There is a fascinating exhibition of the Ladybird book artists at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath until 14 April. It traces the interconnected work of these artists, and recounts the  company’s story during the period 1940 to 1975, Ladybird’s ‘golden years’. One of the most prolific of the Ladybird artists was Harry Wingfield (1910-2002), whose illustrations are well-known to past generations of young readers. This is from Shopping with Mother (1958), a Ladybird Learning to Read Book by by ME (Margaret Elise) Gagg.

Every spring, ramblers, walkers, and hikers who enjoy the open countryside have reason to be grateful to those who took part into the mass trespass on Kinder Scout on 24 April, 1932, which fuelled the right-to-roam movement. (It's still a very popular walk, sometimes too popular.) Nevertheless, access to thousands of square miles of land is increasingly blocked; The Book of Trespass (2020) by Nick Hayes is an important account of this dispossession of public rights.

This London Transport poster (1956) by Hans Unger quotes from RL Stevenson's poem in Underwoods (1887) and promotes LT's  'Country Walks' book. For decades, the capital's tube stations had lovely seasonal posters designed by artists such as Laura Knight and Dora Batty which encouraged Londoners to discover 'London's country' by public transport. Many have since become collectors' items, while cheerful spring posters are now, sadly, nowhere to be seen on the Underground. 

The model in A Mountain Climber (1912, SMK, Copenhagen) by Jens Ferdinand Willumsen (1863-1958) is the artist's second wife, Edith Wessel (1875-1966). Although there are many complex readings of his work, and of this large painting in particular, as "a depiction of the “new”, and in the Nietzschean sense, ”great human being” in nature", it is also a striking portrait of a modern woman outdoors, conquering mountains in the early twentieth century. 

This week, with the long Easter weekend coming up, it's hiking, rambling, or simply walking in the countryside. The early 1930s saw an explosion in the popularity of weekend walks amongst young people in particular, and Hiking (c1936, Laing Art Gallery) by James Walker Tucker (1898-1972) captures this nicely. Dorothy Whipple - a great lover of the outdoors in spring - describes the exhilaration and freedom of similar walks taken by Jane, Maggie, and Wilfrid in High Wages (1930) at an earlier time, just before the First World War.

Despite the criticism, Postmodern style is proving to be irrepressible. "A House for Essex” (2015) is a holiday home built by Living Architecture in collaboration with Grayson Perry and Charles Holland of FAT Architects. It was described by Edwin Heathcote in the Financial Times as "an absurd melange of Finnish stave church, Thai temple, arts and crafts mausoleum and fairytale gingerbread house." 

PoMo architecture as featured in Postmodern Architecture: Less is a Bore (2020) contains a "glorious array of vivid non-conformity". "There could be a fake Italian piazza filled with faux ruins, a corporate headquarters shaped like a wicker shopping basket, a Japanese house that looks like a face, or a London office block that simultaneously brings to mind both the 1990s and the ancient world." The Moore House (1984) in Austin, Texas, perfectly illustrates this eclecticism.