Things that look like they should

According to prototype theory (Eleanor Rosch, University of California at Berkeley, and others), as we discover our world from the earliest days of childhood onwards, for the many kinds of object and situation we encounter, we subconsciously select our “best” example, our favourite or “central” one. Often this is the one we run into first, or the one closest to home, or the one with which we are most familiar. So it might be an armchair, a TV set, kettle, tree, bicycle, greenhouse, Christmas dinner, snowstorm, dogturd, uncle, or whatever – or a little further afield, a cinema, lollipop lady, seaside resort, windmill, football match, classroom, mountain, or motorway service area. Subsequently, those early experiences influence our preferences and even our understanding and use of language. While the most insistent effects soon wane with age and exposure to many other instances, to an extent we always retain those homely, local, paradigm examples, against which all other instances are likely to be found wanting - even official, important, generally rated as best, or “metropolitan” examples. Not that we normally make that comparison consciously or deliberately.

Never mind; it’s only a theory. On Friday I visited Oakham, the county town of Rutland. Oakham (slightly remarkably) still has a station, originally on the Midland Railway from St Pancras to Nottingham via Corby, the Harringworth viaduct and Melton Mowbray. Though still sometimes used as a diversionary route for the Midland line, these days most trains calling at Oakham are en route along a rather tortuous journey between the West Midlands and East Anglia. During my brief visit on Friday the electronic display was advising that the train to Stansted Airport was delayed. No clue as to how much delayed, although it was already some 15 minutes overdue. A predictably uninformative recorded announcement was hectoring the victims waiting on the platform to “remember the Three Esses”, which as far as I recall stands for “Screw you, Suckers, Sod off”. I was so glad not to be enduring that familiar irritating predicament, and could walk away from it.

At the south end of Oakham is a level crossing, for a main road near to wide and complex junctions, and though modernised, it is the sort of set-up that makes you (or at any rate, people like me) think about model railway layouts. At one side of the road is a footbridge, and on the other side a signal box. Both look absolutely perfect for capture and installation on a model railway. What I didn’t realise until later is that they have been.

The footbridge dates from 1901.

 The signal box dates from 1899. 

Both are listed structures, and it turns out that both have been used as the basis for Airfix models. In other words, for the purpose of constructional play, for model making, they are evidently prototypical structures, and therefore presumably perceived as the best of their species, the most typical, the most archetypal. What, archetypes in England’s smallest county? You must be joking ! You’d never run into C. G. Jung in this neck of the woods.

 
Although I did make a couple of Airfix aeroplanes as a child, it’s not a label of which I have any great knowledge or intimacy, for my imaginary constructional realm primarily involved Meccano and Hornby as its two core brands. Hornby station architecture tended towards the modernist and the deco, very Southern Region, shades of Richmond or Surbiton or the Chessington branch. Fine in their way, but here in Oakham I could see that the Midland Railway features as adopted for this footbridge and signal box were spot on. They looked exactly like they should. More so, in fact.