Just when you thought there were no more, ...... four ghost signs

Well, you can wait for a ghost sign and then four all turn up at the same time.

And as Neil discovered Beecham’s cornered the market on a little bit of the railway line going between North Wales and Manchester.

Now Neil has become one of the official ghost sign collectors for the blog and so as he says, “I saw a great sequence of Beecham's ghost signs on house gables in Shotton.

They all faced the railway line going between North Wales and Manchester.  Shotton has two stations, a Low and a High Level Station.

The Beecham ghost signs were on the gable ends of houses built to the left of the lines. 

The houses were lower than the tracks, so the signs would have been at eye level as the trains rolled by! 

Clever marketing!”

And like me was drawn into the story and discovered that Beecham's was originally a North West company.”

But that is a story for another time.  Instead I shall ponder on how the humble ghost sign can throw light not only on the products that were once sold but also in the buildings they adorned.

For here in this gable end is a clue to a laler addition.

The building next to our wall has been built on later and the evidence is there shown by the way the sign disappears behind the pitched roof.

Now it could be just an add on to an existing building or a full blown new property.

This of course may not be the stuff of great sweeping events but is a reminder of just what can be revealed by something as humble as a ghost sign.

In their time they were a cheap and effective way to advertise a product or a company in an age before the television advert or the facebook page.

And by their very nature were the sort of advertising that even small local firms could afford.

Their more modest signs could still cover gable ends and stood long after the firm or their product had vanished.

The bigger companies could spend more and so like our Beecham’s adverts were everywhere.

All of which has again drawn me into the history of the painted wall advert and in turn to wonder when Beecham’s decided to call it and day and leave their signs to fade, preferring the TV commercial.

I don’t know but I bet someone does and will be happy to tell me.

In the meantime here is an open invitation to join Neil myself and Andy Robertson in collecting these little bits of of our commercial past

Pictures; courtesy of Neil Simpson