Chris Leigh. Britain’s Railways from the Air (1987)

     Chris Leigh. Britain’s Railways from the Air (1987) Leigh has assembled a lovely collection of air photos, many taken in the 1920s and 30s, when aerial photography was difficult, to put it mildly. He reprints a photo showing the photographer hanging onto a large plate camera, while the pilot looks over his shoulder, prior to take off.
     Considering the relatively slow speed of the photo emulsions of the time, the inevitable shaking of the plane itself, and the difficulty of maintaining the aim of the camera, it’s amazing how clear the images are. Actually, even though this book was printed in the late 80s, printing technology was generally still not capable of transferring the film image to the page without a severe loss of detail and a compression of gray scale in the shadows and highlights. Or else the publisher assigned the printing to an older firm still using older technology, and so saved some money. In any case, Leigh often refers to things he must have seen when he examined the original prints or negatives, but which the reader cannot make out. It would be nice to see the book reprinted with current technology, or issued as an e-book with large image files scanned from the negatives.
     Even so, I enjoyed the book. One thing that struck me was the large number of allotments near the railway lines, some of them on a patch of ground between the tracks and an industrial site, and so on. Another thing is how empty much of rural England was before the second world war: the housing estates that now crowd round country towns and villages were almost entirely absent. Some of the railway installations were enormous: it’s difficult to realise how much land railway yards and junctions could take up. Nowadays, the tracks have been lifted from most of them, and the sites host shopping malls, light industries, or apartment blocks. *** (2010)