H.Law Bakery and Memory Makers, Exmouth, Devon

I found this building purely by chance in 2009. One of my friends had business in Exmouth and she suggested that I come over for the trip, so I had a wander around the town until the time to meet up again and saw several ghost signs, including the ones on this building.

At the time I wasn't able to discover anything about it at all. The painted ghost signs declare it to be Law's Bakery on the front and one side wall, but these are old and the building could very well have changed hands several times since then. On the side wall advert it's called an 'hygienic bakery', which doesn't really sound all that palatable to me! ;)

Fortunately, I recently came across an article about it on the blog 'Painted Signs and Mosaics' by Sébastien Ardouin, so I'm able to add some information. Before the use of bread making machinery, the state of bread in Britain had become quite dire - gritty, tasteless and not very clean - therefore it's possible that bakeries who used the much cleaner machine method were keen to advertise their bakeries as hygenic. There's more info on his article about this, which can be seen on the link below.

http://paintedsignsandmosaics.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/h-law-baker-and-memory-makers-exmouth.html

The ghost advert on the side has the delightful addition of 'Memory Makers' below the bakery sign, in a rather lovely script with lots of curlicues. My imagination conjures up hand-made chocolates in lace-edged boxes! 

However, the information on Sébastien Ardouin's blog reveals that it was a photographic studio owned by one Julian Francis Bates, whose mention in magazines dates his professional years as running throughout the early 1980s to the mid 1990s, a much later time than the bakery.

The other side and rear of the building looks a lot more derelict.

It's interesting to see how the various building materials have been revealed where the plaster has come away from the walls; the top half built with brick upon a stone rubble ground floor. I'm wondering if the original building was little more than a one-storey cottage, built up to provide living quarters above and a new frontage for the shop...but please don't quote me on that, as it's just guesswork on my part.

I haven't been back to Exmouth since and I've wondered whether it was demolished. However, Sébastien Ardouin took photos of the building in 2012, so hopefully it's still there. I hope so as it's a delightful piece of history.