Chapel Street types
Take a walk down Chapel Street, Salford and the first thing you would notice is the dilapidated buildings, long-forgotten pubs and remnants of what used to be. It’s true. The place is a bit of a tip. But if you dig a little deeper, there’s a wealth of hidden lettering that hints of times gone by and what was—at one time—the city center of Salford.
Inspired by Robert Brownjohn’s ‘Street Level’ (a visual essay on the street language in London in the sixties) we took a typographic journey down one of our neighboring streets just to see what we’d been missing. We are excited about the results and, given that it’s a street that we’ve walked down hundreds of times, quite bemused. What we hoped to do here was capture the language of Chapel Street, giving people a real flavour of the area.
So, here’s a snippet of what we found.
Forgotten advertising from a computer age gone by.
A more traditional sign-written example.
Sign for a long-gone car repair shop.
Beautiful 'no parking' sign. Lovely blue too!
Hand-rendered sans serif. Reminds us of Gotham by H&FJ.
Mosaic lettering found above the door at The King's Arms.
Condensed industrial lettering.
Hidden neon signage found on The Bell Tower pub.
Fading lettering due to peeling paint on Albert Vaults.
Retro fitted neon lettering on the Albert Vaults (from below).
More retro fitted neon.
The Old Bank Theatre extruding letters.
The whole set can be found on Flickr here.
Be good to hear from anyone else who’s tried a similar thing. If you have or if you plan doing a typographic walk in the future, get in touch and we can see about making this a regular feature.
Also here’s a link to some shots of Robert Brownjohn’s street level which is seriously inspiring.
2 Responses
Tom
July 21, 2010, 1:23 pmThe mosaic for The King’s Arms is beautiful – I feel another typeface coming on!
eliza brownjohn
December 8, 2011, 4:25 amI am Robert Brownjohn’s daughter and I have the original 138 street level photos. He would have loved your street photos. you got it/
eliza brownjohn