Manchester, Kennedy Street

Letters from the turn of a century, 3

The third and last, for now, of my series on Art Nouveau lettering from Manchester. If you look up the architectural history of the Vine Inn on Kennedy Street, you’ll find out how it occupies two buildings, one originally an 18th-century town house and one part of an adjoining 19th-century textile warehouse. The town house is recorded as a pub by the 1880s, but the joining together of the two buildings occurred, according to CAMRA, as recently as the 1970s. And yet this panel of coloured glass, which seems so typical of the Art Nouveau period (c. 1890–1910) is set over one of the doors in the textile warehouse section, which was not part of the pub at that time.

Maybe the panel was moved, or CAMRA is wrong about the date this part of the building began part of the pub, or the panel is simply much more recent than it looks. In a way, this doesn’t matter to the aesthetic appreciation of the panel. It uses ornamental lettering in a very Art Nouveauish kind of way, with big curving strokes in the Ns, and smaller fancy flourishes to the V and E, to give the panel a sense of decorative swagger that’s wholly appropriate for a pub. The swirling stems and flowers that surround the pub name add an additional flourish without distracting from the lettering, which is helped by being glazed in white, in contrast to the surrounding red and green. The round flowers bear some resemblance to the stylized roses devised and used by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret Macdonald. But they’re very much simplified, and certainly not direct copies – under the influence of Mackintosh perhaps. Whatever its date, this is a striking and attractive bit of glazing.

Manchester, Bloom Street

Letters from the turn of a century, 2

Next in my series of three bits of Art Nouveau lettering is Albert House, a building in Manchester’s Bloom Street that once housed offices, although for what company or organization I’m not sure. It’s a building of brick and red sandstone, relieved by ornament in terracotta. Panels of terracotta decorated with stylised foliage and other curvaceous motifs sit beneath the windows. There are more very Art Nouveau curves in the metal grille on the double doors (and in some coloured glass panels in the windows).

However, my particular interest here is the terracotta lettering just above the door. In these panels, the tendency of Art Nouveau designers to stylise letterforms and to distort their shape for ornamental effect has been taken to extremes. The changes to the shape of the letters (to fit the space above the arch), the oddities in the positioning of some of the letters (look at the placing of the O in the left-hand panel), and the use of decorative foliage wrapping in and out of the word and date, make this at once highly ornamental and hard to read.

When I first looked at this, I could make out the word FOUNDED easily, and the AD and the first two figures in the date. But AD 18-what? It seems to be 1829, but the intertwined 2 and 9 take a fair amount of work to see, or at least they did for me. It’s a bit of fun, then, this date inscription, but also rather over the top. Full marks for effort, but also high marks for effortfulness.

Manchester, Deansgate

Letters from the turn of a century, 1

From around 1890 and for the first ten or so years of the 20th century, a new decorative style, Art Nouveau, arrived in England. English designers* drew on the work of graphic artists, architects, and product designers in France and Belgium. The hallmarks of their work included curved lines (and curvaceousness generally), ornament based on the natural world, especially plants and flowers, and a preference for pastel shades.† The curvilinear features of Art Nouveau spread to the way lettering was handled, and in this and two following posts, I’d like to illustrate this by signage on three Manchester buildings.

First, the Sawyers Arms Hotel on a corner in Deansgate. Corner sites were a favourite location for pubs, especially sites, like this one, on a crossroads – they gave you maximum passing footfall, and two frontages on which to display your sign. This site has held a pub almost continuously since the 1730s and the current building dates to the end of the 19th century.

The name stretches all the way around the curving corner of the building and the script in which it’s written is typical of the style and period – that’s to say expressive, curvy, and a little bit eccentric. Some of the letters break out of their ‘normal’ positions and proportions with great swagger – look at the way the S plunges beneath the base line and displays a noticeable difference in the size of its two loops – small at the top, huge at the bottom. The R likewise has an exaggeratedly large upper bowl, leaving the ‘leg’ of the letter to kick out to the right, invading the lower area of the next letter along. The upper strokes of the W and Y have ornate tops, while the middle parts of the W and M have small strokes, but are still very decorative.

These fancy details, all done with an ornamental curve where this is possible, make the lettering showy and eye-catching. Some elaborate lettering can defeat its own purpose, ending up muddled and hard to read. But that’s not the case here – the sign is both wonderfully clear and brightly eye-catching. It’s just the thing for a grand city pub, a place where people come to relax and enjoy themselves. Exemplary, I’d say.§

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* English rather than British: the history of this development was rather different in Scotland, for example, where there were closer ties to the Austrian and German version of the style, known there as Jugendstil and characterised by a more straight-lined, geometrical approach.

† See, for example, the advertising work of the great Czech artist Alfons Mucha, active in Paris, and architects such as Hector Guimard, famous for his Parisian Metro stations.

§ Grammarians will note the cop-out when it comes to the lack of an apostrophe.

