Left
Left is one of Heavyweight's evergreens, with roots going back to 2013. Its defining moment came with the addition of subtle, almost invisible serifs on the left side of each stem, giving text a quiet tension the eye feels without registering. It counts Monopol magazine among its most prominent uses.
- Design: Filip Matejíček
- Production: Heavyweight
- Spacing/Kerning: Heavyweight Digital Type Foundry
- Number of glyphs: 463
- Number of styles: 4
- Number of languages: 260
- Date of release: 2014
- Version: 2.001
They Will Be There After.
Nobody Commissioned Them to Stay.
The Street Knows
Before You Do.
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The Bureau for Urban Visual Standards was established in London in the autumn of 1967 with a remit that its founding director, a man named Arthur Kempe, described in the first annual report as the systematic documentation of lettering in the urban environment that has not been commissioned for the purpose of documentation. He meant by this the lettering that exists not because anyone decided it should be preserved but because nobody decided it should be removed. The name above a shopfront that outlasted the shop by forty years. The building number cut into the stone lintel in a hand that nobody now knows. The street name on a ceramic tile that survived the bombing and the rebuilding and three subsequent renovations of the wall it was set into. Kempe had spent the previous decade working as a surveyor for the London County Council, mapping buildings rather than letters, and had developed in that time a specific attentiveness to the written surfaces of the city that he found difficult to explain to colleagues who did not share it. He said, in a lecture delivered at the Architectural Association in November 1969 (transcript held in the Bureau archive, Ref. No. BUVS-69-LEC-003): the city writes continuously. Every generation adds its layer.
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Vienna Correspondent Office
Schottengasse 4
1010 Wien (AT)
Archive & Research Division
14 Clerkenwell Road
London EC1M 5PQ (GB)
Amsterdam Field Office
Keizersgracht 324
1016 EZ Amsterdam (NL)
Brussels Liaison Office
Rue du Marché 44
1000 Bruxelles (BE)
Survey & Documentation Unit
32 Gray's Inn Road
London WC1X 8HR (GB)
Berlin Correspondent Office
Oranienburger Str. 27
10117 Berlin (DE)
Publications & Distribution
91 Kingsway
London WC2B 6SD (GB)
Vienna Research Unit
Wollzeile 17
1010 Wien (AT)
Catalogue & Index Unit
116 Long Acre
London WC2E 9PE (GB)
Brussels Correspondent
Rue du Fossé aux Loups 12
1000 Bruxelles (BE)
Berlin Archive Unit
Große Hamburger Str. 5
10115 Berlin (DE)
Amsterdam Research Office
Herengracht 518
1017 CC Amsterdam (NL)
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Clerkenwell
Bloomsbury
Holborn
Aldwych
Kingsway
Schottengasse
Keizersgracht
Herengracht
Auguststraße
Oranienburger
Torstraße
Rue du Marché
Rue des Sablons
Avenue des Arts
Wollzeile
Exmouth Market
Russell Square
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The City
Writes
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Ref. BUVS
67-001 Through
79-177
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Survey & Document
Annotate & File
Photograph (B&W
Only!) Walk, Never
Drive. London © 1967
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Helena Strauss received the Bureau's survey methodology in a package posted from 187 Gower Street on the 14th of November 1967, three weeks after Arthur Kempe had written to her through a contact at the University of Vienna's Institute for Urban History. The package contained a 12-page document titled Field Survey Protocol (Edition 1, October 1967), a set of 50 index cards pre-printed with the Bureau's heading and the relevant field names, a small map of the first survey area (the 1st district of Vienna, bounded by the Ringstrasse), and a letter from Kempe that ran to 4 pages and described, with considerable precision, what the Bureau was attempting to do and why. Strauss read the letter twice before opening the protocol document. She wrote back the following week. Her first letter to Kempe, dated November 22nd, 1967, is in the Bureau archive (Box 6, Folder 1) and runs to 6 pages. It raises 14 specific questions about the methodology, suggests 3 modifications to the index card format that she considers necessary for the Vienna context, and ends with a sentence that Kempe later described, in a staff meeting in January 1968, as the most useful communication he had received since the Bureau was founded: you are trying to document what the city has decided to keep by not deciding to remove it. I understand this.
