IN-PERSON London Heritages. Section A

Abstract

Signs reflect the societies they advertise to, particularly commercial billboards which display large text and images to entice consumers. However, as these billboards age, they capture a moment in time and a glimpse into past societies, providing historical context for the places they remain in. Ghost signs are hand painted billboards that have faded and are often found on the side walls of buildings. A debate has emerged around reinstating such signs and what that does to their heritage integrity; should ghost signs be left to continue fading beyond legibility or should they be restored? For this presentation, I will introduce Derrida’s notion of the sign as “representing the present in its absence”, from Of Grammatology (1967). This will be followed by a cursory review of existing texts on ghost signs and billboards, namely Sam Roberts and Roy Reed’s Ghost Signs: A London Story (2021), Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), and Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, and Steven Izenour’s seminal text, Learning from Las Vegas (1972). To conclude, three applied case studies will be presented to outline various approaches to restoring ghost signs; reproduction, interpretation, and temporary illumination. Whether a sign is faithfully restored to its original design or creatively interpreted and temporarily illuminated through projection mapping, the most successful revitalization projects are the ones where there is a clear ‘sense of place’, where the place’s cultural heritage is authentically legible to a broader public.