Lee Common, Buckinghamshire

 

Wellsprings of Liberty

When I catch myself taking our water supply for granted in the face of countless communities in other parts of the world who do not have the benefit of a reliable supply of clean water, I think back to my childhood. In the village in Lincolnshire where I was born, my mother had to go to the village pump every day to collect the water we needed to drink, wash and clean. And we were lucky. Our house was called Pump Cottage because it was next to the pump – fetching the water was simply a matter of walking down the garden path and opening the gate. For my grandparents, in a still more rural location (their house was in the middle of a field), water was even nearer: a spring discharged right next to the kitchen door. But in the 1950s, neither of these households could draw water by simply turning on a tap. Universal fresh water in England is a surprisingly recent development.*

In some villages, people had to wait for a local philanthropist or benevolent landlord to come along and sink them a well. Such a man was Sir Arthur Lasenby Liberty, founder and owner of the famous Liberty & Co store in London and lord of the manor at Lee Common in Buckinghamshire. Actually, Liberty did not pay the full cost of the well, which was built by public subscription, but he was the prime mover and where he led, many others no doubt followed. Local historians will tell you how workers had to dig a shaft some 365 feet deep, using candles to light their way and a large pair of bellows borrowed from the local blacksmith to keep the shaft ventilated with fresh air.† The well is conveniently close to most of the houses in Lee Common. We stayed there a short while ago, but at the other end of the settlement, so missed the well for a few days before we stumbled on it. But it must have been a boon to villagers until it closed in the 1950s due to pollution – and the coming, one hopes, of piped water.

The well was beneficial to the locals and a good way of celebrating Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. It being a project spearheaded by Sir Arthur, the well house is as beautifully designed as the home furnishings he stocked in his London shop. Indeed he organised Liberty craftsmen to make its wooden structure – hexagonal, with an oak frame, a tiled pointed roof, and panels like wooden gates between the posts. In the period between 1890 and 1910, Liberty embraced the fashionable Art Nouveau style of design, and there are traces of that in the woodwork of the well house. This is clear in the beautifully cut lettering of the inscription, which extends around the structure’s six sides, telling the reader that ‘This well was built by public subscription in commemoration of Her Majesty’s Diamond Jubilee, Anno Domini MDCCCXCVII’. The lettering, with its ornamental letter forms, is as decorative as it is informative, reflecting the combination of elegance and utility displayed by the well house itself.§

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* And yes, I’m sure there are households in some isolated places where there’s still no mains water.

† I’m indebted to the website of The Lee, the neighbouring village in the local cluster of settlements, for this information. The depth of 365 feet seems conveniently memorable, recalling those country houses that have a room for each day of the year, but is no doubt accurate to within a foot or two.

§ The well shaft is kept covered today, but the winding machinery is still there, the well still functions, and the water is tested periodically, to ensure that if needed, it is still fit for use.

Lee Common Jubilee Well, detail of lettering

Liverpool, St John's Lane

 

Liverpudlian Goth-ish

St John’s Lane in central Liverpool is dominated by St John’s Gardens and one end of St George’s Hall on one side; the other side is made up mostly of recent developments – St John’s Precinct and a large, glass-fronted office building, the Observatory. Standing in splendid Victorian isolation is the former office of the Pearl Assurance Company, which catches the pedestrian’s eye with a very ornate corner entrance. It’s a phantasmagoria of arches, shafts, and Gothic details such as trefoils, stubby pinnacles, carved capitals and openwork parapets in a mixture of grey granite and buff-to-reddish stone. Over the door, a semicircular tympanum bears the name of the company in green and gold mosaic. Look up, and this entrance is crowned by a tower and spire. Beyond, four sets of office windows with gables above lead the eye down St John’s Lane while a slightly shorter facade of three gables stretches along Queen Square.

This building was designed by Alfred Waterhouse in 1896–8. It’s a relic of a time when many large insurance companies had offices in large provincial cities as well as headquarters in London. Waterhouse’s bread and butter was designing such structures for Prudential – most of those are in bright red brick and terracotta and many, like the huge Prudential HQ in London are still there, occupied by other companies. For Pearl, Waterhouse used stone. Struck first by the entrance, I mentally filed the building under ‘Liverpudlian Gothic’, like the office block in my previous post. But a quick look made me realise that it’s more complicated than that. The details on the corner are Gothic, sure enough. But the arches are all semicircular, not pointed as one would expect in a Gothic building. And the side windows and gables seem to speak more of a Jacobean revival style.

View of the building showing the facades on St John’s Lane and Queen Square

By the 1890s, many architects were leaving behind the kind of strict, would-be accurate revivalism adopted by their predecessors earlier in the Victorian period – especially in secular buildings but even in churches too. The more vernacular building of the Arts and Crafts movement had arrived; Art Nouveau was just around the corner; and for designers like Waterhouse, working for clients who wanted buildings that were part landmark (the spire), part status symbol (the decoration), and part economical use of space, an eclectic kind of architecture was a good solution. Although Pearl Assurance has disappeared (after a takeover in the late-1980s), this building carries on, a tribute to an architectural blend of ideas and requirements that led to something practical, but hardly a visual compromise.

Note Thank you to my regular readers for indulging me in my splurge of Liverpool buildings over the last few weeks. I had not visited the city for years and it was even more architecturally rich than I remembered. My next few posts will be from elsewhere, but I plan to do more Liverpudlian posts in the future.