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The Bureau's first survey of Berlin was conducted in September and October of 1971 by a correspondent named Klaus Hartmann, a historian at the Free University of Berlin who had been introduced to Kempe through an academic conference in Amsterdam in the spring of that year. Hartmann had attended a paper that Kempe delivered on the methodology of urban lettering survey and had approached him afterward with a specific observation: that the situation in Berlin presented methodological challenges that the Bureau's existing framework was not equipped to handle, because the city had not one political history layered into its surfaces but two simultaneous and contradictory ones, and that any survey conducted in the western half of the city would be incomplete without reference to the eastern half, which was, in 1971, not accessible to a West Berlin-based correspondent without considerable administrative difficulty. Kempe said: you are right. Can you conduct the survey anyway? Hartmann said that he could conduct the western half and document the eastern half through photographs taken from the permitted crossing points and through interviews with residents who had recently made the crossing for family visits. Kempe said: that is not the methodology. Hartmann said: no, but it is what is possible. Kempe said he would accept it. The Berlin survey is consequently the most methodologically compromised of all the Bureau's field surveys and the one that Kempe described, in the 1972 annual report, as the most important. He wrote: a survey conducted under constraint reveals the constraint as much as the subject.
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The Amsterdam correspondent for the Bureau was a woman named Marta de Vries, introduced to Kempe in 1968 through the Stedelijk Museum, where she worked in the documentation department. She was 31 years old at the time of her first contact with the Bureau and had spent the previous 4 years cataloguing the museum's collection of graphic ephemera, a category that included, among other things, a substantial collection of Amsterdam street photography from the 1920s through the 1950s that she had found herself studying not for the subjects of the photographs but for the lettering visible in their backgrounds. This was, she wrote to Kempe in her initial letter of inquiry (Bureau archive, Box 9, Folder 1, dated March 14th, 1968): a slightly embarrassing admission for someone who works in a museum. I look at photographs of people and I read the walls behind them. Kempe replied within a week: it is not embarrassing. It is the correct way to look at photographs of cities. The Amsterdam survey covered the canal ring (UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1975, though the survey predated this designation) and the surrounding districts over a period of 7 years. De Vries was the most systematic of all the Bureau's correspondents in her documentation of the relationship between lettering and water, a specific condition of the Amsterdam urban environment that the Bureau's standard methodology had not anticipated. Lettering on buildings that faced canals deteriorated at a different rate from lettering on inland facades, and the specific quality of light reflected from the water surface affected the photographic documentation in ways that required de Vries to develop a supplementary protocol for canal-facing specimens that she submitted to Kempe in 1970 and that was adopted as an optional addendum to the standard methodology for all correspondents working in cities with significant water infrastructure. Brussels adopted it partially. Berlin did not adopt it.
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Vienna had no relevant specimens. The Amsterdam archive contains 4,340 individual specimens documented across 7 years, making it the densest of the Bureau's non-London surveys in terms of specimens per square kilometer of surveyed area. De Vries attributed this density to the specific character of the Amsterdam built environment: a high concentration of small-scale commercial and residential buildings on narrow plots, each with its own lettering history, in a street pattern that produced a very high ratio of facade area to ground area compared to cities with wider streets and larger building footprints. She wrote in her final survey report (Bureau archive, Box 9, Folder 14, dated November 3rd, 1975): I have documented 4,340 specimens. I have not documented everything. I have documented what I could reach on foot in 7 years while holding a full-time job. The canal ring alone could sustain another survey of equal duration. I recommend it. The recommendation was noted by Kempe in the margin of his copy: agreed. Not funded. The Amsterdam survey was not extended. De Vries continued to send occasional notes and photographs to the Bureau after 1975, not as part of any formal survey but because, as she wrote in a letter dated January 1978, she had found it impossible to walk through the city without continuing to look. Kempe filed the notes and photographs in Box 9, Folder 15, under the heading: Amsterdam (NL), supplementary, unofficial. There are 234 items in Folder 15. They are the most informally documented materials in the Bureau's entire archive and, in the assessment of the Bureau's last director before its closure in 1994, some of the most interesting.
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All Answered™
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The Bureau's Brussels correspondent was a man named Jean-Paul Renard, an architect by training who had spent the decade between 1955 and 1965 working in the urban planning department of the City of Brussels and who had, in that capacity, been directly involved in several of the major redevelopment projects that transformed significant portions of the city center during that period. By the time Kempe approached him in 1969, Renard had left the planning department and was teaching at the Institut Supérieur d'Architecture in Brussels, and had developed, in the intervening years, a view of the redevelopment projects he had worked on that was substantially more critical than the view he had held while working on them. He described this shift in his first letter to Kempe (Bureau archive, Box 10, Folder 1, dated September 3rd, 1969) in terms that Kempe found both useful and slightly uncomfortable: I spent ten years helping to remove things. I would like to spend the next ten years documenting what was not removed. I am aware that this is a form of compensation. I do not think it is therefore worthless. Kempe replied that it was not worthless and that the motivation of the surveyor was less important to the Bureau than the quality of the survey. He said this diplomatically. The Brussels survey presented specific challenges that distinguished it from the other European surveys. The city's bilingual character meant that lettering existed in two languages, French and Dutch, sometimes on the same building and sometimes on adjacent buildings that reflected the linguistic composition of different periods of the city's recent history. Renard documented the language of each specimen as a primary field and noted, in a supplementary column of his own devising, whether the language of the lettering corresponded to the current linguistic character of the neighborhood in which it was located. It frequently did not. Brussels had shifted considerably in its linguistic geography over the preceding decades, and lettering installed in French in a neighborhood that was now predominantly Dutch-speaking, or vice versa, carried a kind of double orphaning: it had outlasted not only its original commercial or institutional context but also its linguistic context. Renard called this category in his notes déraciné, uprooted, a term that Kempe adopted in his correspondence with Renard but did not introduce into the Bureau's standard methodology on the grounds that it was specific to bilingual urban environments and would not be applicable across the full range of survey contexts. Renard accepted this without objection. He said in a subsequent letter: you are right that it is specific. It is also, I think, one of the most interesting things the survey has found. The specific is often more interesting than the general.
