Archive

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

Lewis & Skinner Exhibit Featuring Ghostsigns and Live Signwriting

The Lewis & Skinner archive is a collection of materials relating to the work of a Melbourne signwriting company from the first half of the last century. These were fortuitously discovered by Dr Stefan Schutt last year and he has since been working to archive them. The result is this fabulous online display which includes […]

29 Sep 2013

HAT Ghostsigns Archive upgrade

The Ghostsigns Archive has been updated as part of the wider upgrade to the History of Advertising Trust website. There are not only more photos available but also a new search function which allows you to browse just the ghostsigns pages. This is not the main site search but the one pictured above immediately before […]

3 Oct 2012

Los Angeles murals photographed by Ernest A. Long

Daniel Lohmann kindly shared the link to this archive of Los Angeles mural photography from Ernest A. Long. There is an introductory article on the Getty education blog and the collection contains 200 images, all taken between 1973 and 1883. Like London it seems that Los Angeles also has a proud tradition of mural art, I […]

28 Jul 2012

Digital Engagement & the Ghostsigns Archive: History Workshop Article

Laura Carletti and I have written a short paper for History Workshop Online.  This builds on the survey and offers some reflections on the development of the archive in 2009-10.

4 Apr 2012

Signs and more in Dickens’ London

Picture: ‘Dickens’s Victorian London‘ by Alex Werner and Tony William Collection of 19th Century photography in London, some inadvertently capturing the advertising and signage of the age.  Original photo here, book available here.

2 Mar 2012

Mid-20th Century photos of King’s Cross featuring some painted ads

This set of photos shows what King’s Cross was like 60 years ago with the odd painted ad caught inadvertently by what appears to have been a bus enthusiast.  The one above features a shop sign for Freeman, Hardy & Willis, and there’s this one too.  The full set here.

19 Feb 2012

HAT Archive: January 2012 Additions

A number of new additions have been made to the History of Advertising Trust Ghostsigns Archive.  Some of these are new photos of signs already covered in the archive but many are completely new material for the collection.  Here are a handful of my favourite new additions, the rest can be found by searching for […]

31 Jan 2012

Ghostsigns in The Biochemist

Press coverage for the project sometimes throws up surprises and I was delighted to see that the October 2011 edition of The Biochemist labelled my site as among the ‘Best of the Web’. Katy’s photo once again caught the editor’s eyes in this very nice write up. Thank you to Executive Editor Mark Burgess at […]

25 Nov 2011

Ghostsigns Research from Laura Carletti Scoops Award

Congratulations to Laura Carletti who took home an award for her presentation of the most recent paper on the Ghostsigns Project at the Digital Engagement conference in Newcastle.  The paper is available for download here, with the following note regarding copyright: “Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work […]

20 Nov 2011

Laura Carletti Abstract

Following the recent survey which is part of a larger research project, Laura Carletti has kindly given permission to publish the abstract of a paper she presented to the Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts conference held back in September. The full title is: “Enhancement of niche cultural and social resources through crowd-contribution: the […]

12 Nov 2011

49 New Signs

Since handing over day-to-day responsibility for the archive to the History of Advertising Trust there has been a steady influx of new material. 49 new signs have been uploaded to the online galleries and this means that c.750 are now documented through the collective efforts of photographers across the country. I’ve listed the codes for […]

5 Aug 2011

My Leicestershire Digital Archive

Colin Hyde from the Centre for Urban History at Leicester University sent me an email with a fascinating link today. It is to a project he has been curating over the last couple of years which features an unrivalled collection of Ghostsigns from the county of Leicestershire. What is most interesting about the c.250 images in […]

16 May 2011

Fresh lick of paint

I received an email this morning from a mural artist with an interest in working to restore/repaint Ghostsigns in the UK. She found me via a great project being run by the London Mural Preservation Society. I started drafting a response and then realised I’ve never written specifically about this topic and thought a blog […]

7 May 2011

Ultrabold, Summer 2010

The Summer 2010 issue of Ultrabold, the journal of the St Bride Library, features an article by me on the launch of the HAT Ghostsigns Archive. You can view a pdf here, or subscribe to the journal by becoming a friend of St Bride here. My previous Ultrabold article can be found here with other […]

8 Oct 2010

Change

“Change is inevitable – except from a vending machine.” Robert C. Gallagher Cambodia As some of you will have heard, things are changing in my life and, consequently, with the Ghostsigns Project. This coming Thursday I will be travelling to Cambodia to join my wife who is already there getting ready for our two year […]

13 Sep 2010

Summer 2010

Bile Beans: Balm Road, Leeds Photographer: Richard Turner In my speech at the HAT archive launch I said that I felt it would be just the start of an ongoing documentation of hand painted advertising of old. Sure enough, the archive and associated publicity surrounding its opening have led to many new contributors getting in […]

13 Sep 2010

BBC Ghostsigns

I’ve just got round to posting the proper quality copies of the two biggest pieces of BBC coverage of the project.  These are the One Show piece with correctly synched audio (below) and, more recently, the piece on BBC Radio 4’s Making History program. In print, there was this in the Guardian.

12 Jul 2010

ARC Magazine

> The latest issue of ARC magazine from the Society of Archivists features this two page article on the Ghostsigns Project.

8 Jul 2010

Making History in Bath

Press interest in the project continues and on Thursday last week I travelled to Bath to be interviewed for the BBC Radio 4 program Making History.  The resulting feature will be broadcast at 3.00pm on Tuesday, 15th June and will also be available after this on iPlayer. [Update: Listen to Ghostsigns on Making History.] Bath […]

6 Jun 2010

BBC Radio Nottingham

This short piece was broadcast on BBC Radio Nottingham on the morning of 18th May 2010.  It features an interview with historyanorak and was accompanied by a photo feature on their website. Coming soon will be another piece on radio, this time BBC Radio 4 featuring an interview with me in Bath for the Making […]

4 Jun 2010

Design Week

Nice piece from David Bernstein published in Design Week, 22nd April 2010, full text pasted below.   PRIVATE VIEW APRIL 2010 “‘There stands the ghost of a great name’ wrote Lucan, the Roman poet. He was referring to Pompey. Not the football club but the general who also lost regularly – to Julius Caesar. Lucan’s invocation […]

1 May 2010

One Show & the Guardian

[Update: better quality video here.] Here’s the piece that was broadcast on the One Show, BBC1, on 12th April 2010. To see it full screen on youtube click here. On the same day, by pure coincidence, the Guardian did a write-up in their G2 section. Read it in full here or here.

25 Apr 2010

Archive Press

Me with our sponsors from Rank Hovis and Roy Jeans of IPMPhoto: Trevor Liberson More event photos in this Flickr Set. Following last week’s launchI’ve had a busy time with follow up activity.  Some of this has been from press interested in writing up the story and I’ll give some more updates soon, especially after […]

26 Mar 2010