ARTS  |
| A visitor walks through Bekonscot model village |
Just below the algae-specked surface of the moat, monstrous fish glide past Epwood Castle. These horrible, bloated carp have bulging eyes as big as the boulders beneath the castle walls. A Brobdingnagian bird flies by, its wings casting a shadow over a whole suburban street, and then lands in a patch of green. Elsewhere, hundreds of people have been frozen solid in their tracks, captured in a moment, while clouds of smoke rise from the roof of a burnt-out building.
This is not an apocalyptic film set but Bekonscot, the oldest miniature village in the world, which next month celebrates its 80th birthday. Opened by accountant Roland Callingham in his back garden in Buckinghamshire, this strange, static version of an English idyll has attracted nearly 15m visitors since 1929.
Bekonscot, squeezed between semis and a superstore in the pleasant dormitory town of Beaconsfield, is the most complete example of what appears to be a peculiarly English obsession, a whimsical cocktail of miniature villages, model railways and ornamental gardens. It is a second-hand picture of what life looked like in the Ladybird books of my schooldays.
Like most other model villages in England, it offers a snapshot of a bygone world of local shops, village greens, friendly bobbies, idyllic pubs and a perfect balance between town and country. However, the comforts of technology and the mechanisms of suburbanisation are all present: electric lights, steam trains; cars; delivery trucks; even an airport. There is a mine, a fishing village, a seaside town, a funfair, a zoo and that on-fire house, which is periodically extinguished by a static fire brigade. New models are added every year.
Miniaturisation is a recurring British cultural phenomenon. The richness of our children’s literature is unimaginable without it, from Gulliver’s Travels to Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows and The Borrowers. These are archetypal tales that play games with scale, humans exiled to tiny worlds or becoming playthings in the world of giants, or the tales of little people inhabiting miniature parallel worlds constructed from the detritus of our everyday existence.
The writer Will Self, a big fan of Bekonscot’s reduced reality, picks up on the theme in his druggy short story “Scale” in which the morphine-addicted protagonist lives beside the model village and is surprised to find a replica of his own house there, which he enters only to find another, yet smaller version, and so on. All Self’s works were recently reissued with jackets based on Liam Bailey’s photographs of blurry, scaleless figures taken at ground level at Bekonscot.
There are 17 other model villages in the UK open to the public. Some, like the one at Corfe Castle, capture a historic moment (before the town was destroyed in the civil war), others the moment they were built, like the beautiful village at Wimborne Minster, completed in 1951, which has become a curious mirror of the real and now far less picturesque town. All are the result of passionate hobbyists’ desire for completeness, for accuracy in the relentless search for miniaturisation.
Tim Dunn, 28, who works in online marketing, has long been involved with Bekonscot, having grown up locally, and still volunteers there. He is also an expert on the history of model villages. “The earliest model villages were very rural,” he says. “The first ones were in people’s gardens and they were about creating a vision of a rural England that never existed. They began in cottage gardens and their scale is appropriate to that. The buildings are vernacular, rural because that was also what was appropriate. Bekonscot began as a ‘Swiss village’ of a kind that was popular at the time in ornamental gardens.”
But aren’t most of the villages we see today suburban rather than rural or Alpine? “They are a product of their environment. The people who built the ones we see today lived in the suburbs and they tended to be built on a whim rather than with a masterplan, growing from a few houses into a village.” But there is also, Dunn proposes, an idealism, even utopianism at work. “There’s some evidence to suggest that Callingham built Bekonscot not to show how life had been but how it could be. It is a miniature version of the Garden City movement.”
This didacticism is highlighted in the correspondence between the two meanings of “model village”. There is the miniature and there is the exemplar. The latter group includes Saltaire in Bradford, the vision of Victorian factory owner and philanthropist Titus Salt. Now a Unesco World Heritage site, it is one of many utopian settlements built in response to the brutal conditions of the industrial world. Dame Henrietta Barnett’s posh Hampstead Garden Suburb in its frozen tweeness is the model of the Arts & Crafts fantasy .
These model villages remain a powerful part of the British psyche. But today we have returned to an even earlier, feudal model with Poundbury, built on Duchy of Cornwall land in Dorchester, Dorset, using the Prince of Wales’s principles on town planning, a paradigm of traditional values and design. It is, in its way, as weird as Bekonscot, a toy-town plaything blown up rather than reduced.
Sam Jacob, a British architect whose practice FAT makes wonderful buildings that look like joyful toys blown up to actual scale, is intrigued by model villages. “Modern landscapes can be alienating, seemingly indifferent to you as an individual,” he says. “By shrinking the town it changes the power relationship. They are a way of compressing reality into something more digestible and they allow you to get a sense of the whole society working. It’s a way of seeing and understanding how the world works. What is it that makes a place? What is it that makes a society? What makes us? It overcomes our alienation by giving us a god’s-eye perspective.”
God’s eye or Godzilla’s eye? There is something very strange about seeing children towering over houses and churches. Model villages may have been conceived in a spirit of nostalgia and affection but there is something undeniably creepy about the leap in scale from macro to micro. Even jovial Tim Dunn can’t help but agree: “There can be something Stepford Wives about it, the Village of the Damned.”
It is this uneasiness and sense of the sinister that has made the miniature a recurring motif in art. Last year Rachel Whiteread exhibited her impressive collection of second hand doll’s houses at the Hayward Gallery’s Psycho Buildings. Illuminated from inside but emptied of life and both decorated with and haunted by the remnants of former owners’ left-over wallpapers they glowed eerily in the dark gallery. “It’s a suburban vision of England,” she told me in a deadpan voice.
