Circles of delight in WC2

Last week whilst ambling from Piccadilly to Holborn via Long Acre, admiring the architecture and generally enjoing the sunshine, I happened upon this lovely hexagonal mark in the doorway of one of the businesses opposite Freemasons Hall.

It reads, 20 Great Queen Street, Covent Garden. 

Cool huh?! 

It appeals to me on many levels; geometry, typography and graphic design.

I am not sure who installed it/ how long it's been there.

It is set into the very front of the metal strip that runs across the doorway of No.20, to the left of Walker Slater menswear shop (at No.19) shown here  from Google Streeview:

 

Odeon Holloway – update on renovations (part1)

The Odeon Holloway is being renovated.
The info boards around the hoardings show that they are reinstating much of the original Art Deco colour sceme and re-opening the restaurant area on the frst floor behind the big tall windows.
That's great.
I was hoping that they'd out up free-standing letters on the exterior as per when it was a Gaumont cinema (see below). Or some big neon letters would be nice.
But, recently, the new street-facing signage was revealed:

Odeon Holloway Road, N7, January 2020

Oh how disappointing. An opportunity missed. How is this signage in-keeping with the Art Deco style of the building?!
These days, we have laser cutting and digital technology, LCD screens and lighting, and moving graphics, so couldn't something more evocative have been installed here?
Odeon's designers have simply (by which I mean 'lazily') repurposed a big flat space that, in the early days of the cinema, was used to advertise films or events that were showing or coming soon. This would have involved men climbing up and down ladders; something that is not possible in these days of health and safety.
OK, reinventing the space is fine, but this big bland blue panel is, for me, a wasted opportunity. Note that the inside of the building as still going to be predominantly Odeon blue which is so not how the building looked in the late 1930s and totally at odds with the company's suggestion of a return to the sumptuous surroundings of the past.
Odeon's brand lock-up is here slapped in the middle of the blue panel but it is restricted in size by the height of the panel. And, as such, lacking in impact. There's more blue than brand. More laminate than logo.
This is a horrid, unbalanced, 'logo' anyway – the LUXE section and rules take up more space than the company name – that's just plain silly. It looks like the design project was given to a junior or someone on work experience. The 'designers' do not look to have actually considered how this logo device would work when placed on different shapes and formats. It's fairly normal practice to consider the options and create a few versions of a brand to allow for the various places where it might be applied. This lazy, one size fits all, approach is sure to be happening on Odeon's other sites too.
Going past another Odeon Luxe in Putney recently, I noticed the design and layout of the elements there is different – there are no horizontal lines. Therefore, Odeon don't appear to have a standard logo/lock-up usage guidelines which is poor in itself but means there is not excuse for this half-arsed Holloway layout. 
I have been working on signage projects for years, polishing many turds over the decades, and could have made this look so much better. Every time I walk past this building, and that's almost daily, I mentally rearrange the logo elements to create a better layout. I'd have created an alternatve, better-balanced, lock-up by making the ODEON letters almost twice the size with LUXE* slipped in underneath (at this size) but with rules either side rather than above and below.

 

UPDATE (part2): the building has had a facelift – oh dear – see more here

Anyway, enough of the disappointment... below is a pic of how the cinema looked in the year it first opened.
And lots more pics here:

1938

*Luxe – I assume this means luxury with those big sofa-style chairs with receptacles for drinks etc. Call me old-fashioned, but prefer I like to sit properly on seats/chairs. I find the new seating uncomfortable, too deep back to front. I have been known to take a cushion with me to support my lower back! And don't get me started on popcorn and all that noisy munching and slurping....!

Artizans and Labourers in Queen's Park

I have written before about The Artizans and Labourers General Dwellings Company and their establishments at Harrow Road and Noel Park.
This post shows some of their earlier buildings – little terraced cottages along Kilburn Lane in Queen's Park, London W10, built in 1876.

Note how the end of each terrace had a corner shop. Directly opposite these shops is a collection of buildings that looks like there was either a school or a dairy there. I don't know if these were also part of ALGDC. This needs further investigation – I will add it to the list/pile.
If you know anything about any of these buildings, including the ones over the road, please do let me know.
Thanks in advance.

More doorway mosaics – patterns and motifs

Last month I put together a collection of mosaic floors depicting company names. This time it's a collection of patterns of mainly flora and fauna:

The thistle in the top row was the logo/emblem of David Greig the first high street grocery chain in the UK, and will feature in a forthcoming blog post about that company once I do some more sleuthing. The third one fourth row used to be on Wigmore Street near the end of Marylebone Lane but was removed/destroyed approx 2011 (sad face).

Doorway Mosaics – shops and pubs

I am always on the look out for signs of original shop or pub names.
Often I spot these hints of the past embedded in the masonry near the top of a building or on hand-painted signs.
The ones that cheer me the most are the often intricate floor mosaics that can be found in the entrances.

Only a few of these are actually still relevant to the business that sits above them today

The Artizans monograms of 431–487 Harrow Road

I am often bemused and confused as to why the owners of shops within a once beautiful terrace have felt the need to paint their half of the dividing columns. After all the shops would all look more distinct if the dividers were the same thus creating a frame. It just beggars belief why some beautiful patterned and glazed tiles or moulded stonework has been covered over – why can't they just leave them as is?!!!
A couple of months ago I was on one of Jen's walking tours and as we passed a long terrace in Harrow Road I noticed that most of the dividers had been painted through the middle of the initials of a company who either originally built it or traded from within.

