Whitehill Pool, Dennistoun

Here's the sign of Whitehill Pool, in Dennistoun, in the East End of Glasgow. Too my eternal shame, despite this being my local swimming pool for over ten years, I've still never set toe into the water here.

The typeface of the sign is Aldo Novarese's Eurostyle Extended. If the choice of face doesn't date the sign sufficiently, the very tight letterspacing shows that this sign was designed around the early seventies (or at least by a designer whose technique was polished then).

The perfect square dot's on the "i"s have been reset recently: when I first saw this sign, they both sat at a rakish angle, giving those letters the aspect of a couple of sailors on shore leave in a foreign port.

Me, I'd have avoided painting those little tabs that fix the letters to the wall white: brown, or red; even black would have been less obtrusive. White as they are, they give the sign the flavour of the cut-out clothes and doll on the back page of Bunty (or was it Mandy? Some DC Thomson girl's comic, anyway) in those same early seventies of which I speak.

The play of lights across the sign and wall are reflections of today's bright sunlight from the bay windows of the tenement flats opposite, in Onslow Drive.

Some local artist, bursting with creative, personal, and geographical pride, and with a lemon yellow spray can, has augmented the wall with a charmingly creative tag.