nobody has yet come down to open the letters. It all seems to be the work of spirit hands. It is beautiful and calm and celestial, and is a profound pleasure - tinged by melancholy - to see

and

I spent most of my poor earnings on clothes; I took the trouble to talk and smoke and think as much as possible like the other nine young men in the railway carriage that took me into the city; I learned their horrible, cowardly scorn for those who were poor or outlandish, and for all things that were not like those in their own houses or in those of the richer people of their acquaintance or envy. We were slaves, and we gilded our collars

(available from Little Toller books - see the link above)