Bath

Medical and Surgical Home, Catharine Place, Bath

The mysterious location of the Medical and Surgical Home ghost sign on Catharine Place, Bath. Photo: Tim Lindsay.

24 Feb 2024

Save Our Signs: Bath’s Rapid Response Unit

A palimpsest of fading fascias saved by a keen-eyed signwriter in Bath.

24 May 2021

Five of the Best: Books about Ghost Signs

Over the years I’ve tried to seek out and review books about ghost signs here on the blog. Here is a set of recommendations drawn from these, focused on those in English. In a future blog post I’ll feature work published in other languages. 1 Ghost Signs: Brick Wall Signs in America by Wm. Stage […]

19 Oct 2017

New Book: Ghost Signs of Bath

Ghost Signs of Bath has been a book waiting to happen for many years, and I have written about the city on a number of previous occasions. Fortunately Andrew Swift and Kirsten Elliott of Akeman Press have seized the opportunity and created a publication that takes local historical research into ghostsigns to new levels. I […]

28 Nov 2016

Lyndsey Smith and the signs of Bath and Lewes

The Circulating Library sign from Bath is certainly one of the most popular and regularly photographed ghostsigns in the UK [See comments on this post for some more on this sign]. However, this is the first time I’ve seen it appear in watercolour. This painting by Lyndsey Smith was the runner up in the Bath […]

5 Sep 2012

Two brilliant ghostsigns from Bath

I was recently interviewed by Kirsten Elliott of Akeman Press for an article in a forthcoming magazine launch scheduled for later this year. We’ve since been in email contact as a result of our shared interest in ghostsigns and those from Bath in particular. (Regular readers will remember my little photo essay of a visit […]

5 Aug 2012

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

Annette Smith

On the back of my post about the interview in Bath for BBC Radio 4’s Making History program I have been contacted by Bath artist and photographer Annette Smith.  By pure coincidence she currently has an exhibition running until this weekend at the Octagon in Bath as part of the ‘Fringe Arts Bath’ festival. She […]

9 Jun 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

Bath Ghostsigns

A short visit to Bath and Bristol over the weekend allowed me to visit a handful of west country signs. These maybe aren’t the best examples from that part of the world but if you want to see more then I would recommend checking out Aztec West‘s collection over on Flickr (Bristol and Elsewhere). The […]

3 Nov 2009