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

 

Occasional haunts, 2

I often stroll around Cheltenham, admiring its Regency architecture (terraces, crescents and squares of stone or stucco-clad houses especially). This heritage reflects a heyday in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, when people flocked to the town to visit its several spas and take the waters in the hope of curing a variety of ills. However, the town remained prosperous in the Victorian period, when health tourism was supplemented by education (Cheltenham became home to several public schools) and by its popularity as a place to which to retire (it was a favourite of army officers, colonial administrators and their families). The public schools were not for everyone, and many local-authority schools were built in the late-19th century.

One of these, now converted to apartments, was All Saints’ School, built in hard, mass-produced brick with Dutch gables and big windows, in the style of many a London board school. The architecture is enlivened by architectural terracotta – i.e. clay cast to produce decorative or other designs, a material that was becoming very popular when the school was built in 1890–91. By this time, terracotta faces, sunflowers and foliage were appearing all over fashionable houses. On the school, this material was used to produce signs denoting the separate entrances for boys and girls (photograph below), and for highlights such as capitals atop the brick pilasters that ran up the building, enlivening the expanses of brickwork (above).

My favourite piece of terracotta decoration on this building combines acanthus leaves and scrolls with human faces and vases of flowers. Ornaments like this could be bought from stock from manufacturers in certain towns where bricks were produced – Ruabon, Tamworth and Loughborough, for example. Elaborate bespoke ornaments could be ordered individually, but examples like this, where the architect and builders would have been working to a tight budget, would probably have been selected from a manufacturer’s catalogue, just like those used on many streets of middle-class housing. Perfect for a lesson in the interest of looking up, even at a familiar building.

Witney, Oxfordshire

 

Occasional haunts…

…that just keep on giving: there are certain small towns, mostly in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, that I visit quite often, and where I find myself staring at some architectural feature that I’ve not looked at closely before. Here’s an example in Witney: a probably 19th-century shop with a collection of ghost signs that I was aware of, but had not perhaps given the attention they deserved. Above the modern shop front one can see brick walls made up of a pattern of light and dark bricks – red or brown bricks with their long sides (the stretchers) visible and between them pale white or cream bricks laid so that their ends (the headers) can be seen. The resulting effect is pleasingly mottled, making the upper floors more appealing than the unfortunate shop front below. 

But what makes the building stand out for me are the painted signs. They’re faded, and when I first saw the building I noticed only the large letters across the front: GLO’STER HOUSE, the first word a once common contraction of Gloucester, in which the apostrophe, not always included, is just about visible here (clicking on the image should make it larger and clearer). The words on the corner are more informative, however. The fourth word down, just above the lamp, foxed me at first, because I thought it was HOTEL. But what the words on the corner actually say is, I believe: VINER’S FURNISHING STORES NOTED HOUSE FOR Bedsteads, MATTRESSES, BEDDING, TIN TRUNKS, CARPETS. I think there may once have been more – is that an AND below CARPETS? Even without the missing bit, we get a picture of a home furnishing and bedding store.

I’ve not found out much about Viner’s except that a photograph with the ghost sign in place and the business still open can be seen online, with a suggested date of c. 1964. It’s very blurred and looks as if it may have come from an old newspaper. Perhaps Viner’s, then, were in business through the first half of the 20th century and well into the 1960s. That decade marked my first personal knowledge of Witney, when I remember as a boy being driven by my father along the A40 road, which then passed straight through the middle of the town. I vaguely recall being struck by various shop signs, including, on a butcher’s a board painted with the slogan, PLEASED TO MEET YOU – MEAT TO PLEASE YOU. The locally made blankets were also featured on signboards – I expect Viner’s stocked them too. How good to be reminded of such things by the fading ghost sign of Messrs Viner. Though their wares are no longer sold here, the sign is still doing worthwhile evocative work.

Manchester, Oxford Road

 

People’s palace

Taking the bus from the centre of Manchester to the Whitworth Art Gallery to save time and avoid the rain, I saw this building out of the window…and of course had to walk back to take a closer look. Manchester is full of buildings clad in terracotta, but not so many in a tasteful combination of green and cream faience that catches the eye, is in theory at least easy to keep clean, and stands out from the crowd in a way that’s an effective bit of self-advertising. Perfect of course for a cinema, The Grosvenor Picture Palace no less, its Art Nouveauish lettering announcing that for a small fee, anyone can luxuriate in palatial surroundings while enjoying the latest in cinematic entertainment.

It’s an early cinema, designed in 1913 and opened in 1915,* when the 1000-seater claimed to be the largest outside London and offered, in addition to films, the opportunity to play snooker or billiards in the basement.† The architect was a local man, Percy Hothersall, who designed several cinemas and on this occasion worked with the Middleton Fireclay Works of Leeds to produce the ceramic cladding for the building. Pilasters, swags, roundels, circular oeil de boeuf windows, and a shallow dome on the corner produce an effect of decorative classicism. It’s fairly formulaic stuff that would have been bread and butter to both the architect and the ceramics company, but it must have looked sophisticated to most of the cinema’s first customers.

