Signwriting-on-Sea: The Rich Craft Heritage of Hastings, East Sussex

By Better Letters • 14 Nov 2024

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A bar with bottles of beer on shelves in a window display, and hand-painted lettering on the fascia basking in sunlight.

The Jolly Fisherman, lettered by Rob Finn, one of Hastings' active signwriters.

In some parts of the world, painted signs have persisted as go-to for high street businesses. When it's widely employed in this way, sign painting lends a particular character to a location, and in the case of Hastings, East Sussex, this comes laced with history. Charlie Nelson has been peeling away the layers to learn more about the town's sign painters, past and present.

Signwriting-on-Sea: The Rich Craft Heritage of Hastings

By Charlie Nelson

Robert Tressell, as author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, is arguably the UK’s most famous sign painter. At the beginning of the twentieth century, he lived and worked in Hastings, East Sussex, where, 120 years later, the seaside town’s embrace of all things hand-painted persists. This rich heritage is due to local sign painters that refused to put down their brushes in the face of technological change, and who continue to produce quality work for a tight-knit community that values it.

Robert Tressell and his 1905 mural for St. Andrew's Church, restored in 1982.

Hastings’ Sign Painting Past

In addition to his own work, Tressell was also employed for a time by the Adams & Jarrett firm. Like many companies from that era, they were a one-stop-shop for much more than just sign painting, as their one-time premises and a large gable-end mural sign testify.

Black and white photo of a large gable-end wall adorned with painted lettering and pictorials advertising the many services of the Adams & Jarrett firm. These include building, decorating, signwriting, undertaking, plumbing, sanitary engineering, and more.

This gable end mural sign was painted by Robert Tressell for Adams & Jarrett.

Black and white photo of the Adams & Jarrett shop. It's set across the width of two buildings, and above their fascia sign are panels of decorative lettering between first floor windows. These advertise their various services across a variety of decorative painting and building trades.

Adams & Jarrett's capabilities extended well beyond sign painting.

While those Adams & Jarrett pieces can no longer be seen, there is plenty of vintage work to feast your eyes on in Hastings. The majority of this survives as ghost signs in the Old Town, and many are noteworthy for their quality of execution and relatively good condition.

Ghost signs in Hastings Old Town at the site of the old Swan Hotel, and for the A.W. Foster piano and organ merchants.

The Curious Case of T. Noakes

One of the town’s better-known ghost signs is for T. Noakes. Just like Adams & Jarrett, Noakes offered plumbing and glazing services in addition to his sign painting and gilding work.

Fading painted sign on a stucco wall with decorative lettering that reads: "T. Noakes, Plumber, Painter, & Glazier, Writing, Graining, and Gilding, Estimates Given."

The ghost of T. Noakes on Croft Road, Hastings. Photo: Mark Novotny / History of Advertising Trust Ghostsigns Archive.

The sign likely dates from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, so I was surprised to spot a T. Noakes signature on a sign painted in 2009. I began to wonder if there was perhaps a Noakes’ dynasty of Hastings sign painters...

The sign is set on panel in the shape of a cow hide with a coat of arms at the top and period lettering that reads: "S. Roberts, Boot & Shoe Makers to their Royal Highneses The Duke & Prince George of Cumberland, The Duches of Kent & Princess Victoria, 16 1/2 George St Hastings. T. Noakes, 2009."

This sign on George Street, Hastings, was painted in 2009, and is a replica of a c.1830s trade card for the S. Roberts boot and shoe makers that once traded from the address.

Enter Rob Finn

Making enquiries around town, one name kept cropping up with people I spoke to: Rob Finn. While his work is ever-present in Hastings these days, you won’t find Finn anywhere online. Where you will find him is up a ladder in the Old Town, which is easily done in a small place like Hastings. It didn’t take me long to track him down, and eventually we met so that he could share his knowledge of all things Noakes.

It turns out that T. Noakes on the Croft Road ghost sign and T. Noakes that painted the S. Roberts sign are different people, and unrelated. Noakes is a fairly common name in East Sussex, and it's just a coincidence that these two share an initial and a trade. While Rob doesn’t know a lot about the older Noakes, he was very close to his more contemporary namesake.

Passing It On

Terry Noakes (1945–2014) was a sign painter from the old school, with painting and decorating also among his skillsets. He got started in the trade with the firm A.H. Dearing, specialists in lettering commercial vehicles, and worked in and around Hastings for his entire career.

View from below a man painting white lettering onto a red background.

Terry Noakes painting a lorry in Clarendon-style letters with a layout that just consists of two horizontal lines and a few white chinagraph marks. The brush, selected to match the weight of the thin strokes, is doing all the work as it coats in one hit with some lead-heavy white.

For many years, Terry shared a workspace with the graphic designer and sign painter Peter Thompsett. While they were technically competitors, Peter was more into graphic and pictorial work, while Terry was very much an old school letterman. Terry regularly worked late, churning through a hectic workload, and it was these evening shifts that provided Rob with the opportunity to learn the craft of sign painting.

Fresh out of school in the 1980s, Rob had a day job at Wadley Keith Signs in nearby Eastbourne—cutting vinyl, silkscreening, and producing all types of fabricated signs—but he spent as much time as he could at Terry’s shop, observing and helping out where he could. He watched and learned how to paint letter shapes, eventually reaching a point where he could go it alone and carry on the lineage of accomplished Hastings sign painters.

Array of five business cards photographed on a marble surface.

These business cards from Rob Finn’s collection convey the character of those that he worked with and, in turn, those that they worked with. The ‘Signwriters’ card with the cartoon character advertised the shared studio of Terry Noakes and Peter Thompsett.

On the Shoulders of Giants

Rob is aware of the legacy that he continues, and is utterly fascinated by it. He has spent many hours in Hastings Library looking through old trade directories and learning as much as he can about those that came before him. He has also compiled photo albums of work by many different local sign painters, which inform his own output through the study of letters, layouts and colours. This, and his years of dedication to the craft, have given him a confidence and a tightness of line achieved with just a yardstick, stabilo, and fine sable brush.

In spite of all this, Rob remains humble, and somewhat baffled that there would be a contemporary audience for this kind of story. For him, it’s just his work, and tough work at that, with all the stresses and strains of being up and down a ladder, and dodging the rain and cold. His modesty masks Rob's own lasting entry into the sign painting history of this seaside town, which is now inspiring the next generation of local painters, myself and Jay Holland (@greateropacity) included.

Written by Charlie Nelson / @fundi_signs