Last Saturday morning, I got a very enlightening and enjoyable guided tour of part of the City Centre which was conducted by Tom Spalding. His walk as part of the heritage Day was overbooked and so an additional walk in conjunction with Liam Russell’s was organised for Saturday.
It dealt substantially with street signage but other nuggets of information were also found.
Towards the end we arrived at Tuckey Street and Tom stopped to talk about this sign that I had photographed some months ago.
He understands that the sign was originally on the building on the corner of Grand Parade and Tuckey St which, I understand burnt down, and now forms part of Bishop Lucey Park. This is consistent with the current siting of
the sign – both in terms of height on building (at shopfront height is rather low) and also in respect of position within the street (signs were generally at the beginning and end of streets and not in the middle).
He pointed out details, some of which I had not observed, which indicates that the sign-writer may not have been very experienced:
- For each of the three lines of text, there are three lightly scored lines, similar to what I recall from primary school to get our proportions for letters correct
- The first row appears reasonably well set out but an ability to appropriately set out the second row was beyond the writer,
- The gap between ‘E’ and ‘T’ in ‘STREET’,
- The fancy tail to the ‘U’, and
- The odd ‘6’.
Reading this back, it does make it look like an uninteresting walk and talk. That is so far from the truth.
It dealt substantially with street signage but other nuggets of information were also found.
Towards the end we arrived at Tuckey Street and Tom stopped to talk about this sign that I had photographed some months ago.
He understands that the sign was originally on the building on the corner of Grand Parade and Tuckey St which, I understand burnt down, and now forms part of Bishop Lucey Park. This is consistent with the current siting of
the sign – both in terms of height on building (at shopfront height is rather low) and also in respect of position within the street (signs were generally at the beginning and end of streets and not in the middle).
He pointed out details, some of which I had not observed, which indicates that the sign-writer may not have been very experienced:
- For each of the three lines of text, there are three lightly scored lines, similar to what I recall from primary school to get our proportions for letters correct
- The first row appears reasonably well set out but an ability to appropriately set out the second row was beyond the writer,
- The gap between ‘E’ and ‘T’ in ‘STREET’,
- The fancy tail to the ‘U’, and
- The odd ‘6’.
Reading this back, it does make it look like an uninteresting walk and talk. That is so far from the truth.
