And just to make us wistful at the end of the week. Here is my local pub in North London in the 1960s, photo taken from the amazing Viewfinder site. Naturally the lamp-post is no longer there and has not been for the last thirty years. This is how the Wells looks nowadays. Of course it is amazing the building itself is still there (how has this happened?!). But still, once having seen the lamp-post one cannot help but mourn it.

More from the English Heritage website. This is Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Street, which EM Forster writes about lyrically in The Longest Journey (a little further along to the right is the ditch running along beside the pavement, which bicycles fall into). Every single one of these traffic signs and posts should be removed. They would be in Holland.

But maybe things are changing. This is Kensington High Street, after the clutter-reducing exercise which then dramatically reduced accidents. The white lines are a pity, but in reality they wouldn't often be so conspicuous because of traffic. And there are still improvements that could be made. But the lack of railings, rubbish bins and signs, the lack of 'management' of pedestrians although their safety increased, is heartening to those who notice their surroundings.

This is Kew Bridge, admittedly in a photograph from the 2004 English Heritage booklet Save Our Streets so it's possible someone will write to say that the railings have disappeared, the lamp-posts and traffic lights been neatened. Or alternatively someone will write to say that the traffic engineers have made things even worse. It's hard to see but the pub on the left is actually rather a beautiful building and to the right there's a row of houses that would be beautiful if not completely hidden by road signs, railings and advertisements.

Over the next few weeks many of us will be leaving the city, looking for harmony, beauty, peace and quiet. One of the villains of British life at the moment is the traffic engineer. He (or she) is allowed to to do whatever he likes both in the urban environment and the countryside, always in the name of safety and always to catastrophic effect aesthetically; but aesthetics count for nothing and so it goes on. This week on the Post will celebrate English Heritage's Save Our Streets campaign. It began in 2004 and presumably has made some improvements although it's sometimes hard to see that it has; however, perhaps once or twice we have walked down a street thinking, this is curiously free of rubbish bins and signs and painted lines and railings to herd pedestrians on the pavement.... Here is Bath (railing free in fact but there's room for much improvement). We did notice, a month ago, as we were having our Sack of Bath walk, eying up the frightful buildings that went up in the '60s and '70s to replace the beautiful houses, that the streets themselves badly needed a Betjemanesque saviour.

On the Beach, Ostend by Frans Gailliard (1861-1932) – this is probably a detail, if anyone knows where the actual painting is do write and tell us. The scene would be exactly the same nowadays except that people would be wearing less; but the sounds and smells and the feelings of the woman in the chair (mingled happiness and tiredness) would not have changed at all in the last hundred years.

A Victorian Family at the Seaside (detail) Charles Wynne Nicholls © Wolverhampton Art Gallery. There's a whole novel in this painting, perhaps by the writer whom I'm tempted to call the C19th Dorothy Whipple ie. Mrs Gaskell. (A reader emailed to say that Monday's painting reminded him of EM Forster and we did agree that it was Forsterian in atmosphere; but of course he rarely wrote about small children and their mothers, or France. So we suggested the French scenes in Someone at a Distance; except that the viper Louise is a million miles from the kindness and calm of the mother in the painting. This got the Persephone girls returning to the perennial subject of why Forster is undoubtedly a great novelist – possibly even the greatest of the C20th – and the blessed Dorothy is not, and yet she is so tremendously readable and so unforgettable and what does this make her in the scale of things – quite great?)

Summer Time, Gloucestershire 1860 by James Archer (1824-1904) © National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Holiday 1935 by Harry Morley (1881-1943) is © the Geffrye Museum/Bridgeman Art Library - a very interesting picture on which many short stories, if not novels, could be based. After this week's episode of Open Book we have been thinking even more than usual about the perennial issue of why Rosamond Lehmann and Margaret Kennedy are 'up there' and Dorothy Whipple and Marghanita Laski are not. Someone like Harry Morley, in comparison with a 'great' painter, also points up this conundrum. Lydia (our Friday girl) tells us that this is now called 'canonicity', cf. the conference she is helping to organise.

