Advertising and Public Memory

Social, Cultural and Historical Perspectives on Ghost Signs

Stefan Schutt, Sam Roberts, Leanne White, Stefan Schutt, Sam Roberts, Leanne White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138934689
• eBook ISBN: 9781317389125
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Historic Preservation in Architecture

This is the first scholarly collection to examine the social and cultural aspects on the worldwide interest in the faded remains of advertising signage (popularly known as 'ghost signs'). Contributors to this volume examine the complex relationships between the signs and those who commissioned them, painted them, viewed them and view them today. Topics covered include cultural memory, urban change, modernity and belonging, local history and place-making, the crowd-sourced use of online mobile and social media to document and share digital artefacts, 'retro' design and the resurgence in interest in the handmade. The book is international and interdisciplinary, combining academic analysis and critical input from practitioners and researchers in areas such as cultural studies, destination marketing, heritage advertising, design, social history and commercial archaeology.

1 Uncovering Ghost Signs and Their Meanings

Leanne White, Stefan Schutt, and Sam Roberts

This volume is the first scholarly collection dedicated to the urban traces commonly known as ‘ghost signs’ or, less popularly, ‘fading ads’ or ‘brick ads’: the remains of painted advertising signage on walls and hoardings. Although the term ‘ghost sign’ tends to refer to fading hand-painted advertisements on brick walls, it is used loosely with varying interpretations: this is the focus of our first chapter by Roberts and Marshall, which interrogates the term and its use with the aim of developing a working definition.

Ghost signs have been the subject of much attention in the last decade, although the interest in them goes back to at least the 1970s. Books of ghost sign photography and history continue to be published. The Internet has acted as a catalyst, with thousands of amateur historians and photographers converging online to document and discuss ghost signs via social media and mobile devices with cameras. Others make use of the Internet to self-publish and promote their ghost sign books and tours. Reflecting the diverse nature of this appeal, our book investigates the social, cultural and historical dimensions of the signs and their appeal from a range of perspectives: those of historians, heritage professionals, archivists, educators, digital media scholars, advertising practitioners and signwriters.

Strong traditions of painted advertising – and hence interest in ghost signs – tend to be concentrated in Western countries that were former centres or outposts of early and mid-period capitalism: the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and some parts of continental Europe. In other parts of the world, local practices share some, but not all, elements of these traditions and fascinations; people do not necessarily attach the same aesthetic and cultural values to historic signage. Reasons for this include differing patterns of industrial, technological and economic development. City slums in developing countries are growing rapidly and host a high proportion of the world’s urban poor (Crinson 2005). Such people have a very different set of concerns and priorities to those living in post-industrial cities where “deprivation has increasingly become periphalised” (Crinson 2005, p. xi). This raises interesting semiotic questions about meaning and context, and opens new possibilities for exploring metropolises from what can be framed as the ‘peripheries’ (Huyssen 2008). This book aims to begin the conversation through its chapters about comparable traditions and practices within non-Western cultures, namely the Peruvian ‘Chica’ posters of Hodges et al. in Chapter 11 and Vietnamese painted signs, as analysed by Cristina Nualart in Chapter 9. We also look forward to more discussions of parallel practices within Western countries, such as Chapter 10’s exploration of faux ghost signs by writer and signwriting business owner Meredith Kasabian, and Warnaby and Medway’s investigation of UK shop fascia remains in Chapter 13.

Why Ghost Signs?

When discussing research on ghost signs, the question quickly arises: why? What is worth exploring about the seemingly prosaic remains of old painted signs? One initial response is: because they have caught the imagination of so many people in so many places, which suggests a topic worth exploring in more detail. Delve deeper and ghost signs reveal themselves as more than one-dimensional objects of nostalgic longing – instead, as windows into, and conduit for, a range of phenomena connected with the experience of modern urban living. This topic is examined by Antonina Lewis and Kirsten Wright (Chapter 4) and Meredith Kasabian (Chapter 10), and is the focus of Chapter 3 by Anthony Love, which analyses the current fascination for ghost signs using psychological frameworks.

