Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire

The colours of memory

I’ve gone on before about the stick-on advertising signs that shopkeepers sometimes put on their windows, and how these stick-on signs sometimes stick around for many years. I was reminded of this the other night in Moreton-in-Marsh when I came across this particularly evocative example: a Kodak sign that is obviously quite old, though I don’t know how old.

We’re back in the analogue era here, when most people took their films in to the local chemist to be developed and printed. Digital photography changed all this, of course, and it has been around for decades now – and was becoming popular when the new millennium got going. This Kodak sign goes further back than that, I think. The emphasis on colour and the use of the curve-sided box, like an old TV screen, have a rather 1970s feel. Those were the days, when many people still had black and white TVs, and when colour was something to shout about.

Having taken my digital photograph of this analogue sign and downloaded it on to the computer, I noticed another story that it has to tell. The yellow band of colour on the left is actually not part of the sign. Do you notice how it’s wider than the other bands, and that there’s no white line separating it from the band next door, as there is with the others? It looks as if, having got hold of a sign that wasn’t big enough to go right across the window, the shopkeeper retained part of a previous sign (maybe even a yellow Kodak one of a still earlier era) to fill the gap – and make the whole width of the window glow with Kodak colour.

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Links to other stick-on signs I’ve posted:

Procea bread and the Procea bakerman, in Bromyard and Cheltenham
Atlas bulbs and Wilkinson Sword gardening tools in Ludlow
Every Ready batteries in Uppingham
Tea in Winchcombe
Ariel motorcycles in Frome

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

Here comes the Bakerman

After all the recent posts about timber framing, a contrast and a little light relief.

A while back I did a short series of posts about stick-on signs on shop windows. One of these posts showed a sticker in Bromyard for Procea bread, and around the side of the window, only just visible in my photograph, was another Procea sticker showing a character, called the Bakerman, that the company used in their advertising. One reader asked to see more of the Bakerman, but I did not have a more revealing image from the Bromyard shop. Yesterday however, looking on my phone for something else, I remembered that I'd taken this photograph on the way to breakfast (a rare but cherished treat, the full English) in Cheltenham. So here is the loaf-bearing Bakerman, standing out against the yellow background that Procea used to catch the eye. Short he may be, but his loaf is large.

Can the Bakerman really have been here since the 1970s, when the brand was bought by Spillers? If so, his survival is a bit of good fortune, although not as accidental perhaps as the collection of reflections in my rapid-fire photograph – a little of Cheltenham's Regency architecture, plus a 1960s block abutting it (itself an architectural leftover from the heyday of Procea), a curvaceous street lamp, and the other Procea sign on the opposite side of the doorway. All caught in a moment as my mind was briefly distracted from thoughts of bacon, egg, mushrooms, and toast.

Ludlow, Shropshire

Still bright, still sharp

"Built to last" is something people like to say about architecture, and buildings are usually seen as enduring structures. Nearly all the buildings I post about are considerably older than I am, and some of them are 1000 years old or more. But I also like now and then to notice the ephemeral bits and bobs that get attached to buildings. Notices and advertising signs especially: old signs and posters pointing us towards camera film, wagonettes, elastic glue, beer, tea… Most of these weren't meant to be permanent, but somehow they cling on to walls and windows, against all the odds and against ideas that tell us that advertising has to keep up with the times, keep reinventing itself.

I saw two more examples at the weekend, stuck to the windows of an ironmonger's shop, Rickard's in Ludlow, a building of which I took many more photographs that I will no doubt share with you eventually. Two stick-on advertisements, one on either side of the shop door, still hanging on, and hanging in.

First, a vibrant sign for Atlas Lamps, which caught my eye because it's so colourful. Atlas lamps were in existence by the 1930s – in 1932 or 1933 Jules Thorn, the founder of the Thorn electrical company, started as a lighting manufacturer by buying up the Atlas Works, in Edmonton, London, where Atlas Lamps were produced. The "For staying power" slogan was in use in the 1940s and 1950s – I've seen it in newspaper advertisements of 1949 and 1950, both using the same distinctive typeface for "ATLAS" that appears on this shop sign. Thorn was still using the Atlas name in the 1960s and 1970s, after which the range was absorbed into the Thorn catalogue. This sign may date from the 1950s, as 1960s Atlas items I've seen online use bold lower-case type for the brand name.

Second, a sign for garden tools made by Wilkinson's. Beginning in the late-18th century as gunmakers, Wilkinson's started producing swords and bayonets in the early-19th century, building up a reputation for producing strong, good quality blades. Diversification into razors (1890) and garden shears (1920) followed. At various points the company produced bicycles, motorcycles, typewriters, and other items too. I've no idea how old this sign is – the style has a late-1950s or early-1960s feel to my eyes, but this is little more than the guesswork of someone trying to cast his mind back many years.

And I like the way these signs take the mind back, though my pleasure in them is more than just nostalgic. I'm interested too in the way that artists and designers presented brands in different ways – from the larky drawing of a modern Atlas lifting a light bulb to Wilkinson's more purposeful twin swords. The use of colour is a big contrast too, Atlas's bright, cheerful, appropriately well illuminated, Wilkinson's more subtle, with its mottled background like an old terrazzo floor and its hint of gold. A lot to think about on either side of this shop doorway, before you even step inside.

