Confectionery Works, Bake Office, Mary's
Still trading as Greens builders merchants when this
photograph was
taken
in March, 2001, 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.
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
appears
to be a naive pointing hand in white outline below, which follows the
curve
of 'Confectionery' lettering. 'Works' has an underline in white (these
are
clearly seen in lower picture).
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, but we wonder when and under
whose
proprietorship?
Painted on the end of terrace wall of the house 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?
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 green to
comemorate the hairdressers 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
Helens Church Lane running down to St Helens Street, also close to the
main gate to St Helens 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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Copyright throughout this site belongs to Borin Van Loon, 2003.