Back in the early twentieth century, when picture postcards were all the rage, the subjects reflected what people saw as important, what they were proud of, what - to them - represented their home towns and villages. There were, of course, many pictures of celebrity music hall stars and vacuous views of pretty nothingness; but there were also grand public buildings - town halls, churches, and museums. There was a municipal pride that seems to have sadly evaporated as the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first.
So if you were writing to a Belgium beauty from Edwardian Halifax, what better image to send her than one of the finely proportioned Bankfield Museum. The subtext doesn't seem to say, "look at the fine homes the rich and famous can live in", but, "look at what we can create together when we are proud of our collective history".
You are so right, and it is so sad to see these grand municipal buildings decaying, or even sold off. When we lived in Chester Road in the 1980s the Bankfield Museum housed our local library and I used to take my two small children up there for their books.
ReplyDelete