I thought I’d covered all there was to say on our famous Bile Beans ad or ‘ghost sign’ on Lord Mayor’s Walk, but recently received this fab photo, apparently dating from the 1960s. It’s certainly earlier than 1977/8, when Andy took a photo of the uncovered ad, and Baz Ward painted it. The famous sign – in its original form – is hidden behind a hoarding with a poster advertising cigarettes.

Just beneath the sign is a narrow passageway, with a door, and to the right of that buildings have obviously been demolished – we can see the imprint left of their floors and walls.

Hidden from view

In the comments on another page, Stephen wondered why he didn’t remember the Bile Beans advert though he walked along this street many times in the 1940s.

The Bile Beans sign is now prominent because next to it is a grassed open space. But for many years that wall it’s on would have been virtually invisible, one side of a narrow alleyway, obscured by buildings.

Lord Mayor’s Walk, probably 1930s, featuring a sign for ‘Stanley’s Winter Nips’. (c) City of York Council

In the city archives are two images apparently from the 1930s, showing the since demolished buildings on Lord Mayor’s Walk. One displays a very fine example of these old painted signs.

I’ve seen a discussion recently on Facebook claiming that this is ‘the Bile Beans wall’. I don’t think that’s right. The phone box perhaps makes it look like it’s the same wall – a phone box was located beneath the Bile Beans sign for many years. But by my reckoning, these buildings were further along, near the corner of Monkgate. To the right, off camera, is the church of St Maurice (a Victorian rebuilding of the earlier church), also since demolished. Its distinctive railings (shown clearly on another image from the archives, from the Monkgate side) are just visible on the photo above if you enlarge the image.

The 1852 plan shows houses crammed into this end of Lord Mayor’s Walk. Groves Lane has only three properties after it now, before the Bile Beans wall. In 1852, from Groves Lane to the corner of Lord Mayor’s Walk and Monkgate there were about eighteen properties facing the street. The land behind had been infilled with cramped-looking terraced housing, in St Maurice’s Court, St Maurice’s Place and Wheatley’s Place.

The photo at the top of this page shows the remnants of the narrow entrance to St Maurice’s Court and the marks on the rather ragged walls to the right are the remnants of St Maurice’s Place.

A 1926 aerial view on ‘Britain from Above’ has captured some of these forgotten houses.

(c) www.britainfromabove.org.uk. Detail from image epw016073, 1926

Aerial view (1926) capturing Lord Mayor’s Walk.

Maps and plans available online at old-maps.co.uk suggest that these buildings were standing in 1938 but were demolished at some point before 1958.

And the point is … ?

I’m not an expert on these adverts/ghost signs, but I assume the Bile Beans ad would only have been painted after the demolition of these buildings, which were certainly still standing in the 1930s, and possibly weren’t demolished until after the war.

I can’t see the logic of painting an advertising sign in a place so narrow and overshadowed barely anyone would see it. So it seems more likely that the original Bile Beans sign was painted in the 1940s or later. And didn’t have very long to convince people of the merits of Bile Beans before being covered by a cigarette ad on a hoarding.

Google Street View showing the Bile Beans ad before 2012 repainting

Then uncovered in the 1970s, painted by Baz Ward (on canvas/paper), repainted on the wall itself in the 1980s (first restoration), repainted again in 2012. Here captured by Google Street View in 2012, before that second ‘restoration’.

Comments and thoughts welcome. And of course feel free to praise my painstaking research.

Elsewhere on the web

‘From the 1950s onwards the economics of production swung in favour of mass printed posters and billboards.’ www.ghostsigns.co.uk/about. The photo above appears to capture that swing.

Poster, 1949: Bile Beans, keep you healthy, slim and attractive

Elsewhere on this site

All posts tagged ‘Bile Beans‘

Notes & acknowledgements

Thanks to Jim for the photo at the top of the page. And thanks also to my ‘research assistant’ for not looking too bored when presented with loads of old maps and photos.

This page was updated on 29 March 2014 with images from the city archives and Britain from Above, as I now have permission to use them, but didn’t when the page was originally compiled.

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Spot the difference: 1970s/2012

Here’s Baz Ward’s painting of the scene, painted in the late 1970s, followed by a photo taken by me this week.

A common factor in the two scenes: the wonky chimney pot on the left. Another, the unattractive green box on the left at the bottom of the wall.

In 2012, bigger shrubbery, fewer chimneys, brighter ‘ghost sign’. Altogether a less charming scene, and one missing the cheery highlight of the red phone box. As mentioned earlier, these are slowly disappearing.

The comma question

On Twitter, there’s been some concern over the ‘missing’ comma, following the recent repainting.

