A store for Butley Creek…

Every self-respecting village needs a shop. Unfortunately for the people of Butley Creek, theirs has closed down. Formerly the centre-piece of their little stretch of the old Orford Road, the luck of Messrs. Rice and Co. ran out with the arrival of the new supermarket in Wickham Market. The makeshift boarding-up of the storefront attests to the thin margins on which the residents of this part of the world live. 

My approach to layout building is a little unconventional. It always starts, perhaps less surprisingly, with a photo, but this need not include any form of railway. First and foremost, it’s about atmosphere; the presence of tracks, if there are any, is a happy coincidence! More unusual still is the origin for Butley Creek - inspired, like its predecessors, by a photo. A dark, foreboding sky, over a ramshackle collection of Suffolk cottages.

However, this photo did not depict any of the real, charming villages of the Suffolk Coast. It was instead a photo of the late Iain Rice’s timeless Butley Mills. Ironically, this photo is one of the few that does not include the eponymous mill, but in a sense this added to the desolate feel of the seaside hamlet.

The cameo “not-competition” has provided an outlet for realising my own take on Butley Mills. My model will share a few key qualities with Iain’s original, whilst I hope feeling wholly unique. I am attempting to live the “concept modelling” approach Iain and Bob Barlow championed with their original East Suffolk Light Railway, undertaking site visits and mapping out a circuitous route from Snape, southwards to Orford and then on to Butley Ferry. I’ll share more background in future, either here or in Ribbons. 

The “layout” is at this stage little more than a collection of buildings and stock, along with two A5 turnouts. That’s how I like it though - I always start with the structures, allowing me to play around with compositions and ideas in the real world. The concept for Butley Creek is almost concrete at this point, but the actual layout design has proven more testing. For now, I take solace in the structures.

So on to Butley Stores. It’s a total work of fiction, a fragment of my imagination traced out onto plasticard with no real plan. The dimensions were made up on the hoof, and it shows. However, I hope it goes some way to recreating a recognisably Rice-style “Suffolk” house, whilst not being an exact copy. 

The stores are made in usual style, a relatively thin plasticard core (I think 40 thou) with Slaters embossed sheets on the outside. I add lots of bracing to avoid warping, but time will tell if this is enough. 

I normally fit a solid floor to the underside of my models, but I was keen to leave the (metaphorical) door open so I can detail the interior in future, should I so wish. Instead, I used some balsa strips, left over from the pier on Rye Sands, to brace everything - it is super robust, and also leaves the inside of the building open.

The shopfront was left over from an abandoned project based around a grimy inner-London goods yard - it was based on a real shop in the East End, and originally had a clapboard frontage and leaded windows. I spent a good while making the facade from scraps, so was keen to re-use it. To that end, it had to be rather cruelly amputated from the top floor! 

The hanging sign was a real labour of love, cobbled together from bits of brass wire. Heaven knows how many times I've knocked it off! Downpipes are also brass wire, with strips of paper to represent brackets (a technique nicked from Pete Goss - the only respect in which my approach can be compared to his mastery).

 

I was keen to have some kind of advertising on the side of the building (this also conveniently hides a join in the plasticard sheet). I could have designed and printed something neater, but I had great fun painting my own. I glued toilet roll to the hoarding using matt medium, painted the torn edges white and then carefully brushed in the advert itself.

In case you can’t tell, it’s an advert for some baked beans - I won’t spell out the text as it’s a bit silly, the product of childish play after spending too long at the workbench. 

It may look a bit cartoonish, but I like it - caricature and Impressionism have become motifs of my recent work, and these are qualities I'm keen to develop further.

The finishing touch was the curtains - uncharted territory for me. More of that vital toilet roll, painted a grubby white and soaked in matt medium. Cutting edge stuff!

I’m away from the bench at present, and don’t have any pictures of the rear of the stores in it’s completed state, so this will have to do:

The second building for “The Creek” is also finished, so I’ll share that soon. I have a few other ideas I’m keen to get stuck into, in particular a dull, grotty asbestos feed store, based on one at Burnt House Road on the Berwick branch. 

One danger of not having a firm footprint for the layout is the potential that I end up with too many buildings, but I enjoy the craft so it’s a risk I’m happy to take. I will just have to exercise a disciplined eye in composing the scene, as the Suffolk Coast is all about vast spaces and broad horizons.