The rise was on the wall

Paul Ash relives the glory days of air travel in a book of classic aviation posters

If anything truly captures the romance and the colour of passenger aviation - long before the days of indifferent food and midget seats in the back of a long-haul night bus - it is the magnificent collection of aviation posters, brochures and postcards promoting British Airways' ancestor Imperial Airways, the carrier that opened the skyways from England to its Empire in Africa and Asia.

The posters are as vibrant and compelling now as they must have been in the 1930s. Vivid colours and bold designs and motifs, both familiar and exotic and designed to get the heart racing, are a call to adventure.

It helped greatly that commercial aviation in the 1930s was still impossibly exciting. New air routes gilded the Empire and brought it closer, affirming along the way Britain's belief in itself as a global power.

The collection was saved from storage in a cramped hut at the end of a Heathrow runway and moved to BA's head office at Waterside in 2010, where much of it is now on display - rare posters, models of long-gone aircraft, postcards, photographs, and an assembly of air-stewardess uniforms dating back to the days of British European Airways and BOAC, the two lines that merged to form BA in 1974.

Waterside can be a bit of a mission to get to, even though it's close to the airport, but no matter. As a wise man once said, the next best thing to owning something of beauty - such as a rare 1930s airline poster - is having a book about it.

The authors use the posters to tell the story of British Airways, starting with the aviation pioneers who began experimenting with these crazy machines in the first decade of the 20th century.

Such was the excitement for aviation in the early days that everyone wanted a piece of the action. London Underground's ad men created works of art that promoted flying days at Hendon Aerodrome and advertised the Aero Exhibition at Olympia.

It is poignant that one of the earliest posters, a promo for "England's First Aviation Races" in Doncaster in 1909, was a publicity shot for the Great Northern Railway - if the railway companies could have seen how aviation would later decimate their business, perhaps they would have had those early flying pioneers shot down.

"The Air And The Tortoise," shouts another early Imperial Airways poster showing a picture of a biplane overtaking a ship: "In these days it is the air that wins."

It was an exciting time to be British. It was also a time when art and design collided with a new romantic age to create a sensibility that went beyond mere advertising, something that ad people have been trying to replicate ever since.

Work was commissioned from some of Britain's best designers and artists like Frank Wootton, Mary de Saulles and Theyre Lee-Elliott, designer of the "Speedbird" symbol for Imperial Airways in 1932.

The book takes us through the Swinging '60s, when the Jet Age brought us mass air travel, up to the present day, when going by air may be less glamorous than it once was but is still the mechanism by which we make some travel dreams come true.

Since owning any of the original posters is probably beyond most people's means - not that curator Paul Jarvis is likely to let any of them out of his sight anyway, and certainly not into the rapacious hands of an auctioneer - this large-format book goes a long way to satisfying those desires. It is also an illustrative lesson in the great art of daydreaming and time travel.

• British Aviation Posters: Art Design and Flight by Scott Anthony and Oliver Green, Lund Humphries, R792 on www.exclusivebooks.com.