I love coming across these old decorative thresholds bearing what are often the last traces of long-gone businesses. This one is at 10 Park Road in the West End of Glasgow. I don't know for certain, but it may relate to A. and L. Cameron, Drapers and Shirtmakers, who occupied this shop between 1902 and 1904.
Ghost sign over the back entrance to the former Woolworths store on the ground floor of Charing Cross Mansions in Glasgow. The main store front was at 22 to 26 Saint George's Road (where Tinderbox now is). Opened in 1922, this was the third Woolworths store in Glasgow (after ones on Union Street and Argyle Street, and the 121st Woolworths store overall. It closed in the 1970s.
Threshold of the former James McFarlane Wholesale and Retail Ironmongers on Trongate in Glasgow. The business was founded by William Spence in 1844, and was purchesed by James McFarlane in 1886.
I found this fantastic little ghost sign today at the entrance to a tenement close on High Street in Glasgow. The tenement was built in 1901, but the phone number (Bell 976) indicates the sign dates from sometime between 1936, when the Bell Telephone Exchange opened on nearby Ingram Street, and the 1960s, when the Bell prefix was phased out in favour of the numerical ones 552 and 553.
I came across this ghost sign outside a tenement in Dennistoun yesterday, which got me wonder about who C. Gregory was. First, there's the initials after their name: A.R.C.O, which was an accreditation introduced by the Royal College of Organists in 1894 as a measure of professional competency. So far, this isn't anything more than others who have come across this sign before me have worked out.
My new favourite Glasgow ghost sign. It's on Royal Exchange Court and it's a bit faded now, but you can still make most of it out. It reads: Boys found playing at balls or marbles will be handed to the police.
I love this ghost sign on Olympia Street in the Bridgeton area of Glasgow. Miller's Linoleum Stores was established in 1893 by William Millard, a travelling linoeum salesman from London. The shop on Olympia Street was built in 1913, and is currently run by William's great grandsons, David and Stephen.
The corner dome of 450 Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow. It was designed by Watson and Mitchell in a Free Renaissance Style in 1899.
The ghost sign refers to William Robertson Grieve, a couture dress maker, mantle maker and silk merce whose business occupied this building from 1905 onwards.
A successful local businessman, Grieve was also a member of the Glasgow University Training Corps. He was sent to the Western Front in 1917 and was killed in action barely a month after arriving there. The sign for his business remains as an unusual memorial to a life cut short by war.
Ghost sign on Stewartville Street in the Partick area of Glasgow. John Curdie and Son was started in Kilmarnock in 1870. It spanned some four generations over the next 120 years before closing in the late 1980s, making the sign at least thirty years old.