Cinemas like the Grosvenor were part of a swelling tide of picture houses, which became more and more popular as the film industry got going. Architect Percy Hothersall was drawn into this trend, not only designing cinemas, but sometimes taking his fee in shares in cinema companies. He seems to have made a lot of money out of this, but apparently invested his profits unwisely, and was declared bankrupt in 1926. It’s a sad story, all the more so because the popularity of cinema-going lasted until well after World War II and a wiser investor could have continued to make profits. The Grosvenor showed movies until 1968, after which, like so many cinemas, it was used as a bingo hall before it became a pub. The eye-catching exterior is no doubt just as effective an advertisement as it originally was.

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* Cinema was barely 20 years old at this point. The Lumière brothers first demonstrated their Cinematographe in December 1895. The first decade of the 20th century saw the rapid growth of film industries in many countries.

† I’m indebted to the Architects of Greater Manchester website for information about this building and its architect.

Hull, East Yorkshire

 

Names and textures, 2

Now for a sign that contrasts with the one in my previous post and makes a good excuse to look at one of my favourite street names. Yes, The Land of Green Ginger is the name of a street, a narrow one off Silver Street in the centre of Hull. There are various theories about the origin of this curious name. Some say that it is a corruption of ‘Lindegroen jonger’, referencing a junior member of the Dutch Lindegreen family, who lived in Hull in the early-19th century. Others suggest it derives from ‘Landgrave Granger’, because the Landgrave family nearby. I am always suspicious of derivations that are said to be ‘corruptions’ of ‘difficult’ words and prefer the simpler explanation that, in this great shipping and trading city (a cosmopolitan place where ‘unusual’ names must have been common), valuable spices like ginger were sold nearby.

The sign itself is an elegant one that uses a serif letterform which fills the name plate so that there’s very little free space around the words. Such is the clarity of the letters, though, that the sign doesn’t look crowded and is perfectly legible. The size of the sign has been well specified to sit comfortably on its strip of masonry. The dark background of the name plate and the thickness of the material mean it stands proud slightly as is easy to spot.

But what an extraordinary wall it’s set on. This building was designed in 1907 by Dunn and Watson for the National Provincial Bank. Built in 1907, its Portland stone walls are finished with an effect called banded rustication – the masonry is arranged in bands that have deep grooves between them, giving a striking stripey look in full sun. But this rustication goes further than most. Many of the bands are pulvinated – in other words they have a convex curved profile. The gaps between the bands are very deep and there are concave mouldings within each band; the ends of the bands are carefully chamfered or curved. A lot of trouble has been taken with this masonry, including the way the bands turn to embrace the keystone above the window. Another striking feature is the Celtic knot design on the square block above the keystone. Once more in Hull, name and texture, surprising for different reasons, sit well together.

Hull, East Yorkshire

Names and textures, 1

One of the first things I noticed on arriving in Hull back in July is that the city has some attractive old street name signs. I quickly learned that it also has an extraordinary variety of styles of these signs, probably representing every period from the 19th century to the current decade. This is hardly surprising. For one thing, Hull sustained severe damage from bombing during World War II. For another, it has been a dynamic, developing place, responding to highs and lows, for much of its history. Here’s one example of an early sign in a street I walked along very soon after I arrived.

What a characterful sign this is, and how well it complements the texture of the brick wall to which it’s attached. Its shape, a long rectangle (naturally), cut off at the corners by concave curves, is one that was popular in the 19th and early-20th centuries in many British towns. I’ve noticed signs of a similar shape in places such Louth in Lincolnshire. But signs like the one in Louth are heavy objects, made of thick cast iron, which project visibly from the wall surface and are attached to it by screws that pass through the sign into the brickwork. This one in Hull, by contrast, is much flatter and is fixed in place by screws and washers set around the edge of the sign.

What really caught my eye, though, was the lettering, Most of the letters are of a standard form used by the Victorians on signs, capital letters that have serifs* with a slight curve where they join the main strokes of the letter. The letters also display a notable contrast between the widths of the strokes – thick verticals and thin horizontals. This style gives the letter-designer or sign-writer a particular challenge when it comes to the most curvaceous letters, especially ’S’. In this sign both examples of the letter ’S’ have small serifs that rest slightly above the base line while the lower part of the curve sits a fraction below, giving the letter a slightly free-floating look that I find charming.† The whole sign, I think, looks good on a background of brickwork and sash windows, providing a small asset that’s worth more than a passing glance.

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* A little lettering terminology. Serif: the tiny strokes at the ends of the main strokes of letters. Base line: the imaginary line on which the bottom of each letter sits.

† It’s traditional in sign-writing it was and is normal to place the bottom of a curvy letter such as S or O very slightly below the base line; if it sits on the base line itself, it looks in practice as if it’s floating a little too high. The details of the sign will be clearer if you click on the image to enlarge it. 