The London-based Dutch artist Madelon Vriesendorp makes landscapes that are densely populated by endless crowds of badly manufactured Statues of Liberty, Mickey Mice, Leaning Towers of Pisa, Smurfs and Mexican Day of the Dead skeletons. This teeming city is the contemporary, urban version, the global model village, a wonderful riot of outrageous difference and badly remembered, garish images. Vriesendorp, married to architect Rem Koolhaas (whose passion in architecture is, ironically, what he has termed “bigness”), fondly remembers taking their children to Bekonscot: “Children don’t really know about scale. Ours used to get down to the level of the houses on their hands and knees and imagine themselves part of it, just like boys get their heads right down on the floor to play with their cars, putting themselves into the perspective.” If there is a sense in which the model village is a peculiarly English phenomenon, deeply embedded in a particular idea of yearning for a romanticised past, there is, in fact, nothing particularly English about them – it is more that the English themselves would like to see this kind of eccentricity as unique and central to their being.
According to Will Self, “Bekonscot is a simulacrum of small town middle England, a timeless arcadia. It is a depiction of the sort of place Prince Charles would be happy for us all to live, a silver-wedding, commemorative-plate, biscuit-tin place.”
In fact, as the poster for the International Association of Miniature Parks at Bekonscot shows, this is a truly international phenomenon. What is compelling about the national variants is the distinct agenda that each brings to their interpretation of the theme. Mini-Europe in Brussels is an impressively, almost obsessively, detailed amalgam of European capitals, which are placed intimately close to each other, a closeness they never have in the nearby real parliament.
The Dutch mini-city of Madurodam in The Hague was conceived in part as a war memorial. After the completion of Schipol airport, it became the biggest construction project in the Netherlands.
These miniature villages almost exclusively concentrate on a banal version of tourist cliché or local nostalgia. The only modernist building in Bekonscot is an homage to Berthold Lubetkin’s spiralling concrete penguin pool (1934) in London Zoo. Dunn justifies this quite sensibly: “It’s much easier to build a tiny half-timbered cottage than a glass skyscraper. Also, all model villages are built by obsessives. A fixed date in the past gives them a focus.”
There was a brief moment in the mid-20th century when the first Futurama began to take off, most notably the futuristic vision of a potential city shown at the New York World’s Fair of 1939. This was a modernist fantasy of a 1960s of freeways and skyscrapers.
Do Bekonscot and the Futurama, built only a decade apart, tell us anything about ourselves, about our own cities? Self says, “The small scale is fascinating but also, when you look up close, you see how distorted these figures are. It also brings attention to the disparities in scale inherent in our own built environment. If you look closely at the models and the shop displays, then pull back from the small view, it all looks wrong, the scale of the grass, then trains. Our own cities are just as out of scale.”
Perhaps it is that combination of the ideal and the strange, the controlled and static miniature world and the huge and frightening changing world that draws generations of children and, perhaps more importantly, their parents, back to Bekonscot and its descendants. Ultimately, these model villages are a suburban riposte to the romanticism of the English garden with its follies, grottoes and fake ruins. Both refer to half-remembered, half-mythical, bucolic worlds, one of arcadia and the other of suburbia. “In some ways,” says Self, “the miniature is the archetypal artwork. In its own way even the Sistine Chapel is a miniature. I always refer to what Claude Lévi-Strauss said, ‘When we alter scale we sacrifice the sensible in favour of the intelligible.’”
Ultimately, that is what these miniature places do. They allow us, as in a dream, to step outside the everyday and perceive it instead from above. It then becomes something full of wonder, just as the most mundane and familiar landscape becomes mesmerically fascinating when seen from an aircraft. These tiny towns transform through scale and, through making everything artificial and strange, make it all fascinating again.
Bekonscot’s birthday celebrations are on August 5;www.bekonscot.co.uk
Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture correspondent
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A close-up view of miniature art
Miniature art first became fashionable in the 1500s, when there was a vogue for painted portrait miniatures at Henry VIII’s court, writes Isabel Berwick. Five hundred years later, artists continue to find inspiration in tiny representations of people and places, and by playing with our notions of scale.
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| Willard Wigan’s ‘Nine Camels in the Eye of a Needle’ |
www.willard-wigan.com
Museum in a Shoebox is a new online project that mimics a real art museum, complete with café with model people in it and a model summer pavilion in the grounds.
Created by the Swedish artist Kristina Dalberg, it presents real and imaginary works by real and imaginary artists.
www.museuminashoebox.com
Charles LeDray, a New York-based artist, has a show called Men’s Suits featuring racks of hand-made, scaled down suits and other men’s clothes. The show, which runs until September 20 at the Fire Station in London W1, took three years to prepare and each piece is perfect but scaled down for tiny people of 2½ft tall.
www.artangel.org.uk
Thomas Doyle, a US artist, makes works on a 1:43 scale and smaller. These complex and peopled worlds are often enclosed under glass, “allowing for the intimacy one might feel peering into a museum display case or doll’s house”, says Doyle.
www.thomasdoyle.net
Ron Mueck is a well-known Australia-born “hyper-realist” working in the UK who began as a TV model-maker and now produces minutely detailed and disturbing human models, scaled down – and scaled up. His work includes “Man in Blankets”, an old man scaled down, and “Boy”, a 5m model of an adolescent made for London’s Millennium Dome.