Here’s a photo taken in recent years. (Photo copied without permission from a page on blipfoto.com which has taken my text without permission.) Looks like a comma, after the word ‘healthy’. But as @ghostsigns said on Twitter: ‘I always suspected that the comma got added after the restoration, its appearance just isn’t consistent with the rest.’

So did someone pop along one night with a paintbrush, to add in the comma? Was it the same person who adds missing commas to information signs in the library? Was it someone wanting to reinstate something of the original, long-lost version?

Did this have a comma?

Baz Ward’s painting, from around 1978, doesn’t have a comma. Andy’s 1977 photo has something that looks like a comma, but could just be a mark on the brickwork. A bit of it here, enlarged – make your own mind up.

Anyway, it was all covered already by the 1986 restoration.

Thin red line

Just visible on the (digitally enhanced) image above is another long-lost detail, which I wouldn’t have noticed had it not been mentioned by Baz Ward in a recent email:

I think that’s everything on the Beans scene. Except to say that it’s affectionately known by some as ‘Billy Beans’.

Comments welcome below, or on any of the other pages about it.

Beans beans beans

It’s quite astonishing how many photos exist online of this wall, all taken in the last eight years or so. Bile Beans photos, via Google Images

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Many people will recognise this painting by Baz Ward, scanned from a print I bought in the 1980s.

The Bile Beans sign is often referred to now as ‘iconic’. If it is, I guess that’s largely to do with the fact that an artist painted it 30 years ago – that is, created a representation of it on paper/canvas. The painting was exhibited in the art gallery in 1982, and later sold as a print. As the Evening Press put it, on 1 May 1982: ‘a well-known patent medicine, painted on a York gable-end, has been immortalised by an enterprising artist’.

Baz Ward depicted the authentic ad, and Andy Tuckwell captured it on camera. They and others who were around and paid attention back then saw the proper ‘ghost sign’, fully revealed when hoardings that had obscured it were taken down.

The ad on the wall was repainted in the 1980s, so the version we’ve come to know and love isn’t that ‘authentic’.

It had been heading back to a rather more weathered look, in recent years:

But now looks like this:

A lot of people are pleased about the recent repainting. Others are not. On Twitter, Daniel Benneworth-Gray asked ‘What next, a fresh coat of magnolia on the city walls?’. Replies agreed that the Bile Beans repaint was ‘Like an old friend having bad plastic surgery’ (Nick Statham) and that it had been ‘robbed of all its charm’ (thisnorthernboy), plus other comments too rude to quote.

The first repainting

Like everything in York, we’ve been here before. Back in the 80s the debate took place on the pages of the Evening Press. The Pressman’s Diary column in the Evening Press of 16 Sept 1986 reported the artist’s surprise that the ad had been repainted. ‘For it was his painting of the Bile Beans scene, exhibited with other work in the City Art Gallery in 1982, that re-established the “darkened and dirty” advert as a famous landmark in the minds of local people.’

Baz Ward said then: ‘It’s a pre-war advertisement … Bile Beans are mercifully no longer on sale, and that should have been taken into consideration by anybody wishing to restore it.’

Chris Gallagher and Ian Anderson of the York Arts Forum, who restored the ad, responded via the same column on 22 September, that ‘It was steadily becoming more invisible with paint peeling off and flaking away, and we set about the restoration at the behest of Fison’s who make bile beans … We kept faithful to the weathered condition of the paint and did not use the original ghastly ochre colour.’ They compared it to finding a valuable painting in the attic, wanting to have it restored: ‘So why not treat a rare piece of Thirties’ advertising in the same way and return it to its former glories?’

Then, as now, most people seem to have been pleased with the newly-painted sign. Then, as now, a smaller number felt it had been ruined.

Those of us who don’t like the new look ‘2012′ version of the Bile Beans ad will appreciate how Baz Ward felt after the repainting of the original and genuine version:

Raises many questions, doesn’t it, regarding the ‘preservation’ of our history. Many people feel they’ve just witnessed the crass destruction of an original ‘ghost sign’. We haven’t – it happened a few decades back. Other people feel something has been preserved, that it’s an important part of our heritage.

I guess it is part of our heritage, this 1980s repainted version. But like all things in York, it has layers beneath.

Personally I’m just grateful to the artists and photographers who see beauty in the ordinary, and at the right time capture the soul of things, before it disappears.

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With thanks to Baz Ward.

Elsewhere on the web

ghostsigns.co.uk includes an account by a member of the York Arts Forum involved in the 1986 restoration

and an overview on the subject of restoration: Fresh lick of paint (includes reference to the Bile Beans ad)
More of Baz Ward’s work – Staithes Gallery website
The 2012 repainting was organised by York Civic Trust and paid for by donations from members of the public. York’s iconic Bile Beans sign gets facelift (The Press)

Also on this site

There are several other pages on the Bile Beans ad.

