I went to see the Heath Robinson show at the Derby Museum, there's not loads there, it's a collection of drawings and prints from the William Heath Robinson Trust, but it's worth a visit. Hidden within the odd inventions are all sorts of nice little social observations. One of the drawings was from a book - How To Live In A Flat - which I remembered I had somewhere, so I dug it out. Excitingly, if you fancy a copy, looks like it'll be back in print soon.
It's interesting to see a humourist looking at a form of architecture, and living, that's new. To see the collisions and blending between old and new that we're too distant to notice.
There are, for instance, at least two cartoons about the difficulty of living without a mantleshelf. And, while, it seems acceptable to live with less space, clearly no one is prepared to live without staff:
Similarly, there's a lot of ingenuity devoted to incorporating baths into a modern, space-contrained lifestyle, but there's no mention of showers. Presumably these were still beyond the pale:
And then there are quite a lot of inventions that still seem contemporary and relevant, the kind of thing you'd find in next month's copy of Wallpaper or on a design tumblr