Hull, East Yorkshire

Suit you, 2

In the centre of Hull, strolling around on my visit back in the summer, I found Hepworth’s Arcade, a small shopping development of 1894–5. It’s modest, but well detailed, from the glass roof in the form of a barrel vault supported on openwork iron arches (one such arch is visible in my photograph), through the decorated frieze and fluted pilasters of the upper floor, to the small shop fronts at ground level. The name of the arcade is displayed inside as well as out, to remind us that the development was built for Joseph Hepworth, the tailor from Leeds who pioneered the business of supplying reasonably priced made-to-measure suits using a national network of shops.

This is not a grand interior like the magnificent one in Hepworth’s home city designed by the theatre architect Frank Matcham, but local firm Gelder and Kitchen did a good job that has stood the test of time. The development was no doubt a business venture for Hepworth, but he would also have liked the idea that his name would be remembered for more than his large chain of clothes stores. Perhaps this was shrewd, since in the 1980s the Hepworth business metamorphosed into the chain now called Next, while the arcade still bears the Hepworth name.

There is still a men’s clothes shop in the arcade too. It’s called Beasley’s and it has a separate hat shop opposite its main premises. A hat shop: these are rare beasts nowadays. I celebrated its presence by buying myself a straw hat to replace one I’ve had for about 40 years. On my way out into the street I noticed a bit of Hepworth memorabilia: the large and colourful sign advertising their company. I don’t know the age of the sign but its range of traditional letterforms, its lavish scrolls, and the pointing hand (neatly jacketed and shirted of course), suggest some time fairly on in the history of the arcade. It’ll suit me.

York Way, London

The ‘Theophrastus effect’

It happens every now and then: you’re walking round a town or district that’s unfamiliar to you, and you notice something – an architectural detail, a combination of colours in the paintwork, a type of sign – that seems more common here than elsewhere. It can be a bit of local distinctiveness like a preference for certain patterns in pargetting, or evidence of a craftworker with notable skills, or just a fashion that has taken hold in a few neighbouring streets. Or maybe it’s just that, as you look, something strikes you and your eye and brain are alerted to other examples nearby. My personal name for this is the Theophrastus effect, because years ago I had to write something about the ancient and some would say obscure Greek writer Theophrastus and suddenly, because I was thinking about him a lot, I began to see references to him everywhere.

Walking around some of the streets near Euston Station the other week, the Theophrastus effect came into play when I started to spot metal lettering positioned over entrances to courtyards, a housing complex, and even a pub. Some of these signs incorporated fancy wrought-iron decoration and a particularly good one, the sign above the entrance to the Lincoln Arms pub, has some superb metalwork.

This is a lovely way to mark the entrance to a hostelry, drawing you into the oddly angled doorway or making a memorable impression if you’re just passing by. The letters aren’t at all bad – maybe the curved ones are less assured than the other letters, but they’re good enough to hold their own. The surrounding wrought-iron spirals, scrolls, and foliage are outstanding, in my opinion. Their inventive curves, some of which scroll, then bend in a different direction, are redolent of Art Nouveau and the way in which the foliate forms overlap the ends of the lettering slightly I find particularly appealing.

This memorable sign certainly made me want to go in, although I had a commitment elsewhere that made this impossible. I intend to go back though, not least because the building next door was covered in scaffolding, making a decent photograph of the whole pub impossible. And because, according to CAMRA,* the Lincoln Arms, which had a phase as a ‘trendy bar’ is now a traditional pub again. How pleasing that this sign has survived the various changes.

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* The Campaign for Real Ale, the organisation that has done much to improve the quality of the beer available in British pubs, as well as encouraging improvements in the quality of pubs as a whole.

Lullington, East Sussex

Where was I?

Year: 1968. Scene: A red Humber Sceptre driving along a lane in remote Somerset, my father at the wheel, me in the passenger seat, trying to find where we are on an Ordnance Survey map. We are trying not to admit to each another that we are lost.

DAD: Well, I don’t think this can be the right road.

ME: I know. It doesn’t look right on the map.

DAD: Let’s carry on for now.

ME (excitedly): Look! There’s a post box. Let’s stop and see what it says.

DAD (braking): Good idea – son.

That last word was always said with a slight pause before it, ‘son’ being stressed in an unusual way, part in irony, part in praise, or, occasionally, if the emphasis was very strong, admiration.

Of course, what we both knew was that back then, post boxes carried information about their location on the panel that bore the collection times. So we stopped and discovered more or less where we were.

I thought of this when I saw this lovely signpost at a Sussex junction back in the spring. I found several things about it easy to like – its wooden construction, the tapering column, the black-painted finial, the shaped corners of the pointing arms, and the clear sans serif lettering. Also the way it told me the direction of Lullington church, which is what I was looking for. And the fact that the column spells out where you are: LULLINGTON. If you’re unsure of your bearings, it puts you right. Perfect.

This was useful when the signpost was erected and, it could be argued, it’s still useful today. Most of us find our way around these days with the help of apparently miraculous satnav devices.* They are usually pretty good at guiding us to our destination, but not very good at telling us where we are. We glance at the dashboard map and see we’re nearing a grey area signifying a settlement, but no name is attached to it. If some oaf has driven into the village sign and knocked it over, or if we miss it because we are dodging other dashing objects or are distracted for a split second by an interesting Georgian rectory, we have no idea. If we’re in a place like Lullington, too small to have many signs at all, we’re likewise likely to be foxed. Signs like this still have their uses.

