I am no fan of cameos but....

I have completed the cottages for Faith St recently, seen above. Don't worry too much about the white wall at the front of the layout, this will be directly attached to the fascia. It's just my opinion however I reckon cameos on layouts can be way overplayed, and in many cases their absence is the best path to a realistic scene. However in the interwar period there is one entirely Australian and appropriate cameo that I cannot avoid. True of many generations both before and since, a group of children playing cricket in the back lane with improvised stumps and field is too hard to resist, hence the below scene in the lane between the houses in Hope and Faith streets.

Raw Cottages & the Why and the Where

As shown briefly in the last update the first houses for Faith Street are to be a single storey terraced pair of cottages. The location defines the style - the cottages are directly opposite Qualmann's Warehouse, and as the warehouse is bluestone it pre-dates these cottages. It is unlikely that moderate-to-expensive houses would be built directly opposite such a location with its noise, traffic and industrial use. So these are humble workers cottages, not the more expensive houses seen in Hope St. One block makes all the difference! For the prototype I searched through my pictures from my trips to inner east Melbourne but didn't have any suitable candidates, so chose the following located in a similar area but in this case in North Fitzroy.

Picture: Picture Victoria

The descriptive by Picture Victoria is very direct, for the date of the photo, 1948, they are labelled as "poor". The materials are simpler, they are lighter on the decoration seen in Hope St, and they are'nt big - there are four houses in the block above. This fitted the bill for the location. nb. the building still survives at 177-183 Rae St. Must drive past one day! It's funny how times change, I reckon these would make a great place to live, particularly so close to the city, and so do many other people judging by the value of these kinds of properties today.

So to the model....As mentioned in the last post, construction is primarily styrene, with some other materials for detailing. I only have room for two cottages, and here they are shown initially "in the raw" but on their future location in Faith St, and two closer pictures. As can be seen, in line with their being more modest housing, the land space is smaller than Hope St also. The side the two first pictures are taken from deliberately is plain and flat as it will butt up and adjoin the fascia, thereby intimating continuation of the building.




Next step is painting/weathering and embedding with appropriate gardens/yards.