Assignment One

A Model Village

For this assignment I had to research a model village and present my findings as a tourist brochure. My research led me to a model village an hour away from where I live. I took my family to visit Corfe Castle Model Village last weekend, the sun was shining and the visit was amazing. It was such a great experience actually walking around the model village. I knew all about Corfe Castle and had visited the National Trust site so many times before but had no idea that a model village of how Corfe Castle Village would have looked, even existed.

For context, it opened to the public in 1966, Corfe Castle Model Village depicts the castle and village as it was in 1646. You can compare the real castle with the model castle from our garden; this gives a fantastic idea of how it used to look prior to its destruction by Oliver Cromwell’s troops during the English Civil War, when it was home to Lady Bankes.

Built to 1/20th scale at the height of fashion for model villages, Corfe Castle Model Village was the brainwave of Mr. Eddie Holland, a local businessman. Mr. Holland first had the idea in the 1950s and wanted the model to be situated close to the real castle. When the property Drury’s (Dr. Dru Drury’s home and practise), in the Square of Corfe Castle, came on the market, he felt it was ideal for his plan. It took two years to build. The castle was built in situ on a man-made mound.

Many of the houses were built in the Potting Shed by Jack Phillips, the model village builder from Parkstone, assigned with the task of recreating the intricate detail of each house. Jack continued to maintain the Model Village for years to follow. Most of the houses have Purbeck stone roofs, each one with minute handcrafted tiles. The top of the King’s tower on our castle stands at 20 feet above the level of the moat, so it is pretty impressive. We also have a model of the model, and a model of the model of the model. Work that one out! In the model of the Church of Saint Edward, if you listen carefully you will hear music and a choir. (s.n.,2022)

My first port of call was to work out how to design a tourist brochure which led me to Youtube where I found a few different videos of how to design a brochure using Adobe Indesign. I enjoy using Indesign and found the video’s extremely helpful. I made a list of needs and must haves then started creating. In my previous assignments, my tutor has noted that I need to include hierarchy in my work so I researched different typography and font sizes for different headings. I found my way around the toolkit to aid with how the brochure should look in terms of colour, the droplet tool was very helpful with this, I was able to record the colour palette from an uploaded photo and use those colours for the background of the brochure. Overall I enjoyed the process of creating the brochure, which I have included below. The brochure would fold 3 ways, the first image on one side and the second image on the other.