Bromyard, Herefordshire

 
Stick-ons: 2

Another trawl through my archives threw up this window sign from Bromyard. The photograph is a few years old, so I’m not sure if the sign is still there. When I took the picture it was already time someone took this damp and dilapidated building in hand, though of course I hope that if they did, they managed to restore the flaking “BREAD” sign and perhaps even preserve the blue and yellow Procea one in the window.

Procea bread began in New Zealand as Procera and was sold a lot in Britain, where the name was changed to Procea, until the company was bought by Spillers in the 1970s. Procea was advertised a lot in the 1950s, when the use of a kind of informal script lettering for the brand name became common. This sign is later – the script seems to have got thinner and slightly more refined as the years went on. The name was often accompanied by a slogan, of which there were many. Brown bread was fortified with wheat protein: “The meat of the wheat”. The stuff was so good that it was a case of “Once tasted, never wasted”. “Procea Brown is so much Better it deserves a capital B.” “You never have a stale loaf problem when Procea’s your daily bread.” And so on.

Customers were exhorted to “Buy it where you see the Procea Bakerman”. That’s him, just visible on the side of the window in my picture. There must have been thousands of Bakerman stickers on bakers’ windows in Britain in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Now they are few and far between.

Bromyard, Herefordshire

Hot tin roof

I’m stuck indoors writing, and with deadlines looming, getting out less and less to find new buildings to share with you. I’ve recently been describing the unlikely surfaces and forms of the Guggenheim, Bilbao, and its wafer-thin titanium cladding, which curves this way and that like an overgrown eel that’s been put through one of those apps you get for your iPhone, which distorts photographs in disturbing ways. Not inappropriately, since designs like the Guggenheim are only possible with the most advanced software, not to mention the most costly materials.

And, stuck indoors, writing, I looked through my picture files to find something to share with you, and found this: a shed in Herefordshire with a corrugated iron roof. Notice how the surface curves this way and that, like an overgrown eel that…

I know, I know. This modest length of bent metal covering a knockabout structure of assorted brickwork and decaying woodwork is hardly the Guggenheim. But its use of corrugated iron is still rather inventive, the way it starts at one end as almost a flat roof and finishes at the other as almost a vertical wall. And are those openings skylights or windows? I’m sure there’s some logical reason for the way this roof has been built. Something big and tall that had to be accommodated in the far end that didn’t quite justify the time, expense, or whatever needed to build the brick wall higher. Perhaps it has something to do with the planning regulations. Whatever its raison d’être, it made one passer-by look up and smile.

Bromyard, Herefordshire

April foolery

This clock was designed by Michael N. Oxenham and made by Robert Race. It was put up to commemorate the Millennium and I prefer it to some of the more grandiose and overblown structures that were erected at that time. It makes a pleasant distraction on the front of a timber-framed building, now a gallery, in the square in the Herefordshire town of Bromyard, a place full of interest, to which I hope to return. Meanwhile I shall savour this unusual way of making a mark and marking the time.