A further response is that, by exploring the complex relationships that exist between the signs and those who commissioned, painted and viewed (and view) them, a deeper appreciation can be developed of wider historical, social and cultural movements. Ghost signs elicit a broad range of analytical responses: from investigations into modernity and everyday life, to explorations of lettering and the practicalities of painting styles and conservation techniques – and more recently, of digital placemaking and amateur archival practices.

Certainly, the growth in interest in ‘old things’ has taken place in lockstep with processes of gentrification, a dynamic of many older neighbourhoods in Western cities (Brown-Saracino 2010). In such locales, urban ephemera have become ‘retro-cool’, and ghost signs with them. This could be framed as commercially based appropriations of the past by modern cities in their competitive economic jostling, as described by David Harvey (Schuster 2001). When once ghost signs were painted over by developers converting old warehouses and factories into apartments, now they are increasingly being conserved as part of the building’s ‘character’. Mark Crinson (2005) notes a similar trend for valorising artefacts of former working-class trades, such the Victorian bricks of buildings in older parts of Manchester. When is this a genuine respect for local history, when is it a marketing ploy, and when is it nostalgie de la boue, or “memory with the pain taken out” (Crinson 2005, p. xii)?

As it is, ghost signs survive somewhat haphazardly. They are hostage to trends in real estate, the whims and predilections of building owners, the wording and implementation of planning and heritage guidelines and, occasionally, organised actions by communities. One of the pervasive themes of this book is that ghost signs represent survival and loss simultaneously. More ghost signs disappear every year, and most surviving signs both continue to fade and are at risk of annihilation. An old sign’s survival, like that of a person, can therefore be viewed as both stubbornly tenacious and precarious. Take the example of the Flemish ghost sign advertising the Geveaert film company that is the subject of Chapter 16 by Peeters et al. The sign had been hidden (and protected) for decades by a billboard, then uncovered, then the subject of community interest in conservation, then – suddenly and unexpectedly – removed by the same owner who had until then been keen to conserve it.

Situating Advertising and Public Memory in the Wider Academic and General Literature

Existing Literature

No scholarly books on ghost signs currently exist, although a number of Dutch and Belgian publications have tackled ghost sign-related historical research. These include Collet et al.’s De la pub plein les murs (2010), a historical account that positions Belgian signs in the context of social, craft and advertising history, and Havelaar and Hijhof’s Tekens Aan De Wand (2012), which documents the restoration efforts of local historical societies throughout the Netherlands.

Perhaps the first scholarly article specifically about ghost signs was published in 2007 by the Literary London journal (Roberts and Groes 2007). A trickle of further articles have appeared since, especially in recent years (see Shep 2015; Cianci and Schutt 2014; Sinfield 2014).

However, popular works have long been written about ghost signs and related areas, as well as heritage reports and policy documents. Some locally relevant documents are cited in the chapters by Australian heritage professionals Leisa Clements (Chapter 17) and Rachel Jackson (Chapter 19), Belgian heritage professional Veerle De Houwer (Chapter 18) and US-based educator Marie Wong (Chapter 20). Additionally, Waller and Waller provide case studies of Australian heritage processes involving ghost signs in Chapter 21.

Popular literature on ghost signs began in the United States. The first popular book to deploy the term ‘ghost signs’ is writer and photographer William (‘Wm’) Stage’s 1989 book of the same name, which documents a number of American signs. Passikoff’s 2006 The Writing on the Wall: Economic and Historical Observations of New York’s “Ghost Signs”, offers analyses of ghost signs that are related to the economic development of New York. Also based in New York, educator and ghost sign expert Frank Jump began to document signs in the 1990s: Jump’s 2011 Fading Ads of New York City contains a photographic essay as well as written commentary on meaning and place as they relate to the signs. Most other popular ghost sign books, which tend to originate from the US, UK and Europe, focus on documenting signs within specific locales. Although not printed publications, it is also important to mention digital initiatives such as the influential UK-based History of Advertising Trust Ghostsigns Archive, an online archive established by book editor Sam Roberts in 2010 and discussed by Laura Carletti in Chapter 5. Other significant digital projects have also taken place in Europe, such as the Roadside Advertisements initiative, which has been documenting signs in France and Belgium.¹

