Confectionery
Works, Bake Office, Mary's
Woodbridge Road
Still trading as Greens* builders merchants when this
photograph was
taken
in March, 200, sadly the building no longer exists. It qualifies as an
example of trade lettering, not because of the 'GREENS' (albeit painted
twice on the frontage, with varying states of distress), nor yet for
the
curiously crooked, yet firmly screwed on 'REGD.
PLUMBER' sign high up
on
the timber yard wall. The secret lettering was just spotted above the
(barely
visible here) gates to the right.
[*Pedants' Corner: it is always interesting to observe the use - or
deliberate omission - of punctuation marks in signs of all sorts; the
stray 'greengrocer's apostrophe' found in e.g. "POTATO'S" and the
apostrophe-lacking shop name shown here suggests that the business was
owned by Mr Greens.]
A stool was mounted to get these shots on a sunny
Spring morning in
2003,
balancing over the closed gates. The expected curving word
'CONFECTIONERS'
turned out to have a corollary below it:
'CONFECTIONERY
WORKS'
There is a naively-painted pointing hand in white
outline below, which follows the
curve
of 'Confectionery' lettering. 'Works' has an underline in white. The
enhanced image to the right suggests the form and positioning of the
obscured first 'C' and last 'Y' of 'Confectionery'.
This battered old brick wall could have told some
tales. The whole
building
was demolished and removed three weeks after these photographs were
taken
in April, 2003. Clearly a victim of timber and other heavy materials
being
moved in and out, it also bears scars as if scraped by the sides of
carts
in years gone by. Although run down and unimposing in the top
photograph,
the building ran back from the road a long way and had some interesting
features. A sweet-making factory, then - or possibly a baker's making
sweetmeats - but we wonder when and under
whose
proprietorship?
Felaw Street
Painted on the end of terrace wall of the lundrette at the
corner of Great
Whip
Street and Felaw Street (closed to the refurbished Felaw Maltings, for
so
many years a disintegrating monument of the Industrial Revolution in
Ipswich):
'BAKE
OFFICE'
At first we assumed that this was
the place which dealt
with
the hiring and firing of malsters and workers at the nearby maltings,
until
we saw the period photograph of the premises of E.R.
George, Baker and Pastry Cook. The sign 'Bake Office' is there on
the
wall fronting Crown Street, so a baker's office for taking orders,
then? The enhancement below shows the position of the characters more
clearly.
Here's a composite photograph of the corner of
Great Whip Street and Felaw Street in 2011; the 'BAKE OFFICE' lettering
is towards the end of the red brick wall at the right of the image.
[UPDATE
September 2010: we have unearthed this
photographic detail from the 1960s (below) which is the same building,
the premises at the time of Haward's Bakery - see the 3-D gold-lettered
'Hovis Golden Brown' sign. Much of the housing and shops around this
building have were demolished when Vernon Street/Hawes Street were
remodelled, a new roundabout built between them and the upper section
of Wherstead Road ceased to be the through way for traffic. In the
background can be seen (see close-up) the
lettered:
'R(obscured)&W
PAUL LTD'
concrete silo on the upper Wet Dock and over
the bakery roof one of the Felaw Street malting tower vents.]
Woodbridge Road/St Helens Church Lane
A few hundred metres up the Woodbridge Road hill from
where the
Confectionery Works once stood, is a shop frontage with no shop, on the
overhang are the relief capitals: 'MARY'S' painted over in dark green
to
comemorate the hairdresser's which stood at the corner. The door at a
45
degree angle to the street is now bricked up - it's at the top of St
Helen's Church Lane running down to St Helen's Street, also close to
the
main gate to St Helen's Primary School. Through that door one was once
(up until the late eighties?) able to glimpse basins and an array of
those 'space helmet' style hair dryers on stands. Once again this sign
doesn't quite follow the parameters set out in our Introduction, but it's worth
including as an example of the sort of shop sign now becoming rare in
our town [suggested by Ed Broom.].
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Historic Lettering site: Borin Van Loon
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