The cabin, or holiday home, was a popular building task for post-war architects in Norway. With her designs, Wenche Selmer embraced simplicity and modesty, and combined modernity and tradition. This is the Cabin at Ringkollen (c1953) by Wenche Selmer and Jens Andrea Selmer; the subtitle of the exhibition in Oslo is 'What Can You Live Without?" and much of her work is an object lesson in doing without a great deal (even if it's only for the summer).  

Wenche Selmer had a lifelong interest the cabin or what she called "the small wooden house". In partnership with her husband, Jens Andreas Selmer (1911–1995), she designed more than thirty summerhouses, mostly on the southern coast of Norway. For Selmer, a cabin was more than a building project, it was an ideal for architecture in general and a metaphor for the good and simple life. This is the Selmers' own cabin at Beltesholmen (1956-57). 

With cool summer escapes in mind, on the Post this week we feature the Norwegian architect Wenche Selmer (1920-98) whose work is the subject of an exhibition at the National Museum of Oslo. "She perfected the idea of the Norwegian cabin: frugal, useful and adapted to the environment" and yet her important contribution to Norwegian architecture has still not been fully recognised, partly because it was quiet, modest, and domestic. 

This is how the last vestiges of the once globally important hat industry in Stockport looked in the 1950s. Hatting Factory Workers (n.d.,Stockport Heritage Services) is by Amy Katherine Browning (1881-1978) and her paintings can be seen in Hat Works, the only museum in the country dedicated to the hatting industry, which is housed in Wellington Mill. 

The enormous Salts Mill is the centrepiece of the carefully preserved model village of Saltaire, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which was built by Sir Titus Salt (1803-76). When it opened in 1853 there were around 3,000 workers operating 1,200 looms. The mill's vast spaces were once filled with noise and textiles but how house a range of businesses and exhibitions. Saltaire was also the major filming location for The Choral (2025) written by Alan Bennett. 

A London, Scottish and Midland Railways poster (1924, Science Museum Group) designed by the Symbolist painter Frederic Cayley Robinson (1862-1927). As this blog points out, it "features a group of women working at looms weaving cotton; they are lost in thought, working silently without interaction...This is not the harsh backbreaking reality of work in a cotton mill but the artist’s idealised interpretation". However, their clogs are very realistic; Jane in High Wages (1930) wakes up on her first day at Chadwick's to the clatter of clogs worn by "hundreds of men and women, all but silent" and is thankful she does not have to get up at half-past five to go to work at the mill.