In the Country

Abstract

This chapter examines how the Great Western Railway promoted its rural destinations to different groups of consumers. The company did not sell a commonplace countryside, but used photographic advertising to offer different visions intended to hold particular resonance with certain interest groups. Medcalf shows how the company honed a picturesque image, and created a fantasy land of historic destinations infused with legend. In the interwar years, as anti-modernism became a popular consideration, the company constructed a timeless village world where rural labour and traditions still thrived. As the company reached out to a popular market, it experimented with a more peopled aesthetic, but even as it built up a more glamourous image, the GWR ensured that these still observed country codes.