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The card index that Arthur Kempe designed for the Bureau in 1967 was based on a system he had used during his time at the London County Council for the indexing of listed building records. He had modified it substantially for the Bureau's purposes: where the LCC system was organized primarily by address, the Bureau's system was organized by material and technique, with address as a secondary field. Kempe's reasoning was that the Bureau's primary interest was in the typology of urban lettering rather than its geography, and that a researcher wanting to compare all instances of gilt lettering across London should be able to find them without knowing in advance which streets they were on. The index contained, at the time of Kempe's retirement in 1981, approximately 14,000 cards covering specimens from London (GB), Vienna (AT), Amsterdam (NL), Brussels (BE), and Berlin (DE). The London cards were filed in 6 of the 12 drawers of the card cabinet, organized by material and technique within the following primary categories: stone incised, stone relief, brick or terracotta, ceramic tile, cast iron or pressed metal, enamel, gilt or painted on glass, painted on plaster or render, and printed or transferred. Each primary category had between 3 and 11 subcategories depending on the range of variation within it. The ceramic tile category, for example, was divided into: plain white ground, colored ground, pictorial, and mixed. The painted on glass category was divided into: exterior application (reading correctly from outside), interior application (reading correctly from inside, reversed from outside), and gilded (a specific technique requiring a separate category because of its distinctive optical properties and its concentration in specific building types and periods). The European cards occupied the remaining 6 drawers, organized by city and then by the same material and technique system used for the London cards with the addition of the language field introduced by Helena Strauss and the political period field also introduced by Strauss, and the déraciné notation developed by Jean-Paul Renard for the Brussels survey. The card index was consulted by 47 external researchers between 1967 and 1981, each of whom signed the access log kept on the shelf above the card cabinet. The access log is in the Bureau archive (Box 1, Folder 1) and records the name, institutional affiliation, date of visit, and cards consulted for each researcher. The most frequent visitor was a postgraduate student from University College London who consulted the London gilt lettering cards on 14 separate occasions between 1974 and 1977 as part of a doctoral thesis on Victorian commercial signage that was submitted in 1978 and that cited the Bureau's archive in its bibliography. The thesis is in the British Library. The citation reads: Bureau for Urban Visual Standards Archive, 187 Gower Street, London NW1. Consulted 1974–1977. Whether the thesis would have reached its conclusions without the Bureau's card index is impossible to say. Kempe noted the submission of the thesis in his diary with the single observation: the index worked.
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Keizersgracht 412
1016 GC Amsterdam
Built 1672, Canal House
6 Specimens, Painted Render
Category: Orphaned
Prinsengracht 521
1016 HM Amsterdam
Built 1741, Warehouse
8 Specimens, Iron Relief
Category: Inconsistent
Herengracht 401
1017 BP Amsterdam
Built 1665, Residential
3 Specimens, Stone Incised
Category: Consistent
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14 Bleeding Heart Yard
London EC1N 8SJ
Built c. 1780, Commercial
3 Specimens, Stone Incised
Category: Consistent
22 Exmouth Market
London EC1R 4QE
Built 1903, Retail
7 Specimens, Painted Fascia
Category: Inconsistent
Holborn Viaduct No. 9
London EC1A 2AT
Built 1869, Civic
12 Specimens, Cast Iron
Category: Orphaned
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Wollzeile 32
1010 Wien
Built 1887, Commercial
5 Specimens, Gilt on Glass
Category: Inconsistent
Schottengasse 7
1010 Wien
Built 1912, Residential
4 Specimens, Ceramic Tile
Category: Orphaned
Gonzagagasse 3
1010 Wien
Built 1898, Mixed Use
9 Specimens, Stone Relief
Category: Consistent
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Oranienburger Str. 31
10117 Berlin
Built 1894, Commercial
11 Specimens, Enamel
Category: Orphaned
Auguststraße 21
10117 Berlin
Built 1901, Mixed Use
6 Specimens, Painted Brick
Category: Inconsistent
Große Hamburger Str. 8
10115 Berlin
Built 1887, Residential
4 Specimens, Stone Incised
Category: Orphaned
Medium
Clerkenwell
GREEN
Medium
301
C@BI
NET
Medium
№1
ÆRCH
IVE
Medium
Bomb damage map¹, 1941 Ref.
