Thread by @SnoozeInBrief

If you like #GhostSigns or little crumbs of Cambridge history, you might like this thread. (If not, look away now…)

On the corner of Mill Road and Hope Street in Cambridge, very near my childhood home (where my parents still live), is this building. I’ve walked past it many thousands of times. And running the full length of the wall is a #GhostSign so faint I’ve never noticed it before.

For about a century, this was the How family bakery. I remember going there as a kid – if you went at the right time in the morning and hurried home, you could have the joy of eating bread still warm from the oven! Tasty iced buns, too. They closed down around 2000.

These photos of the bakery are from a local nostalgia Facebook group. The first, via Geoff Peters, is probably from the 1970s. The second, dating from around World War I, is via Jane How, who I think is married to a (great-?)grandson of one of those little boys.

As a kid, my interest in this wall was for the bubble-gum machines attached to it. But higher up: painted letters. And somehow they caught my eye when I walked past recently. My parents had never noticed them either, so the sign must have been really faded even back in the 1980s.

So, what does it say? It took me a while – a few trips to take photos from different angles in different light, then staring at enlarged details – to get it all.

First word is ‘THE’. (And, according to Google Street View from 2014, there’s nothing under the violin-maker’s sign.)

The next word is less distinct in parts, but definitely ‘CAMBRIDGE’. Pretty easy to guess after the first three letters.

The third word was more of a challenge. It turned out to be ‘PATENT’, although the final T is almost invisible. That’s a bit of an unexpected word to be painted on the side of a bakery.

At this point I decided to look for an old Spalding’s street directory, listing local residents and businesses, to get some clues on what kinds of words to look for. I found one from 1913 in the University of Leicester’s online archives, of all places.

The 1913 Spalding lists the How property at both 222 Mill Road (‘baker, pastry cook, and confectioner, patent smokeless ovens’) and 1 Hope Street (‘steam and hot air ovens’). So maybe the Hows were involved in selling these ovens as well.

Armed with that knowledge, I figured that the next word must be ‘SMOKELESS’. You can just make out most of the SMOK, but then the ELE is pretty much gone. The SS at the end is more distinct.

Next we have ‘STEAM & HOT’. It took me far too long to realise that the single character made of curves had to be an ampersand.

Then there’s a block of new brickwork (and another further along). At first I thought this would scupper things, but actually I suspect that what used to be there wasn’t old brickwork but floor-length shutters, probably for loading. And that means we’re not missing any writing.

After the first new brickwork we have ‘AIR’ (which makes perfect sense following ‘HOT’) and then ‘OVENS’. I get the feeling that the sign painter was starting to stretch the words out to fit the space.

Finally, after another block of new bricks, ‘BAKERY’.

I give you:

THE CAMBRIDGE PATENT SMOKELESS STEAM & HOT AIR OVENS BAKERY

Similar text to the 1913 Spalding, so perhaps of similar age. Old Edward J. How must have been very proud of his high-tech baking methods. Still, it's quite a mouthful. Like the bread... #GhostSigns