Sorry to bring you grim news in two days, but here’s what Westcombe Park Police Station currently looks like, courtesy of Adam. The officers in Greenwich nick have all been told to budge up to make room for their oriental buddies, leaving the building stripped naked for the developer’s knife.

All we can hope for is that adapting this very sweet little building into ‘character flats’ (i.e. the outside saved, anything inside ripped out and replaced with bland, though TBH since it was a police station it’s probably never been that exciting inside) is more attractive financially than razing it to rubble and replacing it with a tower block…

Remember this?

Back in 2009 we were enjoying the many pumps of the Old Royal Naval College that have survived time, tide and enemy action to live dotted aroun various courtyards, hiding in plain sight.

Here it is, in Queen Anne’s Court:

and in case you can’t quite place it, here it is in longshot:

Stephen is quite a fan and has been keeping an eye on them ever since, though for my money the very best bit about these pumps was the sign at the top of this post – a faded, painted note that says ‘Not to be taken away.’

Folks, I have some sad news for you. The sign whose only raison d’etre is to tell us not to take it away has been taken away:

I don’t know why it’s gone; I have written to the ORNC to see if I can find out. Nor do I know why the disappearance of something as tiny as this has saddened me quite so disproportionately this morning.  I hope it will be returned intact very soon.

Until then two small holes and a grey stain are all that remains of a delightful little piece of Greenwich whimsy.

I’m back. After a week of ‘interest’ it feels rather weird to be back at my desk this morning actually typing a new post. I’m going to be catching up with as much mail etc. as possible over the next week or so but for today I’m keeping things traditional with a fabulous Faded Greenwich that Mike spotted in Egerton Drive.

In case you can’t read it, it says

ARTIFICIAL TEETH

Hours 10-7, 10-2 Saturdays.

I know nothing more about it, and on looking in Diana Rimel’s excellent volume, The Ashburnham Triangle, it would seem that on this occasion she doesn’t either, though she did give me the idea that any listing might be under Blackheath Road, since the sign’s actually on the side of 45a.

Obviously I’ve no idea how old this faded wooden sign is, but I did have a quick peek at the 1849 Greenwich directory – surely anyone who’s happy enough to advertise on the side of his house would take a place in a directory? Maybe, but unless it’s one Dr Haycroft who lived ‘somewhere’ in Blackheath Road, it’s a later sign, and since I don’t have any later directories and time presses too much for a visit to the Heritage Centre, for now we’ll just have to enjoy this sign for its enchanting, oblique whimsy.

Remember this? One of the last vestiges of old Greenwich – a harmless little badge of our industrial and maritime past.

Well, folks, the photo above’s just about all we have left of that. Can anyone give me a buyable justification for this?

I guess they wanted to ‘tidy up’ the ‘nasty old stuff’, but in doing so the developers have committed a kind of reverse vandalism. I mean – it’s not even neatly done. And the colour sucks.

This was completely unnecessary. It’s not like the rest of the project is all beautiful, minimalist and clutter-free. They could have easily incorporated the old sign into the development as a heritage thing, as a link with the site’s former history. But no. Some work-experience kid was given a pot of paint and told to get lost for a couple of hours.

We may be getting a whole bunch of shiny new buildings in Greenwich all ready for the Olympics, but it’s a pact with the devil. Each of these little bits of ‘smartening’ (in no real sense of the word) is tiny in itself but as a cumulative thing, we are trading Greenwich’s soul for a progress that isn’t worth what we are losing.

Here’s one I must have been passing for years and never noticed before Dazza sent me these pictures. Now, if memory serves, where Ginza/ Tsuru is now used to be an old working men’s club, which then became a general eyesore before being sold off a few years ago to be turned into my favourite Japanese restaurant (BTW it’s still the same people running it; they changed the name because a new backer came in and for some reason didn’t like ‘Ginza’ as a name…) .

Which all means the writing on this wall possibly predates the club. The letters of the first word are clear enough – AYLESBURY – but what’s the second? DALE? The first part of BAKERY? The old bit of building runs out just where it becomes interesting.

Is it an old sign? Or was the road itself once called Aylesbury Road? Checking on an old Ordnance Survey map, it was was definitely Chilver Street in 1914, and I can’t imagine that it’s an awful lot older than that anyway, judging from what architecture’s left. To my shame, I can’t remember the name of the old working men’s club there – though why it would be called Aylesbury Working Men’s Club when it’s in East Greenwich is beyond me.

Help, folks!

