London Signs and Inscriptions — Story, Setting & Ideas

Heraldry as Street Furniture

Norman treats carved coats of arms not merely as decorative but as functional signs. He explains that before the Great Fire, such shields were common on public buildings and the houses of the wealthy, serving 'as guides to the unlettered class, which then formed a vast majority of the population.' He cites Chaucer's testimony in the Scrope and Grosvenor dispute, where the poet recalls seeing a sign hung out with painted arms in Friday Street—an early glimpse of heraldry used as a commercial or familial identifier.

One of the most detailed examples is the Royal Arms from the Southwark gatehouse of old London Bridge. Norman traces its journey: taken down in 1760 when the bridge was widened, bought by a stonemason named Williams, and eventually set into a public-house in Newcomen Street. The arms originally bore the inscription 'g ii r,' later changed to 'g iii,' a small detail that Norman records without embellishment. Such objects, he shows, moved with the city's fabric, surviving not in museums but as working parts of new buildings.

A Shield from the Dissolution

At No. 22, Cloth Fair, Norman found an armorial shield of the Rich family, dating from the sixteenth or seventeenth century. He blazons it: 'gules, a chevron between three crosses botonnée or.' The house stands in a district that once had 'an air of picturesque antiquity,' near the Church of St. Bartholomew the Great. Norman connects the shield to Richard Rich, the Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII who acquired the site of St. Bartholomew's Priory in 1544 for £1,064 11s. 3d.

Rich's role in the trial of Sir Thomas More is noted without moral commentary; Norman simply records that he 'took so scandalous a part.' The shield, surmounted by a coronet, marks the property of a family whose founder was a City mercer. Norman's method here is typical: he moves from a physical relic to the documentary record—the original deed of grant—and then to the broader history of the fair and the parish church. The object becomes a hinge between topography and national events.

The Antiquary's Eye

Norman's training as an artist shapes his observations. He notes not only heraldic details but also the material condition of signs—whether they are carved in stone, painted, or 'misfitted with glass from the present chapel.' His illustrations, though not reproduced in this digital edition, are referenced as part of the original volume's apparatus. The text itself is dense with precise locations: 'south side of Newcomen Street, late King Street, Southwark'; 'Cloth Fair and Bartholomew Close'; 'Friday Street.'

This topographical specificity gives the book a practical use: a reader could, in theory, walk the streets and look for the remnants Norman describes. Yet he also acknowledges loss. Gray's Inn, he notes, was once 'on the outskirts of London, with an uninterrupted prospect of the neighbouring fields as far as Highgate and Hampstead'—a view long since built over. The tension between preservation and erasure runs through the work, though Norman rarely laments; he simply records what remains and what has gone.

Norman's book is best read as a companion for walking, not as a continuous narrative. The entries are self-contained, and the index of streets and subjects makes it easy to dip into. Readers interested in a particular parish or thoroughfare can search for its signs; those curious about heraldry will find a glossary of blazoning terms implied in the descriptions. The value lies in the accumulation of small facts—a shield moved from a bridge gate to a pub, a coronet on a house in Cloth Fair—that together map a lost layer of London's surface.

Sometimes I think of Philip Norman standing on a foggy corner, squinting at a faded heraldic beast above a shop door, and how those carved stories outlived the hands that made them. That same quiet ache for memory returns in Cathedrals of Spain — Reading Companion, where stone and shadow hold centuries of whispered prayers. It feels like wandering, not reading.