C O N T E X T 1 2 4 : M A Y 2 0 1 2 27 Fiona Newton Off the rails For more than a hundred years, former railway carriages have found a new life off the rails, being ingeniously reused as both holiday homes and permanent housing. Railway carriages and wagons taken off the rails can have a hopeless and abandoned look.They stand forlornly in the corners of fields housing horses or simply mouldering away. But for some, life off the rails has not been the end of the line. Carriages have, for over a hundred years, been reused as a ready-made shell for housing. They have ceased to be railway memorabilia and have become architecture. In the best examples, thought and design have been involved in their conversion. In other cases it is simple ramshackle opportunism. Many former railway stations which are now used as holiday accommodation, restaurants or hotels have a carriage or two pulled up where the rails once were, as if the engine had just pulled out but forgotten to take its carriages with it. They provide extra commercial space and add context. They can enhance the station’s character, if in a rather Disneyland kind of way. Most of these carriages have been positioned relatively recently. The physically converted railway carriage was a much more familiar sight between the wars than it is today. The development of railway carriage cottages came in two very distinct stages. Carriage homes began primarily in the 1890s as holiday homes for the more Bohemian upper classes. Without planning restrictions, development was able to take place on the back of the beach as close to the high tide line as possible. Into the early 20th century, areas of coastline saw the colonisation of beaches and dunes with ephemeral shacks and structures. In some cases these developments, away from the centres of resorts and often on bleaker or more inhospitable parts of the coast, included buildings which reused old railway carriages.Very few of these houses of the 1890s to 1910s survive. This fashion even found its way intoVictorian novels. HGWells described their development inThe Days of the Comet (1906): ‘It was, you must understand, the custom of the steam-railway companies to sell their carriages after they had been obsolete for a sufficient number of years and some genius had hit upon the possibility of turning these into habitable little cabins for the summer holiday.The thing had become a fashion with a certain Bohemian-spirited class; they added cabin to cabin, and these little improvised homes, gaily painted and with broad verandahs… made the brightest contrast to the dull rigidities of the decorous resorts.’ In the 1920s and 1930s railway carriages were developed as cheap holiday homes for the working classes and sometimes as permanent homes, if not anticipated for use in the long term. Land-owners, especially those within easy distance of cities, sold land to speculators, who divided it into smaller plots and sold it on for holiday homes. Coastal and riverside locations, especially in the south east, became overrun with uncontrolled plotland development for the masses. Some of these used the Three houses close to the beach at Sutton on Sea in Lincolnshire –Wavelands, Lindum and Marsoville – are each based on two railway carriages.
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