I have absolutely no idea who L. Brooks was or what they did. Roger spotted this on the side of a house at the top of Devonshire Drive and I’ve done my best to make it clearer but I suspect it’s already too far gone to really tell much at all from it. Every so often if I look at it really fast, I think I can almost make out that top line but – no – it’s gone again.

One thing I love about these faded signs is that windows never seemed to be an issue for the painters – they just did their design around them, rather than making putting them above or below the obstruction to their art. Maybe they just didn’t have a long enough ladder – or a head for heights…

Not the advertised post today, folks. I decided I wanted to find out some more information before posting, and am having difficulties doing so, so instead I bring you, courtesy of the Phantom Faded Greenwich Hunter, Roger, Number Eleven in the series…

It’s on the side of Number 35, Blackheath Road (just before it becomes Blackheath Hill, a few metres before the turning for Greenwich South Street) and, as far as I can read, it’s advertising a plumbers’ merchants. Since this is a little alley, if memory serves, I’m guessing the actual premises were down there, and they were just using the side of the house as a hoarding. Of course, I suppose the merchant himself might have lived in the house.

A lot of the houses along that part of Blackheath Road are really rather lovely – and, presumably before the A2 became quite so congested, were probably very posh indeed. I particularly like the ones with the little wrought iron balconies, though some of them really have seen better days now.

Anyone know anything about this plumber?

I don’t normally like to return to a subject as quickly as this, but Stephen had some really interesting extras to go with yesterday’s Faded Greenwich post (he also has a better pic of the sign – see above.)

He used to live at Number 21 and tells me that the naming of the whole of the oddly-shaped ovalish street as ‘Circus’ is only relatively recent. If you take a peek at this 1908 map you’ll see that only the rounded, south side was originally the Circus; the flatter, northern side, which was hastily finished with any-old buildings after the cash ran out, rather than continuing the elegant, sweeping curve of Searles’s vision, was known slightly more prosaically as Gloucester ‘Place.’

Stephen tells me his brother remembers a pediment stretching between the two sides, that said ‘Circus’, but if there was one there, it’s long since bombed to buggery in WWII, which destroyed most of the less-pretty north side and more-than-ideal of the south side too. Maybe there are some old photos knocking around. I keep meaning to try and find some pictures of bomb damage in the area.

Actually, not so much ‘faded’ but ‘ generally unnoticed,’ there’s nothing faded about the word “Circus” carved high into the house at the entrance to Gloucester Circus – it’s still crisply clear, if you think to look up and find it.

I don’t know if it’s original to Michael Searles’s vision, but I have no reason to believe it’s not, and it’s good to see it so beautifully looked after. It’s actually wrapped around the house’s main chimney, relieving the severity of a wall full of blind windows, which must have always have been so – this was right in the middle of the Window Tax years, so they would have been created thus; it’s sort of fun to think that filled-in windows had become a valid design feature in themselves by that time, filling an otherwise blank wall.

Perhaps because of the way the circus was built, there isn’t a sister word ‘Gloucester’ on the other side, but then maybe it never was intended to be there. I guess it could just be that the buzz-word of the day, ‘circus’ was enough to persuade people they were buying into Modernity.

I’ll come to the house itself another day, but in the meantime, I’m still looking up, just in case I see another curious thing…

Not going to be around for long, this one. Methers sent me this picture of the old sign that lurks under the sign for Vietnam in King William Street. Surely this wouldn’t be THE McDonalds? Has it really been a fast food store for years? Or was this MAcDonalds Restaurant something rather classier in days gone by? Perhaps the Greenwich equivalent of a Lyons Corner House?

Googling such a question proves hard – any old information seems to be buried underneath the American corporate giant, even if I add the “A” to the name, but maybe someone here remembers?

In the meanwhile, I don’t know what’s happening with Vietnam. It SAYS it’s being refurbished – but there’s a note in the window that slightly bothers me. It recommends, perhaps a little too warmly, the restaurant around the corner Saigon (which, actually I do quite like…) as an alternative while the place is being done up.

Of course, this could just be a friendly, generous, genuine suggestion. In fact I’m sure it is. It must be. Yes. Of course. But it just could be that Vietnam has been taken over by the other little chain that is creeping though Greenwich – the one that isn’t Inc…

I have a lot of time for Vietnam. I even liked its slightly scruffy interior. I have spent many a happy evening with pals ordering as much naughty food (for an ever-spreading Phantom) as I liked. I hope they don’t do anything too funky with it – and I pray the food stays the same….