painted wall signs
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Dublin used to be full of signs like these. Acid rain, development and JCDecaux have combined to get rid of most of them. I’d like to see a separate thread recording and archiving the few that are left. But in the spirit of this one I’ve cropped the easy ones here. Anyone got any more?
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I like these old washed out signs, There is one here in Edmonton for Cunard Lines, which is really neat to see.
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5. is by Broadstone station isn’t it?
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nah 5 is on the back of the Wicklow street branch and is visable from St Andrews’s St Church (Dublin Tourism)
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Correct!
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7 is Byrnes bookmakers on upper leeson street
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Yes, with a nice example on the auctioneers next door as well.
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cummins is abbey street is that not covered by the tourism sign now?
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@LOB wrote:
7 is Byrnes bookmakers on upper leeson street
tsk, I’ve bussed, cycled, walked, driven, drank, smoked and staggered at that location a million times before and I still didn’t recognise it. For shame
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Have you never looked up at it and said to yourself ‘Why should I care where Joe Byrne bets?’ I always found it amusing.
Also, the Corry McMahon bothers me because the N is slightly off. Did nobody mark off a grid before starting to paint?
There’s a good one on the gable end of the redbrick terrace at the Lincoln Place corner of Trinity too. Didn’t FJP have a section on these?
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The Trinity one has been bugging me all week, it is covered by scaffolding at the moment, it was a hotel, the hotel that had half the present Lincolns Inn as a bar, the hotel where Nora Barnacle worked. What was it called, I can’t remember, can you: google is cheating.
There is another hotel name on a piece of gable half way along Westland row, I will add it next week.
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btw I am convince that number 2 is on John Rogerson quay or thereabouts, its like a car park or coach depot or something but I can’t quite put my finger on it, am I close?
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Finn’s Hotel 🙂
Hector Grey has one too on his gable that’s soon to disappear.
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1 is on Lombard Street East, on the left as you walk toward the river. 4 is of course the Bolands Mill. I’d know that yellow lettering in my sleep.
Some of the fjp photos ctesiphon mentioned can be found here. I miss fjp.
There are many fine examples of hand lettering there, many of them faded and quite beautifully dilapidated. I think there is even a Finn’s Hotel in there, Graham.
It’s easy, once you start looking, to get obsessed with finding these throughout the city. About a year ago in NYC I saw typography guru Tobias Frere-Jones speak eloquently about these ghost signs, ‘examples of lettering that are no longer with us.’ In a feat of documentation that absolutely boggles the mind, Frere-Jones has embarked on the Quixotic quest of collecting every single example of typography and lettering on public buildings in New York City. Last I heard, he’d made it from the south tip of Manhattan all the way up to 14th Street. Over 4,000 photographs.
I have a pithy collection of my own on a memory card somewhere. Will have to dig them up.
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Doh! I should have known FJP would have plenty of them. I passed that first one in Harold’s Cross last week but I’d used up my camera battery in the Botanical Gardens. (If you haven’t seen the Hard Rain Project yet, do go before the end of August.)
Lombard St East, Bolands and Sir John Rogerson’s Quay (near Windmill Lane) are all correct. The bakery in No 5 is Camden Street but I can’t make out what the logo in the centre is, unless it’s saying Deanta hEirinn. I think that building may have ended up a a Kylemore once.
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There’s a new website called the ghostsigns project, a collaborative national effort to photograph, research and archive the remaining examples of hand painted wall advertising in the UK and Ireland.
http://www.ghostsigns.co.uk/homeNot that many from Ireland in it yet, though there welcoming Photographers who have pictures of signs, however old, to contribute them to the project by offering them as a gift to the History of Advertising Trust (HAT).http://www.flickr.com/groups/ghostsigns/
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This 13 minute long film documents a group of advertisement artists as they hand-paint a rendition of each stage of the “nine-step” Belgian pouring ritual. The men of Sky High Murals spend 21 days painting and repainting a 20×50 wall on the side of a building — as soon as they finish painting one step, they begin going over it with the next. A brilliant insight to a dying art.
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