The Street Signs Collection
After many walks around my local area in Carlton, Nottingham during the Covid-19 pandemic, I became engrossed in everything about street signs — the look of them, the placement of them, age, origin, meaning, utility and so on. I wanted to understand them better, so I began to take photographs. At first I favoured the oldest looking signs, as history has always been an interest of mine, as has old fashioned architecture, and these older signs, with inward, bevelled corners and a bold sans-serif font, held so much character; each one seemed to shout out to be noticed and for it’s story to be told. “How long has it been there?” I thought, “Who or what is it named after...And why is it that shape?”. I wondered why they had lasted so long and had not been replaced by the newer, reflective signs most commonly favoured on streets nowadays. Photographing them felt like the attention they had long been needing. I began to fixate on the variety of shape and font that existed across the signs; details I hadn’t noticed before in such every day objects that were now so fascinating to me. It wasn’t long before I felt the need to separate my pictures into folders based on these aesthetic attributes, which soon led to photographing the modern signs too, as the project became a deep discovery into these intricacies. Not only then did I find connections between the shape of the sign and it’s font, but I also started to discover connotations and associations that could be made from the names of the signs. I found in my collection an “Elm Avenue”, “Appletree Lane” and “Willow Road”, and so this inspired me to create groups of signs based on the language they use. My system for categorising throughout this project was ever-changing and improving, starting out as simply dropping the photographs into the correct folders on my desktop and eventually becoming a highly navigable database across Miro and Google Sheets. I ended up building something of a mind-map tree diagram in Miro for visually navigating through all the possible categories, and several spreadsheets that contained every bit of information I could want, from what shape a sign was to whether it was fixed to a wall, or whether it was a flower and/or a “Lane”. From here, I produced numerous photobooks, showcasing this variety. What started as intrigue for a somewhat mundane object, quickly grew into a fanatic-like quest to categorise and archive a myriad of these faithful information bearers. They were more than an object to me, with each one holding significance and bringing me joy in it’s individuality. As a project undertaken during multiple national lockdowns, it’s possibility for outcomes only increases if and when the world re-enters a state of ‘normality’. However even then, if under restriction, with the greatest enthusiastic mentality, anyone can walk out of their door with the intention to discover, unfold and re-imagine their local environment, and what better way to do this than collect their own set of street signs!