Largs And District In Old Picture Postcards

Largs and District in Old Picture Postcards by Andrew Miller Brown is a charming photographic wander through the Ayrshire seaside resort of Largs and its surrounding district, back to a time when a postcard was not merely something bought in a panic ten minutes before leaving a holiday destination, but an important means of communication, social documentation and proving to relatives that you had successfully reached the coast.

Published by the European Library in 1987, this volume gathers together old picture postcards showing Largs and the surrounding area in earlier decades, preserving streets, buildings, promenades, shops, transport, holidaymakers and local scenes which have either changed beyond recognition or vanished entirely.

For anyone who knows Largs today, the fascination is immediate. Familiar roads appear in unfamiliar clothes. Buildings stand where other buildings now stand. Streets are quieter, vehicles are rarer, hats are considerably more common, and everyone seems to have been capable of standing perfectly still for a photograph without making a face.

There are inevitably views of the waterfront, because Largs without the sea would be rather like Blackpool without illuminations or Edinburgh without somebody mentioning the festival. The town grew as a popular west-coast resort, and these images capture something of the period when a trip "doon the watter" was a proper event rather than merely a journey which could be accompanied by live traffic updates.

Old picture postcards are wonderfully deceptive objects. Originally sold for pennies, scribbled on, stamped and sent off with messages such as “Arrived safely, weather fine, Aunt Jean has a cold,” they have accidentally become miniature historical documents. Nobody producing them necessarily intended to record the changing face of a town for people living a century later. They were just trying to sell postcards.

Which makes them all the better.

The pleasure of books like this lies in the detail. Shop signs can be studied. Street layouts compared. Long-demolished buildings rediscovered. Fashions examined. Vehicles identified. And occasionally some completely anonymous Edwardian gentleman can be found standing beside a lamp-post with the solemn expression of a man who has no idea that strangers will still be looking at him generations later.

Andrew Miller Brown’s selection provides a visual record not only of Largs itself but of the wider district, giving the reader a glimpse into community life before redevelopment, motor traffic and modern commercial signage steadily altered the landscape.

It is local history without having to read six pages about municipal drainage.

That is not to disparage municipal drainage, of course. It is important. But sometimes it is considerably more entertaining simply to look at a photograph of the High Street in 1910 and wonder where everybody bought their trousers.

The European Library produced many of these regional postcard collections, and they remain especially useful because they bring together images which might otherwise be scattered among private collections, albums and old postcard boxes. For local historians and genealogists, such pictures can offer valuable clues about how a place looked at a particular time; for everyone else, they provide the satisfying experience of discovering that nearly every familiar town once looked both recognisable and completely different.

There is also an odd intimacy to postcard history. Unlike grand official photographs, postcards were ordinary things. They were bought by visitors, written on kitchen tables, sent to friends and tucked into drawers. A century later, those same modest images may provide the clearest surviving view of a vanished shopfront, hotel, harbour scene or row of houses.

Largs itself makes an especially good subject. Its long history as a seaside destination, its relationship with the Clyde, and its position as a gateway towards the islands means that the town has always had a steady traffic of residents, visitors, boats and people waiting for boats while wondering whether they should have brought a coat.

The answer, being western Scotland, was usually yes.

This 1987 volume is offered in Good condition and provides an enjoyable slice of local visual history for anyone interested in Largs, Ayrshire, Scottish seaside towns, social history, transport, architecture or the simple pleasure of comparing “then” with “now.”

It would also make an excellent present for somebody from Largs, particularly if they are old enough to respond to half the pictures by saying, “Oh, I remember when that was there.”

Andrew Miller Brown — Largs and District in Old Picture Postcards. European Library, 1987. ISBN 9789028846074. Condition: Good.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — preserving the past one photograph, postcard and inexplicably familiar street corner at a time.

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