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* One of these days I’ll get round to doing a post about the virtues of OS maps when it comes to finding interesting buildings. Come to think of it, I’ve covered this ground already, in more than one earlier post. See this one from 2019.

Vindolanda, Northumberland

Markers of significance

Oh I do like a good sign. Shop signs, inn signs, ghost signs, road signs. Signs that tell us to ‘Commit no nuisance’; signs that implore us to adjust our dress before leaving. Signs that transport us to other times and other ways.* When our hosts took us to the wonderful Roman site at Vindolanda, they had a bonus to show us: not one old sign, but two close together, from vastly different eras. First, the stone column in the upper photograph. That’s a Roman milestone, and the only one in Britain that survives both intact and in its original position. It was one of a series marking the miles on the Stanegate, the Roman road that once linked Corbridge and Carlisle. The Stanegate, and the forts along it such as Vindolanda, date from the time in the 1st century CE when the Romans were advancing into what is now Scotland. When their progress was impeded in 79 CE they withdrew, so that the road became in effect the empire’s northern frontier. Hadrian became emperor in 117 and visited Britain in 122, probably staying at Vindolanda, when he ordered the wall to be built. Milestones marked the distance to the next important place along the road and had an additional propaganda value because their inscriptions mentioned the emperor. Sadly the inscription on this one has worn away, but its survival reminds us of a once essential route for the Romans, at first as a point from which to advance and later as a route for the defenders of the frontier.

As an antiquity of great importance, the milestone was put under the care of the Ministry of Works in the 20th century. The object in my second photograph is one of the ministry’s admirable cast-iron signs naming the monument and its location, and warning the reader that damaging it will render the culprit liable to prosecution. There used to be hundreds if not thousands of signs like this and their iron construction made them very durable. This one would have been put up during the lifetime of the Ministry of Works (1940–62); in 1962, the body was renamed the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, which it remained until 1970, when it became part of the Department of the Environment. The sign refers to this monument as the Chesterholm Milestone, Chesterholm being the name of a nearby 19th-century house built by the antiquarian Anthony Hedley. Before the name Vindolanda became known (in 1914, when an altar to the god Vulcan inscribed with the name was discovered), ‘Chesterholm’ was often used to describe the fort and objects found there. Although the sign was put up after 1940, people had obviously been referring to the stone as the Chesterholm Milestone for many years and the name was still in circulation.

When I started visiting castles and other ancient monuments as a boy with my parents in the 1960s, both this style of sign and the ‘Public Buildings and Works’ signs that replaced them were commonplace. Most of them have been replaced by later signs, but a few, like this one, survive. Where did all the others go? Who knows? Most of them probably went for scrap. A few must have been snapped up by collectors. Signs hold a lasting fascination for many, whether for their design, their historical associations, the nostalgia they can evoke in the beholder, or personal connections. I know of a café not far from where I live that has an old National Trust sign of similar vintage, I have friends who own old advertising signs and other antiquated notices. I am pleased that such things have found good homes, but I also like it when such a sign can still be found in its original setting, just like the more ancient and highly significant the Roman milestone.

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* For a lighthearted post on old signs, see The signs of yesteryear, from 2018.

Chester

Alas: Smith and Jones…

In Chester in June last year I was trying to do what I do in a city I don’t know well: drifting around taking things in and trying not to focus too much on the obvious. This involves looking up, as we’re always told to do (by people like me, for example) above shop fronts, but also looking down towards semi-basements and cellars, and looking horizontally, down alleys and along back streets. Drifting is not easy in a busy city centre in the middle of summer, but when looking up I did manage to catch sight of some interesting details without bumping into too many people. One such was this old sign for W. H. Smith, newsagents and booksellers, a name about to disappear from Britain’s high streets after more than 200 years.

Smith’s was founded by Henry Walton Smith in 1792, but its great expansion occurred under his grandson, William Henry Smith, who had the idea of station bookstalls during the railway boom of the 1840s and turned the business into a nationwide multiple retailer. By 1905, when this hanging sign was designed by artist Septimus E. Scott, there were branches of Smith’s in hundreds of locations, both high streets and stations. The sign shows a Smith’s newsboy, who sold newspapers, magazines and the occasionally book from a large basket, crying his wares as he went along, as did many other on-street newspaper sellers in days gone by.*

There are still a few newsboy signs hanging above what are still, at the time of writing, branches of Smith’s. They’re not all exactly the same – many were standard enamel signs but others seem to have been hand-painted – so it’s worth giving each one a good look. The brackets vary too, with different combinations of wrought-iron curlicues, some also featuring the name of the business, others incorporating the company’s oval-shaped ‘WHS’ device. Now the shops they adorn and advertise are being sold, as W. H. Smith undertakes the most drastic of the various restructures that have marked its recent decades. Because selling books, newspapers and magazines from high-street locations have all been hit by online sales, the role of a bricks and mortar newsagent is a tough one to play. Smith’s say they make most of their money from their travel agency business (mostly in separate shops). So another owner is buying the traditional Smith’s stores and they’ll be rebranded as ’T G Jones’.†

It’s a sad end to a long history and one hopes that the new owners are able to run the stores profitably. In spite of the effects of rival online trading, there seem to be plenty of customers in my local branch, some buying newspapers, books, or stationery, some using the Post Office counter the store contains. I also hope that the signs that still hang above such shops as those in Cirencester, Stratford-upon-Avon, Worcester, Chester and elsewhere, are retained and looked after, to remind us of the long history of retailing by this once-pioneering business,.

