When I sat down to write this article it was going to be about blue plaques in Brighton, and especially those in ‘The Whistler’ cachement area but as I researched names and places I came across the story of a Brighton resident, Dave Askwith who, together with Alex Normanton, conceived the idea for the book, ‘Signs of Life’, published in 2005, while commuting from Brighton to London on the 7:34. “It was mundane – my fault for sitting in the same seat, (facing the bin and the emergency fire extinguisher), staring at the same signs every day,” said Askwith, who works, like Normanton, in advertising. “It’s not so much the sign but what it’s associated with; how signs mislead. ‘Quick ticket machines’ are anything but; they’re not quick, they’re a nightmare. Then you see the signs saying ‘good service’ beside Underground lines and everyone knows that it’s woeful at best. Trains that are ‘fast to Brighton’ are nothing of the sort. Signs are funny because they say one thing when we, reading them, know the reality is totally different.”

Askwith started putting signs up – the first aimed to shed light on a mysterious lever on a slam-door train. Others were overtly political, such as the “Polling Station” poster on a bin, which was intended to express Askwith’s anger at the political system. Continue reading Signs of Life →