Lower Brook Street / Rose Lane

Price The Bootmaker
The shop at the corner of Tacket Street and Lower Brook Street is quite a distinguished landmark. 'PRICE', the boot and shoe seller occupied this attractive building for many years and the lettering integrated into an upper balustrade on both faces commemorates this. The building has been a restaurant or bar for a number of years.
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Incidentally, the decorative moulding, replete with scantily clad nymph close to the Lower Brook Street sign (above). More recently painted white/cream than shown in this shot, presumably when it became Ollie's Bar, it's certainly more noticeable:

[UPDATE 23.4.12: The sad state of the Price lettering in 2012 has to be recorded here. The Roman numerals on the clock face look pretty good but the owners of this property are letting the balustrade and its lettering go to rack and ruin. Shame.]
Ipswich Historic Lettering: Price 1  Ipswich Historic Lettering: Price 22012 images
It's just down the road from The Unicorn in Orwell Place, not far from the CTC roundel, Symonds sign in Upper Brook Street. On the opposite corner to the Price lettering:
'THE BUILDING SOCIETIES ASSOCIATION
MEMBER'
Ipswich Historic Lettering: IBS crest2012 image
This is on the corner of Upper Brook Street and Dog's Head Street on the turretted building once occupied by the Ipswich Building Society, later rather ignominiously a '99p Shop'; even worse, the 99p Shop went out of business.

Suffolk Victoria Nursing Institute
Then a little further down Lower Brook Street on the same side there's the little-noticed, but quite impressive, entrance to:
'SUFFOLK VICTORIA NURSING INSTITUTE'
The awning leading from the front pillars to the door bears the incised name and, very prominently, the date 'AD1903' in a terra cotta tablet above it.
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Rose Lane
It is only a short walk from here down Lower Brook Street, right into Turret Lane into Rose Lane. Here is a piece of industrial architecture (photographed in 2001) which had a facelift in 2003 as a companion building to the rebuilt Brights furniture shop on St Nicholas Street (close to a very pristine-looking Victorian, multi-sided pillar box).
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The recessed circular plaque set so very high up in this very narrow lane reads: 'D.B 1862' (no second full stop after the 'B'). The photograph of the cleaned up version above shows the extended new building behind. The convex traffic mirrors have been reaffixed at right of the fascia, however they appear to be cross-eyed ...

This building is more or less on the site of Curson House, see Curson Lodge for more information.

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©2004 Copyright throughout the Ipswich Historic Lettering site: Borin Van Loon
No reproduction of text or images without express written permission