& Cheapest
House
For
Gentlemen's
Hosiery
Is
L. I. [?] Turner's
...
With only part of the first and the last two letters still visible, the first line could have been either 'The Best' or 'Largest'. Strangely, 'Cheapest' is written in lower case when the rest of the ghost sign is in upper case.
I could not resist posting a picture of the mural at the back of the building, inspired by one of the most famous Japanese woodblock prints: Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa, published in the early 1830s. Obviously this is not a faithful reproduction as the wave is progressing in the opposite direction (the presence of the house next door made this necessary as the dramatic impact of the composition would have been lost should the wave have been about to break on a Victorian brick house!) and the oshiokuri-bune (the fast boats used to transport live fish) have been omitted. However Mount Fuji still appears in the background.
Location: Coldharbour Place / Pictures taken in July 2009 and April 2008
1 comment:
MY GreatGrandfather Alfred Arthur Turner was born in Lambeth in 1852. He was a tailor, as was his father before him.
He moved to Birmingham when he was in his twenty's. He got married and then moved to Nottingham, later he finally moved to Sheffield, where his son (My Grandfather) Arthur Louis Turner had a tailoring business.
As far as I can discover all my relations were in the tailoring business, but I have never been able to make any London connection.
Could it be that the Turner ghost sign you discovered has a connection?
Richard Turner
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