Winchcombe, Gloucestershire

Stick-ons: 3

I’ve been away for just over a week, hence the recent posts of pictures from my archives. Now I’m back, he’s a third stick-on sign, this time from the town where I live, to symbolize my return to the land where cups of tea are a way of life. These signs are on a window that until a while ago fronted a small grocery shop. The building is now used residentially, but the tea signs remain and add some colour to the rather sober window frame. They advertise two brands of tea that have been part of British life for over a century.

The Typhoo brand began in 1905 and was successful partly as a result of astute marketing – even in the 1900s the company produced teapots with the Typhoo name emblazoned across them and included collectable picture cards in packets of tea. In the early days the company also claimed their tea was health-giving, and the curious name derives from the Chinese for “doctor”.

Brooke Bond is even older. The company was founded by Arthur Brooke in 1869 and launched its famous P G Tips brand of tea in the 1930s. Brooke Bond tea was very successful from the 1950s onwards, when packets contained collectors’ cards that were probably even more popular than those given away with Typhoo tea earlier in the century. Brooke Bond tea is not widely sold in Britain now but the brand is still widely available in India and Pakistan.

I’m pleased these colourful signs are still adorning this former shop window. Whereas the Brooke Bond one sits quite neatly in its rectangle, the Typhoo sign has been cut up to fit – but in spite of the interrupting glazing bars its bold letters shout the message loud and clear.

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.

Frome, Somerset

Stick-ons: 1 

When I was looking at the ironmongers in Uppingham a little while ago, the remains of its Ever-Ready Batteries sign set me thinking. I have noticed these old stick-on signs on shop windows before. Perhaps two or three might make a short series. I was soon looking through my photographic files and came up with this one, specially for those of you who like to travel on two wheels: an old stick-on sign advertising Ariel motorcycles on a shop window in Frome.

Ariel was a company that began in the 19th century as a manufacturer of bicycles. they made their first motorcycle in 1902, and produced such popular machines as the Red Hunter in the 1930s. Ariel was bought up by BSA in the 1940s and BSA continued to make motorcycles with the Ariel badge until 1970, advertising them as "The Modern Motorcycle" if this sign is anything to go by. Given the bright orange and yellow colouring it's hard to believe that when I passed it a couple of years ago it must have been the for forty years or more. The style of the lettering, with its contrasting capitals and script forms, seems to hark back still further. It certainly makes a bright and striking contrast with the classical, 19th-century looking shop front, with its dentils and mouldings. A lovely find.

Uppingham, Rutland

Four candles

“Four candles,” says Ronnie Barker, starting off a chain of misunderstandings with his comedic partner Ronnie Corbett in one of the funniest sketches in British comedy. Corbett, behind the counter, is soon climbing stepladders, opening drawers, shifting boxes of goods, and sorting through a seemingly endless stock to find what his customer wants.† He is also evoking the world of the old-fashioned ironmonger.

Going back a few more decades, the Victorian ironmonger was one of the key people on the High Street. You could see his shop from far off because of the arrangement of buckets, bins, and brooms on the pavement outside. Coming closer, you would be able to make out rows of lamps in the window, a range of metal items such as kettles, pans, jelly moulds, and all kinds of other kitchen equipment. Then there would be tools, from hammers to saws, and all kinds of fancy work, like bell pushes and bird cages. The cavernous interior would be full of drawers and shelves, and in the gloaming beyond the front of the shop were larger items, such as tin baths and baby carriages, kitchen ranges and stoves. Somewhere in the rear would be a doorway leading to an outhouse full of farm equipment, such as the kind of plough that was often the ironmonger’s sign, and a forge where some of the stock was manufactured and where the proprietor would repair metal goods.

D Norton and Sons in the middle of Uppingham was probably like this once upon a time. It is still a cornucopia of gardening equipment and household goods and still has its 19th-century shop front, with a plough above the door and elegant classical columns on either side. I would like to ask my Uppingham correspondent to go up to those columns and tap them next time he passes by. When I was there I forgot to give them a tap to see if they produced the dull thud of stone and plaster or the ring of iron. I have posted before about an ironmonger’s shop with an iron facade, and I did wonder whether these were metal columns, but a commenter on this post says that he has tapped them, and that they feel like wood.

A lovely feature of this shop is the stained glass panels in the upper sections of the windows, advertising some of the goods and services on offer when the window was installed in the 19th century. The one on the right tells us that the proprietor was a “FURNISHING IRONMONGER”, which I take to mean that his stock was aimed mainly at the domestic market – whether fitting a kitchen range or supplying a canteen of cutlery, he would be your man. And on the left, there’s more: “GAS FITTER & BELL HANGER”. Does that mean church bells? The business of fitting door bells and the kinds of bell systems that Victorians with big houses used to summon their servants was more the usual line for ironmongers, but who knows? When the interior gleamed with oil or gas light, these stained-glass panels must have glowed, drawing the eye of passers-by on winter evenings.

Now shops like this also sell more up-to-date items such as bulbs and batteries. Part of a stick-on sign for the latter, a bygone of a more recent period, survives on this window, the blue suggesting the Ever-Ready brand. Its presence reminds me once again that there is so much more to look at in shop windows than the goods on display.

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† Or what he doesn’t want. What Barker is actually after, he soon reveals, are “Fork ‘andles. ‘Andles for forks.” And so the dialogue goes on.