Ghost Signs of Glasgow: Centuries of the city’s past for those who know where to look
For Elspeth Cherry, ghost signs are a bittersweet memento of her own mortality as well as waves from the city’s past that disappear as old buildings are demolished.
By Anna Burnside.
The days when a Glaswegian firm made corsets and wee boys played marbles on the pavement feel very far away. But they have left their mark on the city’s built environment for those who know where to look.
Elspeth Cherry, a volunteer with the Ghost Signs of Glasgow project, knows exactly where to look.
“It’s an apparition”, she says, pointing to a mottled wall beside the Piper Bar, opposite the south-eastern corner of George Square. Sure enough, the bumps are not just the natural texture of the stone. They are the last remains of the painted advertisements and notices that were once prominent on the building.
One is just visible - it reads “No Bills”.
Further down North Frederick Street, on the side of the tiled pend that leads to the bowels of the Italian Centre, there are more. One points to a goods entrance. Others advertise businesses so old that their names have worn away.
Ghost signs are leftovers from the city’s commercial and industrial past. They are markers painted on walls in the days before neon by businesses that could not afford brass plates. Sign painters mixed their own paints—there is a stunner advertising a decorating business in Partick’s Stewartville Street that is a testament to the firm’s skill and use of quality materials.
A resilient few have survived demolition, redevelopment, sandblasting, graffiti, mural artists and the Instagram-led trend to cover every available surface with plastic foliage and flowers. Gentrification has, in some cases, helped their preservation. Several businesses - a tattoo shop in Shawlands, a restaurant in Partick - have incorporated old shop signage into their new look.
A bar in Finnieston, the Kelvingrove Cafe, has even kept the name of the original 1896 business and made a feature of the striking paintwork.
Redevelopment can reveal delicious ghostly pickings underneath modern signage - this happened to the old Di Maggio’s in Shawlands recently. Or it can wipe them out altogether. One of Cherry’s favourite signs, for Lizar’s opticians on Buchanan Street, has been painted over.
She says: “What remains is just a random Polaroid into the past.”
On Virginia Street, the magnificent Jacobean Corsetry sign is a Merchant City landmark. It dates back to 1946 when Dowell & Son Ltd manufactured ladies’ undercrackers and distributed them to 500 shops nationwide. The business made corsets until the late 1980s when Lycra and feminism combined to put restrictive underwear in the recycling bin of history. The company closed in 2000.
The building’s current owner, Jim Mackie, takes his responsibility for this little bit of Glasgow’s history seriously. The sign has been refurbished by a coach builder: the steel frame that supports the letters has been replaced with an aluminium one and the wooden letters, which were painted with gold leaf, have been repaired, sanded and repainted with metallic paint.
This is cheaper than gold leaf but, sadly, much less durable. The paint is topped up every few years.
But Mackie thinks it’s worth it to preserve this landmark. New tenants in the ground floor of the building agree and have taken the signage to heart - it’s now home to a gay showbar called The Corset Club.
Before Dowell & Son were inserting whalebone into Germolene-coloured nylon, nearby Miller Street was home to the Stirling Public Library. Its less flamboyant signage is carved into a stone arch above. Thanks to ghost signs, centuries of the city’s past are visible in adjoining streets.
Merchant William Stirling bequeathed his house and collection of 804 books to the city in 1791. Ownership passed to the city in 1912, moved to Miller Street and then to Royal Exchange Square in 1954. It’s now known as the library at Goma.
The history behind these signs has been meticulously researched by the Ghost Signs of Glasgow project, started in 2018 by the Glasgow City Heritage Trust.
Co-ordinator Jan Graham explained: “The project was initiated to unearth the stories behind old signs and shopfronts in the city. Ghost signs are the fading remains of old painted signs on buildings, and they provide an invaluable insight into Glasgow’s architectural, social and cultural history. Many ghost signs hide in plain sight, obscured by the urban landscape around them, leaving a tangible part of Glasgow’s heritage vulnerable to development and being lost forever.
“The project has been revealing, researching and documenting ghost signs in Glasgow to build an archive and to expand our collective knowledge about these remnants of Glasgow’s past. So far we have produced a touring exhibition, walks, talks, maps, workshops and a ghost sign conference with speakers from across the UK and Ireland.”
Their research has preserved memories that might otherwise have been lost forever. Just visible from Glassford Street is the huge sign for Glen & Davidson, a wholesaler that sounds like a Glaswegian version of Grace Brothers from Are You Being Served.
Staff who worked there in the 80s recalled Mr Glen, in his pinstripe suit, wandering around the sales floor chatting to the staff.
The packing room was run by an old fella in his 70s who had worked there since he was a teenager. He spent most of the day dozing in a chair. At lunchtime, he popped out for a dram and to pick up sweetbreads from the meat market.
These are windows into a world that no longer coexists with Glasgow circa 2024. Glen & Davidson’s sign sits behind an ornate 30s block with a Spar at the bottom. John McCormick & Co Bookbinders, on McCormick Lane off Buchanan Street, overlooks the back of Hide & Seek. The bar's bouncer oversees a lane full of the detritus of 21st century hospitality: empty kegs, full bin bags, broken chairs and an abandoned freezer.
Royal Exchange Court was built in 1830 as a grand four-storey residence. Today it has fallen on hard times and smells strongly of urine. A homeless person has left their tent in the pend that leads onto Royal Exchange Square.
It’s also home to one of the most evocative of the city’s ghost signs and one of Elspeth Cherry’s favourites: “Boys found playing with balls or marbles will be handed to the police.”
Carved on the nearby wall are dates and initials. Cherry likes to think these are the work of the same street urchins who dared to bring their balls and marbles into this smart courtyard.
For her, ghost signs are a bittersweet memento of her own mortality as well as waves from the city’s past that disappear as old buildings are demolished. She admits to a little moment when a block on the south side of Argyle Street, west of Central Station, finally fell.
“You have to just suck it up when a building goes but it can be sad. On this building, there was one little window left with the purple sign that said What Every Woman Wants.”
For Glaswegian women of a certain generation, What Everys was their Primark, selling cheap finery to the queens of Saturday night. It doesn’t feel like history in the way that Jacobean Corsetry does.
But Cherry is adamant that the little window was a ghost sign like any other. “People my age think, what a great shop that was but it’s long gone. That whole building was a little bit of me.”
Follow Ghost Signs Glasgow on Instagram @ghostsignsgla.