North Ealing, London

Pointer

‘Stop pointing, it’s rude.’ That’s how the great Irish writer Flann O’Brien sometimes responded to the pointing finger device used on signs and in typography to indicate something important, or to show us the way to a destination. O’Brien sometimes used the pointing finger himself, especially in his newspaper column when he wanted to draw attention to something in the editorial, which was usually across the page from the column he wrote, under the name of Myles na Gopaleen, in the Irish Times. Back in Myles’s day, pointing fingers were everywhere – they’d been popular with the Victorians, and remained common in the first half of the last century.

We don’t see them often today, but here’s a survivor, above the steps to the platforms at North Ealing station in west London. I wonder if it has been there since the station opened in 1903. Back then, this suburban station was on the first above-ground section of London’s Underground to run electric trains. It was in the van of modernization, in other words, but if the electric trains seemed to look forward to a new age, the letterforms on this sign seem to look backwards to the time of Queen Victoria and steam railways.

 Compared to the elegant Edward Johnston signs that came to the Underground in the interwar period, this sign is no masterpiece of elegance. The tall condensed letters are slightly eccentric. The way the strokes of the S and G are cut off diagonally and the slight variations in stroke width in the R save them from being too heavy and blocky – or make them look odd, according to your taste. And the pointing finger, which has acres of white space on either side of it, has none at all below. It’s very much the standard signage of its time, in other words. The kind of thing one would see regularly on notices telling one to keep off the grass, or providing a hint of the day’s headlines. But the result is legible, and serviceable.

A hundred years ago there must have been thousands of such signs. Most of them have disappeared on to rubbish heaps or into the homes of rapacious collectors of railway memorabilia (you know who you are). I’m glad this one is still doing its job, directing passengers to Harrow, Uxbridge, and the far west.