Design critic and researcher, working across design practice and education. More info coming soon.
Design critic and researcher, working across design practice and education. More info coming soon.
Research
Design
Talk, Essay
Design
Talk, Essay
Talk given as part of the AMPS: Architecture, Media, and Politics, Society Local Cultures – Global Spaces conference.
Essay based on this research – titled Cedar Heights: exploring the contexts and graphic language(s) of suburban house signs in the UK – won the 2023 Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland (SNSBI) essay prize.
Cedar Heights hit the local news in 2007. It was the kind of house that might comfortably appear on Selling Sunset: listed at £1,000,000, 5 beds and 3 bathrooms sprawling over 5,000ft2, decorated throughout in an off-white opulence that is made of shiny marble and dramatically uplit. That it had been built in Mapperley Park—a suburb of Nottingham, a former mining city in the Midlands—was unusual, but not exactly newsworthy. Recently redeveloped by local builder-turned-developer Guy Phoenix, the real story was in his choice of particulars. Alongside the luxury interiors, two-storey chandelier, and wine store, the house was being sold with a full-size shark tank, complete with two Indonesian reef sharks.
When I was little, my dad and I would take walks around the bit of Nottingham where he still lives and I would ask him why the houses had names and who named them. A few years later, new neighbours moved in next-door and renamed that house that I had always known as number 8 ‘Mulberry Lodge.’ I would ask my mum if we could rename our house (no) and what we would call it (I don’t know because we’re not doing it) and whether we could get this sign with a robin that I’d seen at the garden centre (what do you not understand about the word no?)
This research scratches a long-term itch to try to understand the practice of house name signs, using walking as a method to retrace the walks my dad and I did. I use mapping and photography to understand how graphic design is used by non-designers to create identity – both around individual homes and the suburb as a whole. In the essay produced as a result of this research, I combine historical research and memoir to draw links between the historic and the contemporary practice, as developers reshape the local area.
Extracts from essay below; please contact me for full text.
Essay based on this research – titled Cedar Heights: exploring the contexts and graphic language(s) of suburban house signs in the UK – won the 2023 Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland (SNSBI) essay prize.
Cedar Heights hit the local news in 2007. It was the kind of house that might comfortably appear on Selling Sunset: listed at £1,000,000, 5 beds and 3 bathrooms sprawling over 5,000ft2, decorated throughout in an off-white opulence that is made of shiny marble and dramatically uplit. That it had been built in Mapperley Park—a suburb of Nottingham, a former mining city in the Midlands—was unusual, but not exactly newsworthy. Recently redeveloped by local builder-turned-developer Guy Phoenix, the real story was in his choice of particulars. Alongside the luxury interiors, two-storey chandelier, and wine store, the house was being sold with a full-size shark tank, complete with two Indonesian reef sharks.
When I was little, my dad and I would take walks around the bit of Nottingham where he still lives and I would ask him why the houses had names and who named them. A few years later, new neighbours moved in next-door and renamed that house that I had always known as number 8 ‘Mulberry Lodge.’ I would ask my mum if we could rename our house (no) and what we would call it (I don’t know because we’re not doing it) and whether we could get this sign with a robin that I’d seen at the garden centre (what do you not understand about the word no?)
This research scratches a long-term itch to try to understand the practice of house name signs, using walking as a method to retrace the walks my dad and I did. I use mapping and photography to understand how graphic design is used by non-designers to create identity – both around individual homes and the suburb as a whole. In the essay produced as a result of this research, I combine historical research and memoir to draw links between the historic and the contemporary practice, as developers reshape the local area.
Extracts from essay below; please contact me for full text.
They were always something I saw from a distance—street level, to be precise. On walks, I would try to figure out what each name and its corresponding sign told me about the house it represented, and get stuck on questions like: why is this semi-detached suburban home with no garden called Rose Cottage? Or: how do the new owners feel about Redlands set permanently into their cast iron front gate? And: now the house is carved into apartments, does the sign that reads Richmond Court that is topped with a tudor rose represent the building or the people? Does it change if they own their home or are tenants of someone else?
