The first place we entered in Rye, apart from the hotel, was an antique shop.

Imagine my surprise to find the tail fins from a Soviet MiG Fighter for sale!

There was also this Art Deco poster of Bexhill-on-Sea, featuring the town’s iconic Art Deco/Moderne De La Warr Pavilion:-

And a jolly elephant (the company’s logo is an elephant) on a French (language) advert for Côte d’Or milk chocolate with the added bonus of an Art Deco style building in the background:-

After Stratford we travelled down to Cheltenham the next day.

Imagine my surprise on suddenly seeing a very big and modern Art Deco building just off a roundabout. I turned into the road and found it was opposite a (previously unsignposted) Park and Ride.

The building is the headquarters of UCAS, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service.

Note the rounded portico and balcony plus the stepping. In this it’s reminiscent of the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea and also of the Rothesay Pavilion. (More so of the latter since the Rothesay Pavilion isn’t rendered in white.)

Below is the block by the entrance gate. It has nice, strong, white verticals set off by the crosses top and bottom.

This good view of the entrance is from geograph. Note the rounded gatehouse.

On coming back to the Park and Ride much later in the day I took this close up.

Edited to add:- I tried to find out from the net when the building was designed and constructed and who the architect was but kept getting information on Higher Education courses instead.

I found a view of the UCAS building from above.

From a bit nearer in to Cheltenham, down Evesham Road, I took this photo of another modern building with deco styling.

This one was nearer to the UCAS building and just off Evesham Road. I think it’s called Cleeve House.

I caught the programme whose title was the same as this post on BBC4 on Monday night. It was about the cultural revolution of the 1920s and 30s and focused on Art Deco/Modernism. As a result many of the buildings I have mentioned in passing – the De La Warr Pavilion, the Hoover Building – or shown myself – the Midland Hotel – were highlighted, along with others such as Saltdean Lido and the New Victoria Cinema (not, I think, the one in Edinburgh but more probably this) and a whole host of 20s and 30s buildings from the 1925 Paris Exposition Des Arts Decoratifs (where the term originated) onwards.

The impact of Hollywood on the dissemination of Art Deco style was said to be crucial as was the impression of speed, streamlining being the original “go faster” stripes.

Where I took issue a bit was when it suggested that the perfection and optimism embodied in the form was intended to be extended to humans. Some people at the time did expound eugenics, for example, but that was surely more a distortion of social Darwinism than a consequence or expression of Art Deco.

Apart from the movies the most Deco thing about the era was, of course, the posters, whether of railways or holiday destinations or ships. Some of these are just fantastic. More than a few were displayed in the programme which is on the iPlayer if you want to take a look.

There’s a new series of programmes on Art Deco Icons starting tonight (Wed 22/10/09) on BBC4. The first features Claridge’s.