In the last issue of our magazine we asked members to suggest new ideas for the posters in the booths on Howardsgate.
We are delighted to report that many wonderful ideas for new posters were sent to us. Not just ideas: contributors have written text, and found photographs. A huge thank you to everyone who has contributed to this amazing response.
The topics for the new posters now in development are: Welwyn Garden City station; The Cherry Tree restaurant; distinguished garden citizens (with a separate poster on Richard and Celia Reiss); Digswell House, and Digswell Estate. We are now working on turning the fresh content into new posters.
There’s still room for more ideas! Please do let us know if you have an idea for a new poster by emailing booths@wgcsociety.org. If you’d like to create a poster, we’d be delighted to hear from you, and you can view our simple guidelines here..
Call for volunteers to join the poster booth team!
We need more volunteers to help look after the poster booths. Please let us know if you’d like to get involved. The poster booth team does lots of things, including organising the cleaning, maintenance and repairs of the poster booths, and liaising with authors and editing the texts.
Please email: booths@wgcsociety.org
Here’s some useful information for those interested in contributing to the poster booths project, either by making new posters and/or maintaining the booths.
Background
The poster booths were designed in 1951 by Louis de Soissons. Following a long period of dereliction and misuse, they were refurbished by the Welwyn Garden City Society in 2020. Originally designed to carry advertising posters, their purpose now is to tell the story of Welwyn Garden City using text and photographs or illustrations. The current posters, which will be replaced, cover the following topics: The Story of The Poster Booths; A Marriage of Town and Country; The Henry ‘Tim’ Birkin Story; The New Town Agricultural Guild and the Model Dairy; Welwyn Film Studios in Welwyn Garden City; Ebenezer Howard 1850 – 1928, and The Town Plan.
For more background information, there’s an article about the poster booths on page 10 of Issue 1 of the Society magazine that can be viewed here:
Suitable topics
Suitable topics for posters are anything related to the story of Welwyn Garden City, appropriate for an audience of all ages and backgrounds. Photographs and illustrations are particularly welcome to help make the posters visually impactful.
Unsuitable topics
These would include currently politically sensitive issues and advertising.
New-look paving
Society members may have noticed the new paving laid around the poster booths by the Council. It’s great to see smartened-up paving around the poster booths. It’s interesting to note that the paving slabs have a pattern related to that used on the new paving in the Stonehills development, the history of which was discussed on page 14 of Issue 2 of our magazine, which can be read online here:
Poster booth in the ‘Stepping Through Film’ photography project
One of the poster booths was spotted on the BBC news website recently (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-65985827) in an article about photographer Thomas Duke’s photos of movie stills taken in the exact location the film scene was shot. The photo on the BBC website shows a still from Simon Pegg’s comedy film “The World’s End”, from a scene shot by the poster booths. Both the film, and the photo of the film still, were shot prior to the restoration of the booths.
The film was shot ten years ago, and it’s interesting to see the photo booths were then in their green phase.
If you happen to have any photographs or footage of the poster booths from times gone by, we’d love to reproduce them in the magazine.
Let us know on: booths@wgcsociety.org.