Wales, 1937

Here at OT we love old tourism posters, for the artwork, for the great views and for their depiction of a lost time when travel was slow, and the payoff of a grand vista or an unknown restaurant unfolded at a leisurely pace. The British Railway system has been producing fantastic pop-art posters for almost a hundred years now. In fact, many of our ideas about the bucolic beauty of the British countryside come from these posters and postcards.

Take this gorgeous poster of the Great Western Railway (GWR) describing the charms of the Welsh landscape. Featured here is the epic profile of the mountain Cadair Idris and the Afon Mawddach lake in the southern end of the Snowdonia National Park. An old branch line of the GWR used to run from Ruabon to the seaside resort of Barmouth, bringing weekend tourists to this area. Today, that train line is a 13-km cycle trail managed by the Snowdonia National Park Authority.

The artist who created this and many other GWR posters was Sir Herbert Alker Tripp, a senior police official with the New Scotland Yard, who always viewed painting as his true calling. This he did in his spare time, and most of his paintings turned into tourism posters by various branches of the British Railway system.