Tag: signage

I don’t know what I expect a church hall nameplate to look like, but this spindly metal lettering isn’t it. I like it though — the tall letters attached to a bodgy framework that leaves the first S hanging and the way it looks against the brick background. I like the dangling T, the high crossbar of the A and the short diagonal strokes of the M that make me think of those high-hitched trousers Gary Cooper wore, and the not-very-curvy curve of the R and how the bowl hasn’t quite been wrestled into shape to join the vertical stroke.

I almost missed it, the way it blends into its faded paint and blue sky surroundings. The name Pinkertons is synonymous with detective agency in the way that hoover is synonymous with vacuum cleaner. Allan Pinkerton established his agency in the United States in 1850 and became famous when he claimed to have foiled a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. However this building is most definitely not home to the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. The sign on the door leading upstairs says ‘Pinkertons Optic House’, and there is a locksmith on the ground floor. At a stretch they could relate to spying and lockpicking, but really, it’s a coincidence, and I just liked those pale blue letters and the incongruity of seeing Pinkertons in a small NSW country town.

We are fairly techno savvy in our household. As computer-literate iUsers, we can, for example, select music through devices that are not plugged in to the speakers from which the sound emanates, or we can piggyback devices to expand functionality. However, a working knowledge of how to use the technology at our disposal doesn’t necessarily imply complete understanding of the science that goes into making them function. So imagine how thrilled I was to discover the explanation for how skype works! It’s nothing more than pigeon post and wires!

There’s a lot wrong here, and not just the letter spacing. It is one of the few — well, the only — bits of lettering with any sense of style I could find along a commercial strip that was so awful it was shameful, a street bursting with shops — ugly, noisy, smelly, crass — that have sprouted too quickly and competitively with little thought for anything other than the tourist dollar. This, in an area that should know better. But I was lucky to find a spot across the street where I could obtain an unimpeded view of this building name. I like the B and R, and the S that isn’t quite straight, that perfect A, and the acute angle of the apostrophe. And the fact that they didn’t pull it down.

The Lakes Hotel is in Rosebery, a suburb of Sydney named after Archibald Phillip Primrose, the fifth Earl of Rosebery, who visited Australia in 1883–84. Rosebery has an interesting mix of commercial, industrial and residential buildings. A large section of it was developed by Richard Stanton (who is better known for the Federation suburb of Haberfield) and until the 1990s it lived up to its reputation as a garden suburb by holding regular garden competitions. Rosebery also had a racetrack where Pharlap trained, and a tram line, which would perhaps go some way to explaining why there is a whole swag of hotels between Redfern and Rosebery which display signage that looks very much like this, with its distinctive asymmetrical O.