Because house signs are so mundane and overlooked, I never really found answers; understanding their history in terms of language was the closest I could get. In Sunnyside: A History of British House Names, sociolinguist Laura Wright charts the legacy of UK house names and their conventions. Although their roots are much earlier, the practice clusters (like a lot of British culture) around the Victorian era. As amenities like railways developed and improved, there was an exodus from London, as the wealthy moved from the capital to commutable provincial cities with cleaner air.[1] The houses and road infrastructure were often built at the same time, so house names were practical in the way they still are for rural addresses: it wasn’t until later that numbers made sequential sense of these developing suburbs. But these names were, and still are, pretty predictable. Surveying thousands of examples, Wright finds only five categories:[2] the transferred place name (the most common, e.g., Norfolk House anywhere but Norfolk); the nostalgically rural (Orchard Cottage); the commemorative (such as Magdala House, very often related to empire); names associated with nobility (e.g., Cavendish House, after the surname of the Dukes of Devonshire who own estates across the Midlands); and the latest fashion (see recently: Stark House, which became popular following Game of Thrones, and apparently at least fifty houses named Bag Endafter The Hobbit).[3] As a tradition, house names are persistent despite numbering systems being more useful in urban areas, and it’s not uncommon for people to choose to add a name to their house’s address if it doesn’t already have one. In 2018, the Royal Mail announced that more than 312,000 UK homes (out of approximately twenty-nine million residential addresses on their database) had names.[4] But this only counted those that were officially registered because it’s easy enough to do informally. Anyone can decide that, as well as the existing number, their house will now have a name, too. Overnight, 4 Lucknow Drive can become Cedar Heights, 4 Lucknow Drive; all it needs is a sign outside to say so.
[...]
For readers who aren’t familiar with Nottingham, a few things are important to know. Firstly: the city as a whole generally ranks poorly against criteria that define what a ‘nice’ place to live is. It is regularly measured in different ways as being the UK’s most economically deprived area (although the council argues that the large student population skews income-based statistics), and it has persistently low educational outcomes for school leavers. Because these things tend to go together, in the 1990s and early noughties, Nottingham also struggled with high rates of violent crime, which were sensationalised by the media into a blanket representation of place.
Despite this broader reputation, though, Mapperley Park is considered one of two ‘nice’ areas within the city limits. (The other, The Park, sits just behind Nottingham Castle.) Before it became a neighbourhood, it had been the parkland estate of Mapperley Hall, built during the eighteenth century. Owned by a family of bankers, the estate embodied a very British kind of class insecurity. According to Nottingham Civic Society, unlike similar areas across the country, ‘Mapperley Park lacked the presence of an aristocratic family and the associated flamboyance, arrogance and real wealth,’[5] and this absence of nobility meant the estate soon became financially unsustainable. It was sold off as lots throughout the mid- to late-nineteenth century, and new homes were built for the same exodus of the middle-class that Wright refers to in her research.
Much of the Edwardian estate that was created remains today. Many of the houses did have names, particularly those designed by notable architects or commissioned for important residents, but others did not. Compared to the rest of the city, the houses and plots of land are massive, and property prices reflect this. The roads are wide, and many are named after military campaigns fought to strengthen and expand the British Empire (Lucknow Drive, Magdala Road, Zulla Road). Most are lined with mature trees now protected under conservation status, so the area is leafy and green, and contrasts starkly with surrounding neighbourhoods that are either former slums turned into low-income housing, or are still tightly packed together with terraces built to house Victorian factory workers. My point is that Mapperley Park is not just any suburb. It is an inhabitable reminder of an age of industrial revolution, imperial dominance, and searing class divides. To live there means to live within an environment that was created as a result of having historic status and power and wealth—but not so much that it couldn’t be taken away.
The original house signs studded through the neighbourhood are part of that. So many of the houses now punctuate the streets with signs and names (as well as numbers), that you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Royal Mail’s estimated 1% of houses have all congregated together in a single spot. That they are prolific in this area isn’t a coincidence, nor that they exist irrespective, in most cases, of any utility. These signs act as signifiers of the neighbourhood’s cultural history, passed from one homeowner to the next. And the replicas that are designed online or in garden centres reinforce this idea of heritage, whether it is real or assumed. More homes are visually established as having some semblance of social and historical significance, which reaffirms the narrative. Mapperley Park continues to be ‘nice’ and, by extension, maintains (an artificial) distinction from the rest of the ‘not nice’ city.
[...]
[1] Wright, L. Sunnyside: A History of British House Names. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020. pgs. 45–63.
[2] Wright, L. Sunnyside: A History of British House Names. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020. p. 3.
[3] Thatcher, H. “Naming your home after a Game of Thrones character is now a thing – and it could even make you money,” Bristol Post, 7 April, 2018. Online. Available at: https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/property/naming-your-home-after-game-1425599
[4] Thatcher, H. “Naming your home after a Game of Thrones character is now a thing – and it could even make you money,” Bristol Post, 7 April, 2018. Online. Available at: https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/property/naming-your-home-after-game-1425599
[5] Brand, K. An Introduction to Mapperley Park. 2nd ed. Nottingham, England: Nottingham Civic Society, 1996. p1.