Works on related topics precede the publication of the first ghost sign books. In terms of advertising and branding, Cozzolino and Rutherford’s 1980 work Symbols of Australia provides an exhaustive overview of 1700 household brands known to Australians. In Chapter 14, leading UK advertising practitioner and commentator David Bernstein outlines the connections between painted and outdoor billboard and poster advertising, citing important volumes from this field such as Dunn’s Advertising: Its Role in Modern Marketing, first published in 1961, and his own Advertising Outdoors (1997). A number of theoretical advertising texts also intersect with aspects of ghost signage, including Judith Williamson’s 1978 Decoding Advertisements, which explores the appeal of advertising and investigates how advertisements assume meaning. Within this volume, themes connected with branding and advertising are explored by Robert Crawford in Chapter 12.

From a graphic design perspective, Baines and Dixon’s 2003 Signs: Lettering in the Environment, takes a comprehensive look at forms of public lettering. Stephen Banham’s Characters: Cultural Stories Revealed through Typography (2012), adopts a narrative approach to public lettering by focusing on the stories and people behind a number of iconic Melbourne signs, including painted and neon signs. Related publications focus on what has been deemed commercial or industrial archaeology (Connerton 2009), at times within the discipline of cultural geography (see, for example, Hill 2013) or within archaeology itself, such as Harrison and Schofield’s After Modernity: Archaeological Approaches to the Contemporary Past (2010). However, commercial archaeology organisations have been around for much longer, such as the US-based Society for Commercial Archeology, promoted online as ‘devoted to preserving the 20th century commercial landscape since 1977’.²

Recent years have also seen a resurgence of interest in signwriting, coinciding with the growth of interest in the handmade and ‘bespoke’. As a result, a signwriting-focused literature is emerging, as evidenced by the popular Sign Painters documentary and accompanying book (Levine and Macon 2012); see Chapter 6 by Schutt and Mead for more on this.

Last, a body of urbanist literature has its origins in Lefebvre’s (1968) notion of Le Droit à la ville, or ‘right to the city’ – the right for ordinary city dwellers to gain agency over their environment through everyday activities such as exploring on foot. As well as the intersecting concepts of the Situationists, this tradition has continued in the work of theorists including David Harvey and Michel de Certeau, who sees citizens’ everyday appropriation and subversion of rules created by authorities as a form of resistance (1984). This approach has been critiqued as an ineffective watering down of the original collectivist, activist intention of the Droit à la ville (Ross 2009; Soja 2010), and others have challenged the notion of a transparent and inclusive ‘everyday life’ (Highmore 2002).

Nevertheless, practices of novel urban discovery have seen an upsurge during recent years. A combination of scholarly and popular literature is developing on related themes, including Oli Mould’s Urban Subversion and the Creative City (2015), Colin Ellard’s Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life (2015) and Sarah Pink’s Situating Everyday Life: Practices and Place (2012). Echoes of this approach to urban life can be witnessed in the activities of some ghost sign aficionados (Schutt 2016). One prominent example is the aptly named and aforementioned Frank Jump, who has taken many of his best New York ghost sign photographs by climbing, unauthorised, over fences and onto roofs.

Theoretical Perspectives

The preceding section provides some idea of the variety of interests connected to ghost signs. We now present some theoretical lines of investigation that may be of value to scholars when undertaking analysis on the subject. Many of these themes and approaches overlap, and are undertaken by scholars from a number of di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Uncovering Ghost Signs and Their Meanings
• 2 What Is a Ghost Sign?
• PART I Social Perspectives
• PART II Cultural Perspectives
• PART III Historical Perspectives
• Contributors
• Index