Gawpers

Aliens could land in Trafalgar Square and exit their flying saucer on the backs of unicorns while a 78 year old Elvis sings ‘The Wonder Of You’ and, you can bet, if the media are present, some gormless British person will  ignore what’s happening right in front of them to turn around and gawp at the camera.

Example 1: this fellow is not interested in Jimmy Pursey and Sham 69’s request for their friend Harry to get a move on: he just wants to look questioningly into the camera and get his slightly defiant face into ten million homes. Well done, Sir, mission accomplished.

It's A Small World

The Model Village,

West Cliff,

Ramsgate,

Kent.

There's something quite poignant about this image: the little girl (who has hopped the fence, I should point out) looks down sadly on an event that she would dearly like to attend but, if she did, would just end up trashing the place with her great clonking feet, like a Home Counties Gojira in Start Rite sandals. The little model people try and ignore her, hoping desperately that she'll go away and menace the High Street or the water mill instead.

Ramsgate Model Village opened in 1953, and closed for good fifty years later, which is rubbish, but more or less exactly would you expect from a crappy year like 2003.

It's A Small World

Modern Town Centre,

Model Village, Babbacombe,

Torquay,

Devon.

I love the message on this postcard, especially the very British way that even a child feels compelled to use the limited space he has to write about the weather even though he's seen The Banana Splits bus and is dying to tell his mate about it. I also like the two different spellings of 'Banana Splits', both wrong. Is it just me, though, or does the Red Arrows bit sound a little bullshitty? Like someone who tells you he once shagged one of Legs and Co, oh, yeah, and her out of Blondie.  

Freedom To Roam

Ah, Caravans. Not a British invention, but a British institution. For such a diffident, singular race, the caravan provides a fantastic way for us to exercise our freedom to go wherever we damn well please, but to take our own private space with us. A caravan is a little like a mobile embassy: wherever it stops in the world that patch of ground technically belongs to the family inside, who will normally be brewing up and remarking upon how wonderful it is to be able to make a cup of tea whenever you feel like it, despite not being at home.

Here are some images culled from a BBC documentary called 'Caravans: A British Love Affair'.

I wonder what she's looking at? Rhyl, perhaps.



Family time. There's nothing else to do.



An early wooden caravan / home from home.



Coleopatra.



A typical caravanning trip.

England, Paris.

 

Sam Alper, the Henry Ford of the UK caravan industry



NOT Kessingland.

When I was in my teens, we had a caravan. We did Wales and Devon and Cornwall and all that but, mostly, we went to Kessingland in Suffolk (about sixty miles from home). It's a lovely place, but there's not much to do there or in nearby metropolis Lowestoft if you're 14, and you soon exhaust that small supply of excitement if you go every fucking weekend, so I grew to resent the place and the way it cut into my burgeoning social life. Now I have a job and a family of my own, of course, I'd love to go to Kessingland every weekend, especially now Lowestoft has that new wind turbine.

Credit Union

  

A faded but nonetheless wonderful title sequence from the days when the Encyclopaedia Britannica used to make fascinating television documentaries, not to mention actual Encyclopedias (instead of just having an online presence). Title sequences are great, aren't they? Well, the good ones are. The great ones are amazing.

Four Great British Discoveries

The Split Atom. Ernest Rutherford to the right.

Steel.



D.N.A.



The Sandwich.

Yes, I know Rutherford was born in New Zealand, but he was British in every other respect.