3 May 2016

Brymay Safety Matches – hints of another ghostsign spotted

A few weeks ago I spotted part of an old hand-painted advertisement for Brymay Matches seeping through the paint on the North-facing corner of Archway Road.
SAFETY MATCHES
The name Brymay is a conjunction of the names of the founders William Bryant and Frances May who opened their first factory in Bow and sold a phenomenal eight million boxes of matches every year!!
There are now only a few hand-painted Brymay ads visible in London, most of having been covered over by subsequent ads (as in the Haringey example below), whitewashed completely, or obliterated by modern advertising systems or graffiti.
Here are some of them:
Haringey (over/under-painted with a John Bull ad) and Fulham
Shepherd's Bush Green and Goldhawk Road
The simple yet distinctive black Brymay logotype within a bright yellow ellipse on a plain blue background peeking out from behind modern signs in Holloway and Lambeth
Criterion Matches, however, implemented a different kind of labour-intensive pictoral advertising; a style also sometimes used by other companies such as Gillette:
Kilburn and Stoke Newington
Here's my last post about Brymay signs.
If you know of any others like these, please do let me know.

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