Over 2022, National Saturday Club Art&Design at Time and Tide Museum contributed to Historic England’s Heritage Action Zone project. The project aims to reenergize and reanimate our local high streets with funding, creative activities, restoration and community consultation.
Great Yarmouth’s High Street Heritage Action Zone stretches through the market stalls, across the market rows, towards the beach and close to the museums. This significant public funding has encouraged locals, and in this instance local young people, to examine the shops and services that once thrived amongst the local economy. Great Yarmouth businesses that blossomed in the Victorian period include Arnold’s department store, a Gatsby-an metropolis which boasted a restaurant with white table cloths and live music, a perfumery and a fashion department. It was a champion of make-do-and-mend culture and sold Singer sewing machines (a company which also had a business premises located in Great Yarmouth at the turn of the century). Consumers from London were known to travel to the East so they could experience Arnold’s.
A dozen notable ‘ghost signs’ – typographic relics of old stores – are catalogued in the wonderfully detailed Ghost Signs trail booklet, which was composed by Great Yarmouth Town Council. The trail can be experienced as a walk through the town, which is a pleasure to follow and investigate. Many ghost signs exist outside of the ‘zone’ and you will no doubt have these faded paintings in your own locale to seek out. If you are not able to walk the trail yourself, you can watch a short film created by Historic England about the Great Yarmouth’s ghost signs, available on YouTube.
National Saturday Club involves a group of local young people who meet weekly to practice creative skills, research local heritage and create artworks, in collaboration with leading artists, designers and arts institutions. Inspired by the ghost signs project, we teamed with printmaker Donna Thompson who introduced us to Victorian letter press printing. We imagined our own businesses and their shop signs and illustrated them with typographic relief prints (many business names we invented were inspired by the participants’ pets).
These prints went on show at the National Saturday Club Summer Exhibition which takes place at Somerset House. The temporary structure hung our prints like clothes strung out on washing line, evoking our makeshift print studio at the museum.
Club members continued to explore high street regeneration and commercial folklore in a follow-up project, 3D Shop Signs. Expanding our concern with flat graphic design to the tradition of more sculptural shop signage, we began to create foamex maquettes in the style of a 3D shop sign for the local high street. With help from local artist and illustrator Gabbi Minas, we carved baths, bubbles and ducks for the Slipper Baths, a mid-century bath house which once boasted a BryllCreem vending machine.
The vertical art deco signage for the Slipper Baths can be seen on Stonecutter’s Way and it has now been renovated for private accommodation. Our maquettes, decorated with plaster of paris and painted all shades of blue, went on display in Time and Tide’s Reminiscence Gallery in August 2022.
3D shops signs traditionally supported illiterate pedestrians to discover what’s for sale, and of course offer an engaging, cartoonish invitation for everyone. The artworks created by Nat Sat Club are ingenious, unique and ambitious – contemporary rebrands for one of our high street’s ghosts.
Cosmopolitan elites might not be able to travel to Arnold’s for tea and the latest fashions, but the creative energies offered by the museum group have imbued life and excitement into our contemporary markets – these projects show the high street still has much to offer. Our club members have helped make it into a creative space that is full of potential to meet their needs.
We recommend you explore other on-going interventions inspired by Historic England’s High Street Heritage Action Zone, including the redevelopment of Lowestoft’s Post Office. And keep a close eye for decorative ghost signs near you, which offer a fascinating glimpse of high street-history.
Time and Tide Museum 