Taking the 124 bus from the Excalibur Estate, I travelled along Sandhurst Road, Catford for the first time and found three ghost signs.
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The first, on the corner with Muirkirk Road, shows that the barber's/shipping agents used to be a butcher's shop. More precisely, it was 'R. C. Evans, Family Butcher, Purveyor of English & Scotch meat, finest quality, lowest prices'. Evans appears to have occupied the premises long enough for the sign to have been repainted at least once: traces of the earlier lettering show through.
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Nearby Inchmery Road has two signs. The first, sadly, is near-illegible although tantalising traces of the words remain.
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However, the second was rather more exciting. From Sandhurst Road, a large sign for Warner Bros, Hygienic Bakers is visible. Walking down Inchmery Road, though, the side of the building revealed that this building also advertises Hovis. The use of the Hovis logo in conjunction with details of a local baker was characteristic of their campaign, but it's the first one I've seen making use of two walls of a building in this way.
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5 comments:
There are a couple of interesting articles in the local residents' association newsletters on the history of the parade of shops, which you may be interested in.
http://www.culverleygreen.org/uploads/2/0/6/2/20626728/newsletter_2013_2_e.pdf
http://www.culverleygreen.org/uploads/2/0/6/2/20626728/cgra_newsletter_2014_1.pdf
Apologies if this has appeared twice, I was trying a different RSS feed which appeared to fall over...
I've been looking at the illegible sign, both in your photograph and in the Google Street View picture, varying contrast and colour and using a slight blur to reduce the texture of the brickwork. Words have appeared, but the result is an anticlimax: before the place was a branch of Lloyds Pharmacy it was a chemist's shop.
The inscription seems to be a quardruple palimpsest, which is why it's so hard to decipher. I can't make anything of the white writing. But there are three black stages:
1. At the top:
CHEMIST
& DRUGGIST
PRESCRIPTIONS
2. At the bottom:
MEDICAL(?) PRESCRIPTIONS
DISPENSED
3. At the bottom:
Everything at Store Prices
You are right Ralph, I posted about the sign earlier in the year, but also found a photo from 10 years ago (which is around when I first noticed it), the deterioration is really clear over that period.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/93733773@N03/8572258093/
I remember there still being a butcher's on the and I'm only 35, and there was a bakers on muirkirk with a Painted on the sign
P
An amazing Hovis & Warner Bros (wedding & birthday cakes a speciality) sign has recently been revealed which was behind the billboard that was up on the wall opposite the faded chemist ghost sign. It's a real beauty. I suppose it's in the nature of these signs that sometimes them being covered by modern advertising ironically preserves them (although you can see where they painted around the billboard - but not that intrusive into the original sign).
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