Archival Photos

A 1984 Photo of the Spitalfields Gillette Ghost Sign

I first posted about this illustrated Gillette ghost sign on Commercial Street back in 2007 when I came across it on Frank Jump’s Fading Ads blog. Frank told me that the best place to photograph it was from the top of the nearby carpark which led to my 2008 capture above. Recently the sign had […]

25 May 2018

Tracking Down Boots in Stoke-on-Trent

Back in 2016 I gave a short talk about my archiving work at the annual conference of the Business Archives Council, where one of the organisers was a project archivist for Boots chemists.  Afterwards I shared the above image and forwarded her the archival photo below which was shared on the Ghostsigns Facebook page by […]

30 Mar 2018

Photo Album of Painted Coca-Cola Signs (1914)

Earlier this year I came across this project to restore a photo album of painted Coca-Cola signs, dating from 1913-14. The album is a fascinating survey of signs that were painted across New England over 100 years ago, some of which survive today as ghost signs. The team at The Coca-Cola Company kindly shared the […]

24 Nov 2017

East End Shops from Spitalfields Life

Spitalfields Life has published a series of pieces documenting East End shop fronts, in support of the campaign against the forthcoming rise in business rates across the area. I have picked one photo from each piece and would encourage a proper browse of all of them. Fascinating stuff! Alan Dein’s East End Shops John Claridge’s […]

4 Mar 2017

Writing on the Whale and Other Novelties

Joe Thompson emailed me these fascinating photos of lettering on unusual objects, namely a dead whale (1919) and a shipwrecked oil tanker (1926). They are from San Francisco, recently donated to the Western Neighbourhoods Project. Read more about the photos and the project on SF Weekly News. As a bonus, an exploding whale video below. […]

4 Feb 2015

Ghostsigns in the Family: Henry Dunn of Deal

This mid-1800s photograph shows a painted sign on the wall in Deal, Kent, advertising Henry Dunn and his various trades of cabinet maker, upholsterer, paper hanger, undertaker, broker and more. Born in 1818, Henry Dunn is my Great Great Great Grandfather, so I was chuffed to discover that he shared my appreciation of the hand-painted […]

15 Jan 2014