In celebration of the holidays, visiting grandchildren, buckets and spades: this week on the Post pictures of children taken from the Children in Art diaries Save the Children did in 1989 and 1990. The Brioche by Victor Gabriel Gilbert (1847-1933) was on the front of the 1990 diary. Presumably Gilbert is despised by art historians because he painted children and flowers. Yet his work is firmly the right side of kitsch – the 'moment in time' is palpable and the detail is fascinating.

Last picture of women's working lives inspired by Made in Dagenham (cf. the Fortnightly Letter going up later today): a still from the 1924 film of The Home-Maker which we sometimes show at the BFI. Here Evangeline is suggesting to a customer that a different dress might be better, and her employer is wondering what she is doing (answer: being a very successful saleswoman).

Lyons Corner House, Oxford Street, 1928 when it opened, thanks for the speedy info that came in just as California was going to sleep. And many thanks for the corrections to yesterday's post – judging by the clothes the queue is 1970s not 1950s; and once the mid-West had got up, a reader from Chicago wrote to say that some nifty googling had elicited that the Holborn Bakery was in Lamb's Conduit Street itself. Now changed.

From the clothes this seems to be 1970s, but why on earth are they queuing? There must have been a shortage of something, or a strike, or perhaps they are waiting for hot cross buns. Nor is it possible to tell exactly where this was, except there's something familiar about the corner and the pavement and the windows: which is because it's the corner of Rugby Street and Lamb's Conduit Street, just across the road, apparently in December 1974 and there was indeed a strike.

Shorpy is an American 'vintage photo blog featuring thousands of images from the 1850s to 1950s. 'Always Something Interesting' is its strapline, and it's true. The caption to this photo (which must be c.1900, the time of The Shuttle) reads:' Girls Luncheon, Natural Food Conservatory, Niagara, NY'. Shorpy labelled it 'Employees Dining Room Weetabix factory' but was Weetabix (as we know it) made then? The photograph would originally have gone into the Persephone Post folder because of the bentwood chairs! (The 'girls' are sitting very still, grace might be being said or someone might be playing the piano at the back, or talking. Whatever, it's very atmospheric)

Women's working lives this week, inspired by Made in Dagenham and by our forthcoming suffragette novel. Some women would have worked here: the Crown Point Printing Works, Leeds c. 1890

And we cannot end a week of Stanley Spencer posts without having Southwold 1937 ©Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums.

Stanley Spencer's The Sisters 1940 © Leeds City Art Galleries, oil painting 48" x 30". It was commissioned by the Kitamura sisters but apparently never delivered, cf. the Keith Bell catalogue. The poet Robin Ford wrote rather a good poem about them in 2003 which is here.

The Behrend Family 1927 oil on canvas by Henry Lamb (1885-1960) © Royal Pavilion Libraries and Museums, Brighton and Hove/Bridgeman Art Library. In 1923 Stanley Spencer stayed in Dorset with Henry Lamb, who wrote: 'Stanley sits at a table all day evolving acres of Salonica and Bristol war compositions': just as he was beginning to think of raising a subscription among his friends and patrons to allow him to paint these pictures on a large scale, the Behrends visited Henry Lamb in Dorset, saw Stanley Spencer's work and first had the idea of commissioning the chapel as a memorial to Mary Behrend's brother Lieutenant Sandham.

While he was painting at the Sandham Chapel Stanley Spencer lived in the village. Cottages at Burghclere © The Estate of Stanley Spencer was painted between 1927 and 1930. It was bought by the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge in 1930 but at the moment is in an exhibition at Compton Verney called 'Stanley Spencer and the English Garden'; it's on until October 2nd and there is a book of the same name to accompany the exhibition.

Another National Trust property which we had never managed to get to before, this time the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere, Hampshire. 'Stanley Spencer's most famous work and arguably his greatest achievement' can be seen in a small chapel built by the Behrend family to commemorate Henry Willoughby Sandham (d. 1919). Any lingering grumbles about the Trust vanished: the Chapel is beautifully looked after, completely unspoilt and the curator inside was unobtrusive and helpful. And the garden was an unmown meadow and there was a sweet collection of plants outside. 'Tea in the Hospital Ward' 1932 is on the righthand side as you come in. More detail here.

And last wartime posts for the week: a poster by Hans Schleger 1943 © the London Transport Museum. There are many other wartime posters here; all of them prompt a reread of Few Eggs and No Oranges. Here is a post about it, also here; and an extract here.