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* I remember as a boy listening to a street newspaper seller in Lincoln repeatedly chanting a mantra that sounded to me like ‘Hurry up, folks’. When I got nearer, I saw the name of the newspaper he was selling: the Nottingham Post.

† T G Jones (which will probably be written ‘TG Jones’), is not named after a real person. It’s a name chosen, according to a piece in the Financial Times, to reflect ‘these stores being at the heart of everyone’s high street’. Hm.

Kidderminster, Worcestershire

 

Ghosts’ stories

I have spent my working life writing and editing illustrated books. Doing this meant paying attention not only to the form and content of the text but also to the appearance of the printed volume – its layout, typeface, paper, cover, and so on. Though not myself responsible for these visual aspects, I would work closely with the designers who were, and my interest in graphics was nurtured by these collaborations. A fascination with fonts on the page turned into a preoccupation with lettering on signs, and the relationship between signs and buildings is one that is revealed now and then in this blog. Ghost signs, those fading painted signs that have hung on after the people who put them there have moved on, are now fashionable, but I was captivated by them before they became popular things to post on social media.

People can get overly romantic about ghost signs – the elegant letterforms, the flaking paint giving us a faint glimpse into a past world, the enticement of what John Piper called ‘pleasing decay’. But this attitude can make us forget an important truth. Take this sign on a door in Kidderminster. By the look of the fading paint and the very closed doors, it’s unlikely that lorries are loaded very much, if at all, hereabouts. The building to which this sign is attached is, I think, the former Chlidema* Mill, named for a method of producing bordered squares of carpet invented by the proprietors of what was, from 1887 to c. 2000, one of Kidderminster’s numerous carpet factories.

By the turn of the millennium, the town’s carpet industry was in steep decline and mill after mill closed. In many cases, the large weaving sheds at the rear of each works were demolished, leaving only the office and warehouse buildings that fronted the street. These were often architecturally impressive, although that at the Chlidema Mill (or what is left of it) is actually quite modest, of two and three storeys with plain red and white brickwork and plain stone window sills. Go around the back and you find parked cars, temporary safety barriers, and (photograph below) an even plainer brick wall. This has been painted to show the outline of the roof of the demolished weaving shed, with its saw-tooth profile – sloping tiled sections and vertical windows, to provide even north light to aid the workers who wove luxurious carpets below.

It’s sad that the sheds found no further use and that no other industry arrived to take advantage of these work spaces. Though some of the old carpet factories in the town have been found roles (in retail, in vehicle repair, and other areas), many of the weaving sheds have gone, job opportunities have vanished, and it’s easy to see that the town lacks the prosperity it once had: the fate of so many implied by the flaking paint of a redundant sign.

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* Chlidema comes from a Greek word meaning ‘luxurious’.

Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire

 

Bardsploitation?

On my many visits to Stratford-upon-Avon, I’d not paid much attention to the sign of the Hathaway Tea Rooms. It’s in a street I don’t often walk along, and if we want tea or coffee in the town, the Resident Wise Woman and I have places where we regularly go. If I noticed it at all, I probably silently condemned it as another arbitrary connection with the Shakespearian reputation (for those who don’t know, Anne Hathaway was the woman who became Mrs Shakespeare). ‘Bardsploitation,’ I might have muttered. ‘What’s Hathaway to them or them to Hathaway?’

Well, the town is full of Bardic references on buildings, so why should Anne Hathaway not get a look-in too? The name gives a good excuse for a pleasant pictorial sign of her cottage, a famous tourist destination in the nearby village of Shottery, owned by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and open to the public. The word ‘LUNCHEONS’ on the beam from which the sign hangs is very much a period detail – it’s a word redolent of the first half of the 20th century.

As is the business itself, and its long life (‘Established 1931’) is something to crow about. It may also be relevant architecturally. Apparently this impressive late-medieval timber-framed building was restored at around that time or a little before, along with its next-door neighbour. Someone (maybe the Georgians) had plastered over the wooden framing and the 20th-century restoration removed this covering, exposing the many timber beams and uprights, adding another bit of ‘black-and-white’ architecture to the town’s centre.

Of course these days we know that blackened beams like these are not a medieval look: structural oak was usually left untreated, so that it achieved a silvery-grey colour. So this ‘black-and-white’ architecture is itself redolent of another time – the Victorian period and later. Any building of this age is likely to bear the marks of several different periods, and such a story of evolution is as interesting as the fact that its origins are ancient. Food for thought over your tea and buns.

