On Thomas Street with a ghost sign

On Thomas Street with a ghost sign

Now here I am indulging my fascination for ghost signs.  

They crop up on buildings advertising traders and products and often survive long after the people of the product have long gone, but they are slowing fading from sight.

In some cases they have been deliberately painted over leaving just a feint hint of what was there.

In other cases they are slowly disappearing as the paint peels away.

This one was found by my friend David at number 8 Thomas Street.

I have to admit he is better at finding them than I am; I was on Thomas Street yesterday and just walked past it.

So the price of recording ghost signs just has to be eternal vigilance.

I can’t date the sign at present as I don’t have access to the street directories after 1911, but I can confidently say it was not there in that year.

Hair cutting for 2d

Back then numbers 2 through to 8 were occupied by Mr Walter Allen, “tobacconist and sundry man” who must have been doing something well because sometime between 1903 and 1909 he had expanded from just occupying numbers 2 and 4 to the adjoining properties.

And just a decade before that in 1895 he operated from just the one shop at 9 Cannon Street.

Not of course that this dates our sign but this is how I like my history, messy rambling and often off on a tangent. So I shall close with the map of Thomas Street from the Goad Fire Insurance Plans.

These were produced for insurance purposes, and show the details of the building and in some cases the materials used in the construction as well as the lay out.

Dating buildings from the maps is a little tricky because they cover a twelve year period from 1889 to 1901, and when buildings were resurveyed the practice was merely to past any corrections over the original.  But they are wonderful plans and I often wander over them.

Thomas Street, 1889-1903

But given that the final edition shown here was 1901, our Mr Allen must have begun his business enterprise on Thomas Street sometime between then and 1903 when he is listed on the directories at numbers 2 and 4.

Thank you David and keep looking for your more signs.

Pictures; ghost sign at number 8 Thomas Street, 2013, courtesy of David Easton and detail of Thomas Street from the Goad Maps of Manchester,  courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/