The post Painting an ‘iconic’ ad: Bile Beans, Baz Ward appeared first on York Stories.

[Photo: Andy Tuckwell. Reproduced with permission.]

This ad is a well-known local landmark, and has been mentioned previously on this site. Back in 1977 when this photo was taken it was in a more natural and somewhat faded state, rudely interrupted by an ad for AGA cookers.

Recently there’s been a call to repaint it (again).

There’s some debate about whether repainting these signs is always appropriate. They’re often called ‘ghost signs’, hinting at the fact that they’re advertising products or services no longer available, or perhaps organisations or businesses gone from those premises (like the sign for Olivers, on Micklegate). They are perhaps more evocative of times past, lost products, when they’re faded and understated? The carefully restored signs on the old Stubbs ironmongers on Fossgate look a bit odd repainted so neat and bright, particularly now the building houses a fish restaurant instead.

Of course the famous Bile Beans sign has already been restored once anyway, and perhaps if it hadn’t been repainted in the 1980s it wouldn’t be visible to us now. Maybe I prefer it faded, but I guess we’ll carry on repainting it every few decades, and continue to amuse visitors with this proud proclamation of a strange-sounding long-forgotten product.

See also

An earlier page on this site: Painted wall ads, from 2007 (page title chosen when I wasn’t familiar with the term ‘ghost signs’).

Information on the 1980s restoration – www.ghostsigns.co.uk

A 1930s paper bag advertising bile beans – www.wellcomecollection.org

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May 2007

Update: April 2014 … since this page was compiled I’ve added many more pages on what I later came to know as ‘ghost signs’. See all pages tagged ghost signs for much more on the Bile Beans ad, and others.

This painted advert, on the wall of Foss Bridge House, has been here for years. The paint had peeled and faded, but it’s now strikingly new and fresh, shouting out to passers-by the usefulness of Stubbs the Ironmonger.

If your attention is attracted by this, and you realise you’re in need of tools, or perhaps sliding door gear, you’re going to be disappointed, as on turning the corner you’ll find that there’s now a restaurant there instead.

The conversion of the building has maintained the exterior – so accurately that the painted wall ads have been restored as well.

The most well-known old ad painted on a brick wall is this one – and I thank Chris, who used to live in York, who reminded me about it. I’ve got a print of a painting by Baz Ward featuring this local landmark. This ad too has been repainted and preserved, though not as recently. It tells us that “Nightly BILE BEANS Keep You HEALTHY BRIGHT EYED & SLIM”. I think it’s the name of the product that makes it such a memorable advert.

It is obviously from a different time, when you could make such claims about health-related products. If it was painted now it would have to say something like “Bile Beans, as part of a healthy lifestyle, may reduce your cholesterol and decrease your risk of heart disease. It may also help with weight loss as part of a calorie controlled diet” – which doesn’t grab the attention quite so effectively, and would need a much bigger wall.

Bile beans was a very popular proprietary medicine during the twentieth century in the UK. The product consisted of a variety of purgatives, cholagogues and carminatives formulated into a pill and advertised for ‘inner health’. The product was devised in Australia in 1899, survived a damning judgement in a law court in Scotland in 1905, became a brand leader in the 1930s and was on sale until the mid-1980s.

– Ingenta connect: Bile Beans

Update: The Bile Beans add was repainted again in 2012. See Call to repaint the Bile Beans ad which includes a photo of this ‘ghost sign’ in the late 1970s, and Painting an iconic ad, which includes Baz Ward’s 1980s painting of the scene.

Off Heslington Road, one that hasn’t been repainted and restored, and will never be, I imagine. It advertises “JOHN SMITH’S MAGNET ALES”. I don’t know when this ad dates from, but it conjures up images of the old days when no one had thought of measuring alcohol in “units”, only in pints, and when adults weren’t being constantly nagged at about their bad habits by patronising government ministers.

This one, on Navigation Road, says “Lances”. Again it’s a faded one, not repainted. I don’t know anything about Lances, what they did, what they might still be doing. Like the Magnet ad above, it’s perhaps all the better for not being repainted, fading away, naturally weathered.

More information/links

When I compiled this page I wasn’t familiar with the term ‘ghost signs’, but these ads are commonly known as such. There’s a whole website about them: www.ghostsigns.co.uk, with some wonderful examples and interesting background information.

www.thepotteries.org – wall advertisements may also be of interest.

– – – – –

Page compiled in 2007. Last updated: 15 November 2013

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