A few weeks ago, a couple of men with ladders started work on a former bridal boutique at the end of my road. I’ve no idea how old the building is. Its pitched roof and intricate gable and the sort of pattern brickwork no one seems to bother with these days suggest it’s Victorian, but it could be older. Beneath the first-floor windows was a decorative cornice. Under that, between a pair of attractive corbels, was a slim wooden fascia upon which the name of the shop was painted in stencilled letters. The chaps with the ladders got rid of all that. They ripped out the timber and chucked it in a skip. The building houses an estate agent now – a flat aluminium fascia, double the size of the old one, informs you of the fact.
Much has been written about the uglification of our towns and cities, not least by Sean Thomas in a depressingly on-the-nail article for The Spectator’s website last summer. We talk about hideous high-rises and miserable new-builds; about domineering road signs and peeling billboards; about smashed telephone boxes and plastic bus stops; about litter and graffiti and what to do with all the wheelie bins. I’d like to talk about shopfronts.
It’s difficult to pinpoint when, exactly, our high streets went from parades of pleasingly styled shops – with awnings and arcade widows and decoratively tiled doorways – to rows of cheaply made, puerilely designed signs. How did we go from the Shambles to Sparkhill’s Stratford Road? (Google it.)
The rise of the kebab house and fried chicken shop in the mid-1990s didn’t help.
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