Rose & Crown Brewery
Anyone walking regularly down Bramford Road from the
busy junction with
Norwich Road could easily miss this most elusive sign. The side wall of
the Rose and Crown public house with its frontage and small triangular
car
park on the corner, extends down Bramford Road with the meeting room
above.
One can only conjecture the way in which the buildings were once put to
use. The sign clearly states: 'ROSE & CROWN BREWERY' and 'DA ...
ENCE'
below. (It couldn't be 'Dance Licence', could it?). The whole wall
itself
tells a story. One window bricked up, another cut into the wall right
in
the middle of the sign; some of the lettering obscured by a vertical
iron
wall truss and down-pipe. (Close-up below.)
Those fugitive characters, in close up, with heavy
drop-shadow (plus two
full stops) on a black painted panel.
[UPDATE 23.2.08: New management at the Rose & Crown has resulted in
the upsatirs meeting room at the rear of the premises (the outside wall
of which we show here) being stripped back to bare brick and boards, to
be used as a music venue. Vestiges of the old brewery can be seen - or
imagined - the 'rough hewn' look of the room adding to the period
feel.
Just around the corner in the narrow Gaye Street is the
somewhat mysterious,
modern, bricked up shop frontage bearing the initials 'TFL' (what
challenges
would have faced the bricklayer if one of the initials had been an
'S'?).
This lays back from the corner with Benezet
Street.
[UPDATE 23.2.08: This example has now been demolished and builder's
shuttering now surrounds the corner site. Slavery
abolitionists celebrated in Ipswich street names - including a
Quaker called Claude Gay - even though this street name includes an 'e'
at the end.]
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Copyright throughout this site belongs to Borin Van Loon, 2003.