London County Council
14 buildings gone, Block C³
(Lettering: Presumed lost survey:
Too Late by 20 Years.)
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CL-GB-1968-0001
CL-GB-1968-0002
CL-GB-1968-0003
CL-GB-1968-0004
CL-GB-1968-0005
CL-GB-1968-0006
CL-GB-1968-0007
CL-GB-1968-0008
CL-GB-1968-0009
CL-GB-1968-0010
CL-GB-1969-0011
CL-GB-1969-0012
CL-GB-1969-0013
CL-GB-1969-0014
CL-GB-1969-0015
CL-GB-1969-0016
CL-GB-1970-0017
CL-GB-1970-0018
CL-GB-1970-0019
CL-GB-1970-0020
CL-GB-1970-0021
CL-GB-1971-0022
CL-GB-1971-0023
CL-GB-1971-0024
CL-GB-1971-0025
CL-GB-1971-0026
CL-GB-1972-0027
CL-GB-1972-0028
CL-GB-1972-0029
CL-GB-1972-0030
CL-GB-1973-0031
CL-GB-1973-0032
CL-GB-1973-0033
CL-GB-1973-0034
CL-GB-1973-0035
CL-GB-1974-0036
CL-GB-1974-0037
CL-GB-1974-0038
CL-GB-1974-0039
CL-GB-1974-0040
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BUVS-68-GB-0001
BUVS-68-GB-0002
BUVS-68-GB-0003
BUVS-68-GB-0004
BUVS-68-GB-0005
BUVS-68-GB-0006
BUVS-68-GB-0007
BUVS-68-GB-0008
BUVS-68-GB-0009
BUVS-68-GB-0010
BUVS-69-GB-0011
BUVS-69-GB-0012
BUVS-69-GB-0013
BUVS-69-GB-0014
BUVS-69-GB-0015
BUVS-69-GB-0016
BUVS-70-GB-0017
BUVS-70-GB-0018
BUVS-70-GB-0019
BUVS-70-GB-0020
BUVS-70-GB-0021
BUVS-71-GB-0022
BUVS-71-GB-0023
BUVS-71-GB-0024
BUVS-71-GB-0025
BUVS-71-GB-0026
BUVS-72-GB-0027
BUVS-72-GB-0028
BUVS-72-GB-0029
BUVS-72-GB-0030
BUVS-73-GB-0031
BUVS-73-GB-0032
BUVS-73-GB-0033
BUVS-73-GB-0034
BUVS-73-GB-0035
BUVS-74-GB-0036
BUVS-74-GB-0037
BUVS-74-GB-0038
BUVS-74-GB-0039
BUVS-74-GB-0040
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Stone Incised, Pre-1880
Painted Render, Consistent
Cast Iron Panel, Orphaned
Gilt on Glass, Exterior
Enamel Sign, Inconsistent
Ceramic Tile, Pictorial
Transfer Print, Partial
Sandblasted Glass, Interior
Painted Brick, Faded
Stone Relief, Intact
Cast Iron Numerals, 1901
Pressed Metal, Damaged
Painted Fascia, Orphaned
Relief Concrete, Post-War
Ceramic Tile, Plain White
Gilt on Glass, Reversed
Stone Incised, Cornice
Enamel Sign, Orphaned
Painted Render, Faded
Cast Iron Panel, Intact
Painted Brick, Consistent
Stone Relief, Pre-1900
Transfer Print, Ghost Only
Sandblasted Glass, Orphaned
Ceramic Tile, Colored Ground
Gilt on Glass, Gilded
Pressed Metal, Orphaned
Stone Incised, Street Name
Relief Concrete, Inconsistent
Painted Fascia, Consistent
Cast Iron Numerals, Orphaned
Enamel Sign, ¾ Intact
Painted Render, Orphaned
Gilt on Glass, Interior
Stone Relief, Orphaned
Ceramic Tile, Mixed Ground
Painted Brick, Orphaned
Cast Iron Panel, Inconsistent
Stone Incised, Orphaned
Painted Fascia, ½ Legible
Medium
The decision to begin the Bureau's London¹ survey in Clerkenwell rather than in the City or in the West End was made by Arthur Kempe in February 1968, after he had spent three Saturday mornings walking the area with a notebook and a camera and had concluded that no comparable concentration of accumulated public lettering existed anywhere else in London that he had so far examined. Clerkenwell² had been, at various points in its history, a center for watchmaking, printing, meat processing, diamond cutting, and a dozen other trades whose physical traces remained on the surfaces of its buildings in a density that Kempe described in his survey notes as almost competitive: each trade had left its mark on the same streets and sometimes on the same buildings, and the result was a palimpsest of commercial identity that had been accumulating since at least the 1840s and that had not been substantially disrupted by either bomb damage or post-war redevelopment.³ The streets north of Holborn Viaduct had been largely spared both. This was not the result of any preservation policy. It was the result of the area's economic marginality in the post-war decades, which had made large-scale redevelopment financially unattractive. The lettering had survived because nobody had found it worthwhile to remove it. Kempe considered this the purest form of survival and the most instructive. The Clerkenwell survey was conducted by Kempe himself and by a part-time research assistant named Dorothy Haynes, who had joined the Bureau in January 1968 from a position in the LCC's records office and who proved, in Kempe's assessment recorded in her first annual review (Bureau archive, Box 2, Folder 3, dated December 1968): the most observant person I have employed in any