It's either AL&CD Company Limited or A&LCD. Note the use of LIM where we now use LTD.

On the northern end of the terrace and in a couple of places high up along the front of the terrace a wonderful monogram using the same letters can be seen.

However I cannot identify the L within these entwined letters. So perhaps it's just "A&CD Co Lim"? In which case what's the significance of the L in the rectangles – a strange ampersandy thing I have never seen before perchance?
As regards researching who this company was I have tried a bit of google-woogle and come up with nothing except a South African Kitchenware company (AL&CD) who don't seem to have ever been in London.
Can anyone help?

Update
Aha!... it's not a C; it's G – turns out it's the Artizans, Labourers & General Dwellings company (interesting that artizans is US spelling but labourers is not)
See the comments for some info/links from Martin

Christmas 2009

Here's my design for this year's Christmas card, though I won't be it getting made up as a printed item this time.

Last year I did my 12 pubs of Christmas and, because I got them printed, I think people didn't realise that I'd made them myself, as in past years I had been more active with the glitter or the sewing machine.

This year each letter here is from a brand name on a ghost sign in London.

Let me know if you recognise any of them.

Joy to the World and all that!

Jane x

Branded metal advertising signs

There are plenty of old advertising signs featuring brand names around London. I suspect a lot of them have been put up for tourists' amusement or to make a place look old and interesting; I especially wonder if those ones in Gabriel's Wharf have been put there just for effect.

But there are others around in hard to reach places that look like they have been there for decades. I am still kicking myself that I did not help myself to the old Michelin and Pirelli signs on a tyre shop that closed around the corner from here earlier this year. D'uh!

In areas like Camden and Portobello you can buy facsimiles of some of the old classics in the shops and markets.

Whilst looking through the fab stuff available on Urban Remade I found this modern equivalent which Peter Blake has designed featuring his logo heart. Affix it to your wall and watch it age gracefully.

Palethorpe's Sausages and Pears Soap, Highgate; Craven 'A', Camden; Liptons, Martini and R Whites, Good Year, Kensal Green; Esso Blue, Finsbury Park; Coca Cola, Drayton Park; Ogden's Guinea Gold, Homerton; The Sailor's Society, Limehouse.

Olympic Park tour

At 6.30pm on Thursday 21st May 2009 I boarded an official Olympic Park Tour bus for the inaugural London Bloggers tour of the site organised by Craig Beaumont of The London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Ltd. Anyway, there were about 12 of us on the gaudy bus, covered as it was in colourful branding and logos designed by blind the children of people who work in Wolf Olins accounts department.


After a short film about plans for the site, followed by a rather crappy ‘quiz’ consisting of six questions no-one was really interested in or cared to guess, we were then in the capable hands of Morag, who was, despite the inner thighs of her unprofessional trousers, really competent and informative. As we were driven around the site she regaled us with information about the various things we passed, most of which just looked like a huge building site! We also saw lots of unwashed soil piled up in mounds waiting to be cleaned of arsenic and nasty chemicals. And I managed to spot a few lonely trees along the newly-cleaned River Lea.

There is only one building on the site that has survived to tell any story of the past and that’s the old Kings Yard Textile Mill. I find it really hard to believe that there really was nothing else worth saving or renovating. It’s all a bit sad. I did find it interesting to see the trestle framework for the construction of Zaha Hadid’s Aquatics Centre, but large-scale areas of new build such as this, splattered with ‘iconic’ structures, are really not for me. I got off the bus at the end of the tour feeling a bit ‘so what?’.

There was much talk about things like sustainability, being eco/environmentally-friendly and how much can be, is being, and will be recycled, yet they handed out to us some wasteful promotional material. On boarding the bus we were all given a big nasty 16-page A5 fold-out leaflet that I could quite easily redesign as a 12-pager by losing all the unnecessary crap such as the superfluous 'facts' that during the games “over 260,000 loaves of bread expected to be consumed” (how big is a loaf of bread?) and “160,000 litres of milk expected to be consumed”. Who cares?! The leaflet also has a plan of the site on it that has got a lot of relevant information missing (Craig, please call me!). And towards the end of the tour we were all given plastic Oyster Card/ travel pass holder/ wallet things. Inside these wallets on one side are 3 ‘Did You Know?’ cards. Mine relate to cycling and paralympic boules and archery. Thanks. They look cheap and nasty. In the opposite pocket is a large leaflet, which concertinas and then folds, entitled ‘join in’. (Notice the lower case ‘j’ on join here, yet there are initial caps on the cards – where is Harry Hill when a decision needs to be made?) Anyway, I think all this printed bumpf and waffle is a waste of money and resources and it makes me wonder if it holds a mirror to the whole event...

After the tour some of us went to the King Edward pub. In contrast to the Olympic site the pub hasn’t changed much over the years; it’s still only two storeys high with etched glass, stained wood and tiled walls. We discussed the tour and how it was a shame that we never got an opportunity to get off the bloody bus to get some better photos (hence the reflections and dirty windows evident in a lot of our photographs). Ian suggested they should employ an open-top bus. Genius idea.

But I am glad I went. it was really good to put faces to some other blogger’s names. And a big thanks, as ever to M@ who has loaded up some good pictures, videos and links onto the Londonist site. I have only put a few of my own images on Flickr but if you’d like to see more then you should check out Onionbagblog, Diamond Geezer, Ian Visits and, if you want to do some further reading, there's always the official Olympic Park website.