Better Letters Magazine - London Calling: A Personal Perspective

I'm currently on holiday, so instead of the usual weekly post, I've written something a bit more personal for a meaningful anniversary. If you attended London Calling: Letterheads 2018, then I'd love to hear your memories in the comments section.

I'd also like to extend thanks again to everyone that makes BLAG possible, including our sponsors A.S. Handover, The Design Trust, Mike Meyer Sign Painter, and Ronan Paints.

And to welcome our new patron Romana Schrift, who joins Blackout Signs & Metalworks, Chicago Sign Systems, Colossal Media, Dragging the Line, John Moran, Right Way Signs, Sepp Leaf Products, and W&B Gold Leaf.

The adventures in Latin American sign painting continue next week.

Five years ago today, we opened the doors to London Calling: Letterheads 2018. But the story of this life-changing event started in my absence, at the 2017 meet in Oslo.

Charlotte from A.S. Handover and a few others there were having a drink, and decided that London should host the next international event. This led to a late-night text message asking if I would help to organise it.

It wasn't the first time I'd been volunteered onto a project, and I think this somehow gave me added impetus, knowing that others really want me to be involved.

Charlotte from A.S. Handover and yours truly at London Letterheads.

The next 12 months revolved around planning for the event itself, with a brief hiatus in the autumn to welcome our second child into the world.

I estimated that I spent the full-time equivalent of 3–4 months working on the meet across the year, in addition to keeping the wheels on the Better Letters bus with workshops, sign painting commissions, film productions, and the occasional Ghostsigns walk.

The weeks leading up to the event were busy, but in that positive, high-energy, exciting way. I was waking up each day with what I call 'hyper-brain', where my synapses are firing with ideas and things to do.

This culminated in the two days setting up on-site, in what was a completely 'dry hire', ie an empty building where we had to bring everything in ourselves. This was compounded by it being four storeys high, with no lift. (Hat tip to the muscle that got it all up, and down. You know who you are!)

Some of the muscle getting ready for the next lift at London Letterheads.

The four days of the meet itself passed me by in a blur, but my enduring memory is of countless faces, familiar and otherwise, smiling, giving thumbs up, and patting me on the back.

London Calling Information Booklet PDF (4MB) of the booklet giving details of workshops, building layout, and more from London Calling. Information-Booklet.pdf • 4 MB

There were tears, of joy and despair, and I don't think I truly relaxed until the morning of the day we took everything down. At that point, I felt that if anything went wrong, it wouldn't really matter.

A year later, in August 2019, I was in the middle of relocating to Spain, and I have sometimes thought of the meet as my farewell to the city I was born and bred in. It was certainly a culmination of sorts, hosting a Letterheads after being inducted into the movement by Mike Meyer in 2014.

Wear the fox hat? / Coming to America, with Mike Meyer en route to my first Letterheads meet.

Six months after the move to Spain, Covid struck, and the world changed. Some people say it's over, but it endures, and so do its cumulative impacts. The following is from the book, Ghost Signs: A London Story, and touches on this theme.

Afterword: Survival

In many respects this book is a story of survival, both in the literal sense of ghost signs having survived, but also in their role as a metaphor for survival itself. New York City’s Frank Jump – a kindred spirit – brought this to the fore when, connecting the signs’ existence beyond their ‘expiry dates’ with his own improbable survival against HIV. He prefers to call them ‘fading ads’, to remove the association with death and more accurately convey the lives they live and the stories they continue to tell.

Thirty-five years after Frank’s diagnosis, and twenty-four after he started documenting fading ads, the world is once again suffering the ravages of a viral pandemic. Its impact will be felt for years to come but, in this book, I found a means of facilitating my own survival, at least in the short term. As Covid-19 caused much of my work to dry up, I was at a very low ebb, so in November 2020 I decided to write a list of projects that had, until then, been sidelined. This book was one of them. Researching and writing with the necessary vigour has in many ways saved me. It has reaffirmed my profound interest in the topic, and challenged me to put my thoughts into print. I also learned a huge amount.

From these signs we can all take heart that survival is possible, both individually and as a species. They implore us to learn from the past, while their advertising messages show a reassuring confidence in a future that is worth investing in.

— Sam Roberts, Summer 2021

In some ways that book was like a love letter to my former home, reconnecting me with the familiar as I tried to navigate life in a new country and a 'new normal'. Since writing it, I have continued to experience ups and downs, and grappled with a range of profound questions about myself, my place in the world, and broader existential matters.

Writing this email today has reminded me of the achievement that was London Calling: Letterheads 2018, and the ghost signs book—it is so easy to forget these things when your mind conspires against you.

It has also given me pause to reflect on my most recent endeavours with BLAG, which I also hope to one day look back on as a pivotal and positive moment in my life and work.

I'll leave it at that, save to say thank you for reading, and for being part of these adventures in sign painting.

All good things, Sam