capacity. She notices things that I have walked past. The survey covered an area bounded by Farringdon Road to the west, Goswell Road to the east, Clerkenwell Road to the north, and Holborn Viaduct to the south: approximately 0.8 square kilometers of mixed historic fabric containing 847 individual buildings of which 634 were surveyed in full and 213 were surveyed in part due to access constraints or condition issues that made full documentation unsafe or impractical. The 847 buildings yielded 3,214 individual lettering specimens across 11 material and technique categories. The most common category was painted on render, accounting for 1,041 specimens or 32.4% of the total. The least common was gilded on glass, accounting for 23 specimens or 0.7% of the total, all concentrated in a single block of Hatton Garden where the diamond trade had produced a specific typology of shopfront lettering that differed in character and technique from anything else in the survey area.² Kempe photographed the Hatton Garden specimens himself on a single afternoon in October 1969, using a 35mm camera with a standard 50mm lens and a yellow filter to improve contrast in the overcast autumn light.
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The building at 9 Holborn Viaduct¹ presented the Bureau's survey team with a methodological question that had not been anticipated in the original field protocol and that required Kempe² to make a decision on the spot that he subsequently recorded in a supplementary note attached to the survey card (Bureau archive, Box 3, Folder 14)³. The building, a Victorian⁴ commercial structure completed in 1871, carried on its principal facade 4 separate layers of lettering in 4 different techniques applied across a period of approximately 80 years: a stone incised inscription⁵ at the level of the first floor cornice dating from the original construction, a series of cast iron numerals and a street name plate added no earlier than 1885 based on the style and casting technique, a painted trade inscription at ground floor level dating from the first decades of the 20th century and now largely illegible due to weathering, and a mid-century transfer print panel above the entrance that had been partially removed at some point, leaving a rectangular ghost of cleaner stone and the remnants of 3 letters: E, R, and what appeared to be the lower half of a D. The question was whether to treat the building as 4 separate specimens, one for each layer, or as a single specimen whose complexity required extended documentation. The existing card format provided for a single entry per building address with a field for the number of distinct specimens present but not for the detailed documentation of multiple overlapping layers at a single location. Kempe spent 40 minutes at the building making notes before deciding that the layered condition required a new document type: what he called a stratigraphy card, a larger format card (A4 rather than the standard A6 index card) that allowed for a sequential description of the layers from oldest to most recent, with a sketch of the facade showing the spatial relationship between the layers. The stratigraphy card format was developed that afternoon, on a piece of A4 paper from Kempe's notebook, and refined over the following week into a printed document that was added to the Bureau's standard kit from January 1973 onward. 34 stratigraphy cards were completed across all Bureau surveys between 1973 and 1981. They are filed in a separate section of the card index, behind the standard cards, in a red card wallet labeled STRATIGRAPHY in Kempe's handwriting. The building at 9 Holborn Viaduct still stands. The stone inscription at cornice level is still legible. The cast iron numerals are intact. The painted inscription has continued to weather and is now, based on the last informal documentation in 1991, almost entirely illegible. The ghost of the transfer print panel and the 3 surviving letters have not changed. The E and the R are clear. The third letter remains ambiguous. Kempe noted this ambiguity in the original stratigraphy card with the observation: unknown letter, lower half only. Possibly D. Possibly B. Possibly O.⁶ The building does not say. We have recorded the question. The answer may not exist anymore.
