How refreshing!

We really feel we’ve arrived now - finally we’ve got the shop sign up.

We love the building we are in. We love that it has a name and a number - so many buildings in a town centre are just the name of the shop, and no-one ever knows what number they are, let alone that they have a name. And also, so often the shop front on the ground floor and the building above it are divorced from one another, and we love the fact that our building is all of one piece.

We aren’t quite clear why it is Church Street Studios, but we love that it is! This really applies to the upper floors, of course, and we are the ground floor, but it makes it a much more distinguished building, we’re sure you agree! Amanda, one of our lovely volunteers, has dug out these particulars of sale from the early 1960s - a different eera in some ways, and yet somehow so familiar.

And with all that character, we felt it was right to step outside of our ‘corporate identity’ and do something different - or rather, from the perspective of the buidling - do something the same. We didn’t have the budget (or the time for fundraising) to go the whole hog and have raised individual letters, but we’ve gone with another carefully made sign from Katrin Gaska of the Chic Sign Studio, carefully mimicing the Church Street Studio sign above.

This is the second sign we’ve had from Kat, as she also painted the sign for us when we were in the Chiltern Shopping Centre. She is a local sign writer and calligrapher based here in High Wycombe. Great to be surrounded by such talent, and to be able to showcase her work.

We hope we won’t be needing a third sign from Kat any time soon, as we have a 5 year lease and (for the first time in our existence) we are not having to think about moving.

And, in case you are wondering, we didn’t ask Kat to paint straight onto the Fascia (the name given to the bit of the shop front where the sign goes) because we’d have had have used scaffolding which would have been quite an inconvenience for the pedestrians on this busy bus route, let alone the expense, and the need for a license etc etc.

The building is owned by the Council, and they had a record of the colour of the green. Now, if you want to be picky you might observe that our green and the buidlings are not quite the same - different materials, different ages - matching paint is not an easy thing to do - but its so much better than something contrasting.

We love the sign. We’re not abandoning our fresh orange logo or colour, just showing that we can adapt to the building we are in. Just imagine our town centre if every shop took the trouble to adapt to the shop they are in, rather than simply apply their standard, but that is a whole different story!

Thanks, too, to Sam for getting it fixed for us, without charge! Very generous!