File:"Bishop and sons" Ghost sign. Pimlico, London.jpg

I spotted this sign while looking for images around London's Victoria Railway station. The removal firm Bishop & Sons was established in 1854 by Joseph James Bishop. The company's original depository was located in Hugh Street, Pimlico (it may have been the building where the ghost sign was painted). As business grew, other depositories were built nearby in Ebury Street and Belgrave Road as well as in Clapham. By the mid-1930s, the surface space of its West End storage facilities exceeded 60,000 square feet. Besides the removing and warehousing of furniture, the company's activities also covered the buying and selling of furniture and their shipments abroad. Among its customers were wealthy families from London with summer residences in the south of England.

The Belgrave Road depository, built in the inter-war years, overlooked the eastern section of Victoria Station and housed the company's main offices. By 1930s standards it was a modern building of fireproof reinforced concrete and tiled floors. Although the Belgrave Road façade was rather narrow it extended into Hugh Street (this was a new one, not the original depository), where the storage space was found. Pantechnicons and later trucks could be driven into the ground floor, where their loads were brought by several lifts to the upper floors. It was on this building that in the early 1930s the company installed a large electric sign visible from the Kent coast trains arriving at and leaving Victoria Station. With such a modern advert, the earlier sign painted two hundred metres further south would have suddenly looked a bit dull.