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Hors-d'ŒUVRE
§ Bureau London
1967
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Dorothy Haynes joined the Bureau on the 8th of January 1968, three months after its founding, at a salary of £1,840 per annum (pro rata, the position being part-time at 3 days per week). She had seen the advertisement in the Evening Standard — not a publication she read regularly, but one she had picked up on the Tube on a Thursday evening — and had applied without knowing precisely what the Bureau was or what it intended to do. The advertisement described the position as "survey and documentation work in the urban environment" and gave a box number rather than an address. She sent a letter to the box number. Kempe replied within 48 hours, which she later described as "almost alarming in a man who seemed otherwise very measured." The interview took place at 187 Gower Street (first floor, front room, overlooking the street) on a Wednesday morning in December 1967. It lasted 2 hours and 20 minutes. Kempe asked her, among other things, whether she had ever noticed lettering on buildings while walking around London. She said yes, of course, all the time. He asked her to describe an example. She described, without hesitation, a painted inscription she had passed that morning on her way from the Underground station at Chancery Lane: "a large capital M and then RKET in smaller letters, painted in what looked like black on a cream ground, above a doorway that was now boarded up, on a building on High Holborn that I had passed perhaps a hundred times without seeing it clearly until that morning." Kempe wrote this down. He offered her the position at the end of the interview. She accepted on the condition that she could take one day per week to continue the voluntary work she was doing at the Guildhall Library. He said: "that seems reasonable." It was the only negotiation either of them ever conducted. She worked at the Bureau for 14 years (1968–1982), initially 3 days a week and from 1974 onward full-time, covering the London survey, the photographic darkroom, the card index, and, from 1971, the correspondence with the European correspondents when Kempe was absent or unwell. She retired in 1982, the same year that Kempe handed the Bureau's directorship to Frances Okafor. The timing was not coincidental. She said, in the 1989 dictation: "I came because of Arthur and I left when Arthur left, though he left before I did and I stayed an extra few months to make sure Frances had everything she needed, which she did, because Frances always had everything she needed before she knew she needed it." After her retirement she continued to walk the Clerkenwell survey area regularly, at first weekly and then less frequently as her mobility declined. Her informal resurvey of the Hatton Garden gilt lettering in 1989 (which found 16 of the 23 original specimens gone or substantially altered) was conducted on a Tuesday in October, on a day when the light was, in her description, "exactly the same flat grey that Arthur had complained about every autumn without ever doing anything different about it." She did not submit the resurvey findings formally. She sent them to Kempe in a letter. He replied with a note of 4 sentences. The note is in his personal papers, not in the Bureau archive. Its contents are not known.
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Frances Okafor became director of the Bureau for Urban Visual Standards on the 1st of April 1982, a date she described in her first annual report as "not chosen for its associations, though the associations were not lost on us." She had come to the Bureau from a position at the Greater London Council's urban design unit, where she had worked for 8 years on questions of public realm quality that overlapped substantially with the Bureau's interests without ever quite touching them. She had known of the Bureau's existence since 1974 (she had used the card index on 3 occasions for research purposes and had signed the access log each time) but had not met Kempe until 1980, when they were both invited to speak at a conference on urban heritage in Birmingham (GB) and had found themselves on the same panel, approaching the same question from different angles that proved, in the course of a 2-hour discussion, to be more compatible than either had expected. Kempe had mentioned, at the end of that conference, that he was thinking about the Bureau's future. Okafor had said: "I hope the future is longer than you seem to think it is." He had said: "so do I." Two years later she was director. Her first significant decision as director was to commission a full audit of the photographic archive (11,240 frames, many of which had not been systematically reviewed since the prints were made) and to produce a finding aid that would allow external researchers to navigate the archive without assistance from Bureau staff. The finding aid, produced over 18 months by a part-time archivist named Robert Chen, ran to 340 pages and covered all photographs with cross-references to the relevant survey cards and correspondent files. It was completed in December 1983. Okafor distributed 12 copies to libraries and institutions with relevant interests. The remaining 4 copies are in the Bureau's archive at UCL. Nobody has asked for additional copies since 1986, which Okafor noted in the 1993 closing report with the observation: "this tells us something about either the archive or the research community, and I am not entirely certain which." Under Okafor the Bureau also undertook its only attempt at active public engagement: the exhibition at the Architectural Association in 1983, which showed 87 photographs from the London and Vienna surveys alongside the Bureau's card index methodology and a selection of stratigraphy cards. The show ran for 3 weeks.
