Lost Moments in Time

Batsford Colour Books, with their haunting photographic images of rural Britain, have long held a strange allure for me. Published during the 1960s and ’70s, they offered a pictorial celebration of different regions of the country accompanied by an introduction and commentary on each image. This may sound mundane, but to enter the world of these books is at times like being in a mysterious dream.

Most of the colour plates are curiously devoid of people. The streets of towns and villages lie deserted, as though some apocalypse has swept the land, leaving it on the point of reverting back to nature. In The Batsford Colour Book of the Cotswolds, for example, with its twenty-four views of village streets, farmsteads and inns, I can find only three people, and they are tiny figures hardly discernible in the quiet landscape. The places shown in The Batsford Colour Book of Sussex are largely empty too, save for a flock of sheep below the trees at Chanctonbury, three riders at Alfriston and four diminutive figures sitting on a bench in the far corner of the garden at Bateman’s – Rudyard Kipling’s country home – one of whom, in her long white dress, has an oddly Edwardian appearance. This emptiness was probably the result of photographers taking advantage of the ‘golden hours’ of early morning and late evening when the light was at its best. Combined with the passing of years, though, it gives the pictures a surreal quality. I’ve never visited Anne of Cleves’s strange-looking house at Ditchling or gazed up at the Long Man of Wilmington carved into the chalk of Windover Hill, but when I see these places in an old Batsford book they arouse feelings of nostalgic melancholy for a lost moment in time. Evocative rural place names are an added bonus. In the 1973 Cotswold book we’re introduced to Stow-on-the-Wold, Lower and Upper Slaughter, Kelmscott and Great Tew. The Batsford Colour Book of Shakespeare’s Country offers us Compton Wynyates, Lower Quinton and Henley-in-Arden, aural poetry to complement the pictorial. There were earlier Batsford Books such as Jane Tregarthen’s 1957 Devon and Cornwall in Colour, but the colour reproductions were rather primitive. Within the space of a few years, however, production techniques had advanced to create clearer images which nevertheless retained a mellow painterly quality that today’s super-sharp digital photography sadly lacks. The one essential Batsford colour book of the 1960s era is Britain in Colour (1964) which effectively provides a foretaste of the later regional titles. Through eighty pictures, the book takes us on a visual journey round an idealized vision of the country – a land of half- timbered houses, cathedrals, stately homes, village inns, dramatic coastlines and mountain grandeur. The United Kingdom, it seems, has no industrial cities, no heavy traffic, no noise. There are images of the tourist sights of London, certainly, but the capital is part of that vision of Albion that the Batsford books revel in – just as the great composers Elgar, Holst and Vaughan Williams, drawing inspiration from the countryside, also wrote music in celebration of Britain’s largest metropolis. The commentaries in Britain in Colour are by the Welsh naturalist R. M. Lockley. They are brief, unhurried and historical in tone. Here he writes of Bourton-on-the-Water, Gloucestershire: A sizable village of utopian beauty. The clear waters of the Windrush, glittering with star-wort and water plants, invite the visitor to stand and stare. He will see fine trout swimming in this stream which rises a few miles away in the Cotswold Hills. The bridges are elegant, the streets broad, and the trees charmingly arranged. As with any good pictorial anthology, you can sometimes pick it up and discover an image you have no recollection of ever having seen before. On such occasions the book itself takes on an enchantment every bit as mysterious as the deserted sunlit villages which grace its pages. The photograph of Hoops Inn, Horn Cross, North Devon, is like a setting for an episode of The Avengers – another very British cultural phenomenon that frequently conjured up scenes of a country largely emptied of its inhabitants. While R. M. Lockley largely confines himself to the factual and historical, J. H. B. Peel in the 1969 book England in Colour tends more to the lyrical, often ending his text with a few lines from one of the great poets. Peel was then a popular commentator on country matters through his regular column in the Daily Telegraph, and on radio and television (see SF no. 36). Other expert writers for the series included Gary Hogg, covering the Cotswolds and Shakespeare’s country; John Hyams on Dorset; and H. E. Whitaker on Yorkshire. Knowledgeable as the writers were, they undoubtedly played second fiddle to the photographers – indeed, one can easily enjoy a Batsford book without ever reading the text. Among the stalwarts of Batsford colour photography were the New Zealand-born landscape photographer Noel Habgood; the architectural specialist A. F. Kersting, who still used a plate camera; and Kenneth Scowen, who often contributed the lion’s share of images. All three were much in demand at the time not just from Batsford but for books in the Country Life and Pevsner Guide series as well. Good colour photography still had novelty value back then and picture books featuring the British landscape were very much in vogue. Country Life published titles in a larger format, while Colourmaster International specialized in sharp and bright images. For me though, the Batsford books have the edge. They are almost square in shape, light to hold and easy to handle, and there is never any need to up-end the book to view pictures in landscape format. Batsford books delighted in the past and deplored the ravages of encroaching modernity. They appeared at a time of great urban expansion when new motorways were cutting swathes across formerly green spaces. John Norwood in The Batsford Colour Book of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight writes in his introduction that Basingstoke was once ‘a small market and industrial town of plain but honest character’ but is now ‘a poor shadow of its former self, re-planned out of recognition and surrounded by a strangulating system of ring roads’. Judith Glover in her Sussex book speaks of the ‘steamroller influence of the developers’. If Batsford Colour Books could be said to have a purpose or philosophy it is eloquently summed up by R. M. Lockley in Britain in Colour: We can only hope that modern planning will not obliterate so much that is beautiful and irreplaceable in Britain. Our purpose is to show that much remains to make this country worth living in, and worth special effort to preserve. And we can all strive towards that preservation. Britain will become a dull ant heap if we continue to smother the country with concrete. It’s this steely thread of conservational zeal that saves the Batsford series from being mere picturesque escapism. The photographers and writers who contributed to the enterprise may have presented Britain in idealized, even mythic, terms, but their call to arms is as relevant today as it was sixty years ago. To enter this peaceful world is to find a beautiful, gentle and unhurried place touched with an air of mystery. It’s a realm many of us would like to live in.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 88 © David Fleming 2025