There are quite a lot of these mementos of bygone businesses, high on gable ends and the rust-red brick walls of Victorian buildings. Sometimes, as here at the corner of Rawlinson Street and Buccleuch Street, there has been a succession of such once-proud announcements, one over the top of another.
Nobody seems to think to remove them, as they might in more fastidious towns. I like that – it gives us a real living link with the past. Sooner or later these buildings will be swept away, and then something will have been lost forever.
Back in the 1980s, when Waterloo Tube station in London was being thoroughly worked over, a real 1920s Ovaltine advertisement was exposed over one of the escalators. It made me smile every time I saw it, and hoped against hope that it would be preserved. It wasn’t, of course. It was covered over with 1980s tack.
Posted by enitharmon 
