"Street signs part of Scarborough’s character" - spotlight on town's heritage heroes

BBC local news recently reported that a mystery painter has been restoring heritage street signs in Newark.

Then last week the Jeremy Vine show on Radio Two also featured this story.

So it is right to spotlight the small team of volunteers who have been doing exactly the same thing in Scarborough over the last four summers.

The borough has more than 200 historic cast iron street signs.

Many of them really needed some tender-loving care!

And as far as I know, none have specific preservation orders on them; however some may have a level of protection being located within conservation areas.

The project is coordinated through the Scarborough Civic Society.

This is a charity dedicated to promoting civic pride in the beauty, history, and character of the town.

It identified that this was a task where volunteers could make a real difference.

So the society stepped in to support the resource-strapped local authority.

Everyone recognised that each restored sign lifts the area within which it is located, (and probably saves them from being carted off and replaced by plastic ones!)

So, for those that remain – and there must have been many more which have already been lost – the group selects those that need work and can be accessed safely.

Each is then visited up to nine times during the course of its restoration – a labour-intensive process that the council could not hope to complete without these volunteers.

The local authority provides the paint and materials for the work and uses specialist contractors for some of the less accessible and more treacherously located ones.

To date, well over 100 of these distinctive name plates, many of which date back to the Victorian era, have been cleaned, repainted and brought back to their former glory by the team.

Passers-by regularly stop to encourage the volunteers, commending them on their contribution to improving their local area.

The volunteers are motivated by pride in their town’s heritage — and by the wish to ensure that small but important details of local history are not lost.

The group have additionally been responsible for the restoring of the weather station on the harbour.

They have also renovated two decorative rowing boats “Valotta” and “Suzanne” – one on South Cliff, the other on the roundabout adjacent to Lunar Park.

“It’s enormously satisfying to see the signs looking as they did a century ago,” said one of the volunteers.

“It’s part of Scarborough’s character — and people do notice when they’ve been looked after.”

The group intends to continue the work in the coming years, and to branch out onto other projects.