Sarshire Ltd, F. Holt, 41 and 41a Brick Lane, Borough of Tower Hamlets, London E1, 2003 • A palimpsest of old Brick Lane’s small-trader past; now depersonalised as a generic Costprice Minimarket.
Sarshire Ltd, F. Holt, 41 and 41a Brick Lane, Borough of Tower Hamlets, London E1, 2003 • A palimpsest of old Brick Lane’s small-trader past; now depersonalised as a generic Costprice Minimarket.
£14.95 from Amazon, click for details
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With photos by Vici MacDonald and poems by Tamar Yoseloff, Formerly is a beautiful little chapbook which is just £8.00 online – you can buy it here
Shopfront Elegy 
I’d be very surprised if the original signage wasn’t under the new signs. Such a shame that the original context has been lost.
Yes, there must be vast numbers of beautiful old signs under layers of crappy modern ones around the country. I understand they were often too hard to take off – especially the old glass ones – so people just put new ones on top. You can often see that if you look at shop signs, they stick out a long way because there are so many layers. And now we are getting thin inkjet banners placed on top of old-school acrylic confections. The glass ones only resurface when a “creative” business takes over the premises – I’ve seen quite a few examples of art galleries doing this recently.