SIGNS I Cattle & Son. Portland Mews, London, England

If you’ve ever stopped to look at the largest words on The Coracle’s homepage you might have noticed that they use a different font to elsewhere on the site, clever you. Both these fonts have a charming history outside of these website walls. They are based on a rather nice hand painted sign on Portland Mews. Slap bang in the heart of London’s Soho, the sign hides underneath an archway leading to an 18th century mews once owned by the Earl of Portland. Didn’t those old-timers just love naming things after themselves? 

Signs are one of those forgettable but everyday useful objects in most of our lives. Before the days of cheap printing on a larger scale, many signs would have been hand-lettered by specialist signwriters. There are still a few signwriters around, usually making sure your local deli or cafe is looking suitably charming. Somehow the odd ‘ghost’ sign on the street has survived, either because it wasn’t noticed or maybe someone deemed it attractive enough to stay. There’s a wonderful blog about London called Spitalfields Life that does a grand job of shining a light on some of these overlooked corners of our world. Some might not be worth making a film about but they might just make your walk to work more interesting.

Back in 2018, three people had noticed some of these forgotten signs. Grant Parker, Simon Warden and Jason Smith collaborated on a wonderful project to breathe life into the fonts of old London that were almost lost. Skulking down alleyways and hiding under newer street signs, they unearthed seven beautiful signs and created fonts from them, to be sold in aid of the Soho charity for the homeless: St. Barnabas. Fontworks, who sell the font, describe it like a fine wine; ‘The reduced size of the ampersand gives away Cattle & Son’s hand-painted origins, and the oblique compacted ‘LTD’ found on the original sign is also included in the final set. This beautiful sign is tucked away under an arch in Portland Mews, sheltering from the weather. Perhaps this is why it has lasted so long.’ Like many things in life, the more you know about something, the more you appreciate it.

Cattle & Son were carpenters. This was back when London’s mews were full of tradesmen, not 4×4’s. The firm disappeared in the 1970s to be replaced by some of Soho’s TV production companies. Somehow the memory of Cattle and Sons lives on but with new life breathed onto it.