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Reviews appeared in the Architects' Journal and in a small architecture magazine that ceased publication the following year. The Architects' Journal review was positive but brief (4 paragraphs, the fourth of which was about something else entirely). The smaller magazine's review was longer and more enthusiastic, which Okafor considered "the correct distribution of attention for work of this kind: noticed by those who were looking, invisible to those who were not." A second exhibition was planned for 1986 but did not take place, due to a combination of funding constraints and the difficulty of finding a venue willing to commit 3 weeks of wall space to black and white photographs of lettering on buildings. Okafor recorded this in the minutes of the board meeting at which the decision was made as: "second exhibition: deferred indefinitely." The deferral became permanent. The Bureau closed in March 1994. Okafor attended the final day at 187 Gower Street, helped to pack the last of the boxes for transfer to UCL, and locked the door for the final time at 17:43 on a Friday afternoon. She posted the key through the letterbox of the building management company on her way to the Underground. She did not look back, she said later, "not because I was not moved, but because looking back at a door you have just locked is a way of pretending the closing is not final. It was final. I preferred to acknowledge that."
Medium
The lettering above the entrance of the building at 22 Exmouth Market was first documented by Dorothy Haynes on the 14th of March 1974, during the third year of the Clerkenwell survey's second phase (the first phase, 1968–1972, had covered the area south of Clerkenwell Road; the second phase, 1972–1976, extended the survey north). The specimen consisted of 7 capital letters painted in white on a dark ground above a doorway that had, at the time of documentation, been converted from its original commercial use to residential: a street door with an intercom panel and 4 bell pushes, suggesting 4 separate flats where there had previously been a single occupancy. The letters read, from left to right: C, O, A, L, and then a gap of approximately 12 cm, and then L, Y, E. COAL LYE? Or COAL (something) LYE? Or perhaps the gap was not a gap at all but a damaged section of the original inscription, and the full text had been something longer that the weathering of decades had reduced to these 7 legible letters and whatever had stood between the fourth and fifth. Haynes documented the specimen, measured the letter heights (approximately 18 cm for each capital), noted the condition (fair: some flaking at the lower edge of the C and the final E, the remaining letters substantially intact), classified the material as painted on render, and assigned it to the orphaned category on the grounds that the building's current residential use bore no apparent relationship to any trade that the surviving letters might have described. She added a note at the bottom of the card, in the margin, that read: "COAL LYE? Check trade directories." The trade directory check was conducted by Kempe, who found 3 businesses trading from addresses in the Exmouth Market area under names beginning with COAL in the commercial directories for the years 1890 through 1920: a coal merchant (COAL & COKE SUPPLY CO., listed 1891–1904), a coal delivery service (COALMAN BROTHERS, listed 1898–1914), and a manufacturing chemist who had produced a cleaning compound called COAL LYED SOAP (listed 1903–1921, address given as Exmouth Market without a number).
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Ground
Floor
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Stone Incised
MIXED USE*
Hatton Garden Pre 1900
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9 Hlbn.
4QE
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187 Gwr.
NW1
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Arthur Kempe ©
14 Clerkenwell Road
London ECIM 1PQ (GB)
Founded October 1967
“Internal Use Only”
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The kitchen's original function was still visible in 1994 when Frances Okafor packed the last boxes: a gas pipe stub protruding from the wall where the cooker had been, a rectangular area of different-coloured plaster above the window where a ventilation hood had been removed at some indeterminate point, and a single ceramic tile, blue and white, set into the wall beside the door at approximately waist height, carrying the image of a windmill. “The tile was there when we arrived,” Kempe wrote in a letter to his sister in 1968, “and it will presumably be there when we leave. It has nothing to do with us. I find this reassuring.” The tile was still there in 1994. Whether it is still there now, in the building occupied since 1995 by the solicitors' firm, is not known. The card index cabinet was the most significant piece of furniture in the office and the one whose acquisition Kempe documented most carefully. He purchased it secondhand in November 1967 from an office clearance company in Islington (GB), for £34, and had it delivered to Gower Street by 2 men from the same company, neither of whose names appear in any record. The cabinet was a standard 12-drawer steel index card cabinet, mid-grey, manufactured in the early 1950s by a company whose name plate on the back had been partially obscured by a label from a previous owner. The visible portion of the name read STER OFFICE — suggesting CHESTER OFFICE EQUIPMENT or WORCESTER OFFICE SUPPLIES or any number of other possibilities that Kempe noted in the same memorandum as the fascia documentation, with the observation: "provenance uncertain, condition good, function exact." He kept the cabinet for the full 27 years of the Bureau's operation without replacing it.