Huddersfield, West Yorkshire

Attention! Authority!

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that the signs of yesteryear are one of my perennial obsessions. Old signage, especially in the form of signs attached to buildings, has cropped up in my posts many times over the years, whether on shop fronts, in railway stations, or down dark alleys. As a pendant to my previous post about the goods warehouse next to Huddersfield station, then, here is a sign (clicking on it should enlarge the picture) attached to that building.

As on previous occasions, I’m struck by the design and materials as well as the language of the message. Here the material is cast iron and the letterform is a plain, bold, sans-serif, all in capitals. That’s just what one expects on a blunt, no-nonsense Victorian notice, and the language too is in some ways very much of its time. Only the ‘PROPERLY APPOINTED COMPANYS SERVANTS’ (no bothering with apostrophes here, no pausing to question whether some of the company’s servants are improperly appointed) may work all the impressive machinery used in and around the station. The company’s servants may operate the capstans and cranes, but if the rest of us go anywhere near them we’ll be interfering with them, and woe betide us. And this decree is made ‘BY ORDER’, the once all-pervasive invocation of nameless and imperious authority. No point in asking (as I remember doing as a small boy) ‘Whose order?’. That sign-off means ‘obey, or else’. The sneer of cold command. The shadow of the omnipotent factory owner or railway company director. I took my photograph and withdrew with dignity, looking most unlike someone who would dream of interfering with a hydraulic crane.

Grantham, Lincolnshire

Everywhere in chains

Where William Henry Smith (stationer) and Jesse Boot (chemist) began, the other chain retailers followed. In the late-19th and 20th centuries, countless high street shops belonged to chain store companies, who aimed to have a branch in every town and to corner the market in their specialist area, ensuring that a shopper in Brighton could travel to Bradford and find some* if not all of the same familiar names: Montague Burton (‘the tailor of taste’), Freeman, Hardy and Willis (shoes), MacFisheries, and the various grocers and dairymen – Sainsbury’s, Lipton’s, Home and Colonial, Maypole. So many have gone now, victims of takeovers or losers in the wars of commercial competition. But now and then a bit of a shopfront, a sign, or a threshold mosaic like the one in my photograph hangs on to remind us of their former presence. Not just ghost signs, wall-emblazoned faded phantoms of former glories, but also these resilient threshold brandings. Look down in any high street, and you’re likely to spot one or two.

So here in Grantham is a reminder of Maypole Dairy, The company began in 1891 and by 1918 they had 889 branches. Their formula was simple: stock a very small range of the dairy products that ordinary people bought all the time: milk, butter, margarine, eggs, tea. At first they did well, but profits fell after World War I and they were taken over by Home and Colonial, although the stores kept their old name; there were still Maypole shops until the end of the 1960s.

The shops were small but stylish. They had tiled interiors (sometimes with pictorial tiles) and gilded lettering in the name signs. Most of that has gone, but a number of these threshold mosaics can be found. The one in Grantham is typical. The letterforms, with their forked terminations to the strokes, have a touch of late-Victorian whimsy about them, even a touch of Art Nouveau. If you look at those terminations closely you can see little ovals, as if they are made of tree branches that have been sawn to size. Arranging the tiny tesserae to make the letters (each of which has a surrounding border of even tinier tesserae), the central flower and leaf, and the background pattern, took both skill and time. But a century ago and more, this was a standard way of branding a shop exterior. Over 60 years after the last Maypole closed, this one is still putting recent shop entrances to shame.

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* Although not all chains had nationwide coverage: some stuck to their local area, some covered the north but not the south and vice versa.

Chester

 

A good front

A couple of posts ago, I noticed an early building serving the automotive industry in Clifton, a structure of 1898 that showed how swiftly architecture began to adapt to house the new business of selling and maintaining cars. This facade in Chester is what remains from another early automotive building, the Westminster Coach and Motor Car Works of 1914. The front that remains shows a combination of practicality (big arches for the easy toing and froing of coaches and motor cars) and lavish display – terracotta cladding bearing rich decoration in the sort of Renaissance revival style popular at the time, with semicircular rusticated arches, dentil courses, balusters, and lots of ornament including scrolls, foliage, fanciful beasts and the occasional human face. The building’s name and purpose are displayed in fancy lettering in the pediment.

The building was actually a replacement of another, similar in design and purpose, which was destroyed in a fire; there had been a coachworks on the site since 1870. Its owners, named Lawton, built their own cars and carriages, as well as selling Mercedes and other vehicles, together with Michelin tyres. Lawton’s also ran a motor cab company. Their building remained a car showroom until the 19709s, after which a new city library was built behind this facade, a structure that was itself recently replaced by the current shopping arcade.

I’m usually pleased when an old building finds a new use – the alternative is so often decay then demolition then the construction of a new building of poor quality and short life. Hanging on to an old facade and erecting a new structure behind it is rarely an ideal solution either. But here I think it works. The current arcade has a landmark for a frontage, with a central arch that provides a grand entrance. The signage could have been handled better in my opinion, but that terracotta extravaganza has been kept, and Chester is the better for it.