Overview

Guiding Lights takes a tour of the coast of England, visiting the immense variety of lighthouses on headlands, cliff tops, harbours and jetties, even some many miles from the sea.

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9781841590462

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This is one of a series of little books dedicated to photographs of neglected architecture. Colourful and compact, they are expressly designed to fit snugly into a pocket. One can easily imagine slipping them out on a journey or in a waiting room, transforming a boring hour into an experience to be recalled with pleasure. But they are little in a rather Napoleonic fashion, small but with great ambition. Peter Ashley is a photographer of genius. Lighthouses have an inherent poetry, but Ashley is also quick to spot their transparent charm, sometimes even absurdist. He writes of a lighthouse striding with 'charisma' across the River Tyne, and the Withernsea Lighthouse popping up from among the houses 'like a monstrous garden ornament'. The other books in the series are equally attractive. It is not difficult to see bridges as beautiful or romantic as, in Bridging the Gap, he follows their patterns and settings from a simple tree across a stream to the slender modernity of the Humber Bridge, an 'aerial experience' 520 feet above the river at high water. His skill shows plainly in the less obviously pictorial themes of railway architecture, in Whistle Stops, and pubs and inns, in Local Heroes, all of which he reveals as astonishingly varied. It is not only the architecture of pubs and stations, set in cities or villages or lonely moorland, that catches his intelligent eye, but the details of these buildings. To take a single example: in the railway stations of south-east England there are over 200 fretwork patterns to be discovered in the wooden valences on the platform canopies. The purpose of these canopies was to deflect wind, rain, smoke and steam away from the traveller, but this function has inspired delicate fantasies of fret and curve. Guiding Lights is perhaps the most amusing of the four books, but all have charisma, to use Ashley's word. Ashley convinces us that we miss too much of the excitement of visual pleasure through dull inattention. A series to cherish. Review by Sister Wendy Beckett. (Kirkus UK)

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