Charing Cross Road, London

Striking a light

Small-town shopkeepers like those in the excellent Turn Back Time: The High Street didn’t usually have shop fronts with the full complement of glittering effects that were sometimes seen in the Victorian period. But in London is was a different story. Where there were hundreds of shops competing for one’s attention, Victorian shop designers did everything they could to catch the eye of potential customers – bright colours, lots of lights, gilding, and lavish displays of goods.

Painted glass, often with mirror effects, was a favourite material for shop names, numbers, and glittering descriptions of the goods on sale, especially in the second half of the 19th century. Passing fashions and the fragility of glass mean that few of these dazzling signs have survived. Some of the best loved are on the umbrella shop in New Oxford Street that I blogged about a while back. This is another, on Smith’s tobacconists in Charing Cross Road. This was apparently the first shop to open when this stretch of the street was redeveloped at the end of the 1860s. The sparkling glass welcomes cigar-smokers in particular, as it did in the 19th century, testimony to the Victorian shopkeeper’s skill at attracting the notice and the money of those who passed by.

New Oxford Street, London

Umbrella men

This is one of my favourite London shop fronts, and I expect a lot of my readers are familiar with it too. So, instead of the main double-fronted New Oxford Street façade, here’s a photograph of the part around the corner in West Central Street, which, like its bigger conjoined sibling, is largely from about 1870 (although the business was established 40 years earlier) and packed full of Victorian exuberance. Gone is the restraint of the Georgian and Regency periods, when shops often had rather discreet bow windows and shoppers had to peer through small panes of glass at the goods within. Instead there’s Victorian display in all its hyperactive glory. The Gothic iron cresting above the fascia, the use of mirror glass, the division of the glazing into large sections, the brightly polished metalwork just below the window, and, most of all, the lettering – it is all very much and very richly of its time.

Most of the signage consists of lettering painted on to the back of glass panels. This is done in a choice of letterforms that will delight anyone with an interest in 19th-century graphic art – I especially like the capital J with its branching top and all the ornate gold capitals in the upper part of the window (the transom light in shop-parlance).

The stock that’s being advertised also harks back to another world. Not just umbrellas, but sticks and whips are offered, and, on the New Oxford Street front, Malacca canes and tropical sunshades evoke the imperial past. Dagger canes and swordsticks are mentioned too – you’ll not be able to get those today – all lovingly lettered as only the Victorians knew how.

Swordsticks or not, there’s something satisfying about the fact that, after 170 years in business, the umbrella men are still plying their trade here, with ranks of brollies at the ready for a London downpour. And if your fabric’s torn or a spoke gets bent, the Victorian signage advertises repairs too: ‘Umbrellas recovered, renovated & repaired. Sticks repolished.’ Bring your parasol…

Bath, Somerset

Plumb good

Now I’ve started, here is a little more plumbing from Bath. Literal plumbing, since plumbers were originally those who worked with lead (Latin plumbum). Those with sharp eyes will spot that this is a branch of W H Smith’s. Smith’s went in for rather beautifully designed stores in the 1920s – the shop fronts often featured stone, rich oak finishes, windows with small panes, and, sometimes, beautiful tiles. Here, though, it was the down-pipe and associated plumbing that caught my eye.

You quite often get the date embossed in rainwater fittings like this, perhaps mainly because it’s not difficult to do, lead being a soft metal that takes this sort of decoration and information with ease. But the openwork ‘WHS’ monogram is a special treat here, as are the scallop shells, the kind of thing that on a medieval building would symbolize a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Why are they here, on a 1920s shop front? Maybe it’s enough that they look right.

Look at the way, too, in which the pipe in recessed into the stonework, so that its outer edge is flush with the wall. This was shop design that was conceived as a whole, and built to last. How refreshing compared to the ephemeral, here today, revamped tomorrow retail design that’s common now. Here’s to the stationers, and their plumbers, and their long view.