Ghost Signs of Collingwood
Forgotten brands still painted on the brickwork — the city talking to itself in faded letters.
Look up on Smith Street and the walls are still advertising things you can no longer buy. Hoadley's Violet Crumble. Sunlight Soap. Pelaco shirts. Robur Tea. Whelan the Wrecker — the demolition firm that pulled half of old Melbourne down and somehow left its own name behind. These are ghost signs: hand-painted advertisements from a century ago that the rain hasn't quite finished with. A walk through the surviving ones tells you what Collingwood used to sell, what it used to read, and how a city quietly keeps the receipts of every business that ever traded on it.
This is not an industrial history walk. It is a walk about typography, memory, and the strange feeling of standing on an ordinary street and realising it has been advertising at you, in beautiful serif lettering, for longer than anyone alive can remember.
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