The World's Breakfast

Today's ghost sign discovery is a lesson in how significant the right light can be in revealing them.

This isn't a part of town that I visit often, but I know I've looked at and photographed this building from this angle before without spotting "The World's Breakfast." I may have been distracted by the H. Hey & Co sign, which in some ways qualifies as a ghost sign itself, but I think that it was the bright afternoon sun that drew the ghostlier sign into my consciousness. You might see it more easily in large.

A bit of detective work led me to the discovery that "The World's Breakfast" was a slogan that Quaker Oats started using at the end of the nineteenth century. Quaker were one of the pioneers of bold painted advertising on walls, but the only other examples of survivals that I've been able to find online are from the US, for example this one in Boston.

Most intriguing is that you can just make out the top of the "Quaker" bit of the original sign underneath, which suggests that the lower part of the building, despite having some age itself, was a later extension to the site (Brick Lane Mills, built in the 1890s).

Perhaps some advertising historians out there can suggest a date for the sign and slogan?

Earlier: Snow at Dawn. All gone now.