Cal Revely-Calder

Neon signs have a curious power

They're nostalgic, evocative and always alluring

  • From Spectator Life
God's Own Junkyard in Walthamstow [Getty]

In a corner of St Pancras station, Tracey Emin is always turned on. ‘I want my time with you’, a neon sculpture by the artist, has been on show here since 2018. It was part of the ‘annual’ Terrace Wires public arts programme, in which a new work is commissioned every year to hang from the station’s roof; but the pandemic distended time, and Emin’s words have stayed put. Though a new commission was unveiled yesterday, an installation by Shezad Dawood, that hangs on different wires, elsewhere in the terminus.

Assembled from bright pink tubes, and shaped like Emin’s looping script, ‘I want my time with you’ looms over the grand Victorian concourse that sends the Eurostar to the continent. Think of it both as a lover’s declaration and the lament of the voters who wanted their country to Remain. That’s apt: neon was christened ‘new gas’ by the British scientists who discovered it in 1898, but today it trades on nostalgic joys. 

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Tracey Emin’s ‘I want my time with you’ in St Pancras [Getty]

It can make you dream of the Jazz Age – the first neon sign appeared in Paris in 1912, and the form reached the States in 1923 – or the vulgar fun of the 1960s, when Vegas was on the up. (Plenty of English middle-class kitchens display their delusions of being a ‘Dive Bar’ or ‘Motel’.) Yet neon signs have faded away, because they cost too much to maintain compared with backlit plastic or LEDs. They also remind decent people of sex shops and adult cinemas.

But across the UK, many have become local symbols, the datedness of their style just giving them personality. One of London’s best-known neon signs was ‘Lucozade aids recovery’, high above Brentford beside the M4 overpass. Put up in 1954, it survived its original building’s demolition, then a tweak to its phrasing (becoming ‘Lucozade replaces lost energy’) – in the 1980s, ‘Aids’ ceased to be an innocent verb – before it was finally supplanted, in 2016, by a lifeless digital screen.

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The Lucozade sign by the M4 in Brentford before it was removed in 2016 [Alamy]

In Islington, by contrast, the ‘Hornsey Road Baths & Laundry’ sign has outlived the baths themselves, which closed in 1991: its diving woman and hot red lettering are invitations to vanished fun.

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Islington’s ‘Hornsey Road Baths & Laundry’ sign has outlived the baths themselves [Alamy]

London’s neon epicentre, however, is Soho, the domain of queer life.

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