Off licences, the traditional 'corner shops' which served the local community
with groceries and sold alcohol as a side-line, have reflected the dominanace
of a local brewer and distributor in the town. Just as in Southwold, where
the dominant force is Adnams, so Ipswich has dominated by Tolly Cobbold.
The Cliff Quay Brewery has had a chequered history and was still brewing
in a limited way (also offering brewery museum tours) until 2002. Tolly
themselves had a poor reputation in the fifties and sixties and during the
clearances of impoverished housing in the town - notably around Civic Drive
- many parlour-type pubs were demolished. Some say this was no loss to the
town...
Certain corner shops and pubs still carry the Tolly stamp. The 'SUFFOLK
ROAD STORES: TOLLY COBBOLD ALES' (above) in brown lettering and rectangular
border against white faces Tuddenham Avenue; its counterpart facing Suffolk
Road features 'TOLLY COBBOLD ALES' in a brown cartouche. The all over whitening
of the brickwork encourages the eye to believe that this is a wall sign
in ceramic tiling.
Above is a lost piece of Tolly lettering which someone has sought to obliterate
with whitewash (now washing down the wall). 'PROSPECT HOUSE: TOLLY COBBOLD
ALES', executed long before the drainage pipe at top left was installed,
was clearly a rear advertisement for a long-disappeared grocer at the corner
of Cemetery Road, fronting Christchurch Street. The dark capitals could
have been placed on a white rectangle, then overpainted in pale blue, or
it might have been that the colours were the other way around. [See the
'Cemetery Road - 1940' webpage linked here for
a photograph of Sidney Colthorpe outside this very off-licence at the corner
of Christchurch Street and Cemetery Road, Ipswich, around 1940.]
The letterer's art is nowhere so well demonstrated as in the 'living' example
of the off license at the corner of Bramford Road and Surbiton Road. Currently
Victoria Wine, this business has also been run by Peatling and Cawdron among
others.
-
The whole shaping of brickwork, roof and moulded frame seem to have been
designed for the lettering high above the street level: 'WINES, BOTTLED
ALES AND STOUT'. A tricky navigation of the apex of the upper triangle by
the word 'Wines', having the 'N' as its fulcrum (the word followed by a
large comma), is shadowed by the centralised curving word 'Bottled' above
a delightful 'And' featuring long elliptical tales from the 'N'. All the
lettering is well looked after and seems to have been regularly retouched
in white and all has a blue grey drop-shadow.
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Copyright throughout this site belongs to Borin Van Loon, 2003.