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Still Standing ®
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The field notebook used by Dorothy Haynes during the Clerkenwell survey was a standard A5 ruled notebook, black cover, purchased from a stationery supplier on Gray's Inn Road. She went through 7 of them between March 1968 and November 1972, filling each one with entries that combined measured observations, sketched elevations, photographic frame numbers, and, occasionally, notes of a more personal character that she did not consider relevant to the Bureau's formal records but that she retained in the notebooks rather than transcribing only the factual content to the index cards. The notebooks are not in the Bureau archive at UCL. They are in a box under Dorothy Haynes's bed in Islington (GB), where they have been since her retirement in 1982. She has read from them once since then, in 1991, when a researcher from the Architectural Association telephoned to ask whether she had any unpublished material relating to the Clerkenwell survey. She said that she did but that it was personal rather than archival and that she did not think it would be useful to the researcher. The researcher said he understood. She has not been contacted since. The entries in the notebooks follow a consistent format in the factual portions: date, address, weather conditions, time of arrival, description of specimen or specimens, photographic frame numbers, condition assessment, and category (consistent, inconsistent, or orphaned, using the terminology established by Helena Strauss in 1967 and adopted by the Bureau in 1968). The condition assessment used a 5-point scale that Kempe had developed: 1 for pristine or near-pristine, 2 for minor weathering or damage, 3 for moderate deterioration, 4 for severe deterioration with significant loss of legibility, and 5 for illegible or effectively destroyed. In practice Haynes rarely awarded a 1 (she considered any lettering that had survived more than 20 years in an urban environment to have sustained some deterioration, however minor) and rarely awarded a 5 (she felt that a specimen reduced to complete illegibility was not properly a specimen at all, since there was nothing left to document). The majority of the Clerkenwell entries carry a condition grade of 2 or 3. The personal notes, which appear intermittently between and sometimes within the formal entries, are of a different character. They record observations that did not fit the Bureau's categories: the smell of the building at 14 Bleeding Heart Yard on a wet Tuesday in April 1968 (described as "something between coal and bread, which may not be accurate but is what I wrote down at the time"), the sound of printing machinery audible through the wall of a building on Benjamin Street whose exterior carried a painted inscription advertising a trade that the machinery suggested was still being practiced inside, the quality of light on Leather Lane on a clear morning in September 1969 when she arrived at 07:30 to photograph a gilt inscription before the street became too busy. She noted, on that September morning, that the gilt lettering on the building at the north end of Leather Lane was only properly visible in the direct morning light at that hour and in that season, and that any survey conducted at a different time of day or in different weather conditions would have produced a substantially different assessment of the specimen's condition and legibility. She photographed it 4 times with different exposures and submitted all 4 frames to the Bureau's archive. They are in Box 3, Folder 4, frames LN-001 through LN-004. The gilt inscription itself reads, or read in September 1969: LANE & SON, WHOLESALE and then a word that was not legible even in the optimal light, followed by EST. 1884. The illegible word was documented by Haynes as "6 or 7 characters, possibly PRINTERS, possibly BINDERS, possibly something else." It has not been subsequently identified. The building was demolished in 1977. The inscription no longer exists in any form except frames LN-001 through LN-004 in Box 3, Folder 4, of the Bureau's archive at UCL Special Collections. The 4 photographs are the only record. Haynes was not informed of the demolition until 1979, when she walked past the site during the Clerkenwell survey's third phase and found a new building where the old one had been. She noted this in Notebook 6 (the survey had by then extended beyond the original Clerkenwell boundary into adjacent streets) with a single line: Lane & Son gone. Photographs LN-001–004, Box 3, Folder 4. And then, on the next line, in smaller writing: I am glad I went at 07:30.
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• Visited March 1968
• Northwest corner, intact
• Paint layer visible
• Building vacant since 1961
• Access through rear
• No current occupant
• Photographed Tuesday
• Light conditions: overcast
• Second visit required
• Lettering partially obscured
• Owner uncontactable
• Listed but not protected
• Demolition notice posted
• Adjacent building
• Surface recently painted
• Original inscription
• Scaffolding prevents full
• Returned April 1968
• Condition unchanged
• Filed under stratigraphy
• Cross-referenced Box 3
• Correspondent notified
• Vienna entry comparable
• Berlin entry comparable
• Amsterdam: no equivalent
• Brussels: déraciné category
• Language: English only
• Material: painted render
• Technique: freehand brush
• Date: c. 1903, unconfirmed
• Condition grade: 3 of 5
• Category: inconsistent
• Recommended for resurvey
• Dorothy Haynes, surveyor
• Arthur Kempe, reviewed
• Entry No. CL-GB-1968-047
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Heart Yard
Leather Lane
Saffron Hill
Greville Street
Hat and Mitre
Bäckerstraße
Blutgasse
Domgasse
Griechengasse
Haarhof
Achterburgwal
Begijnhof
Bloedstraat
Eggertstraat
Gebed zonder End
Ackerstraße
Burgstraße
Dircksenstraße
Eiergasse
Froschgasse