Four Coats of Weather: The Painted Cat, the Signwriter's Ladder and a Town That Still Looks Up

There's a particular kind of November evening in Burslem when the pavements go slick and the shop lights start doing their puddles-on-the-floor trick, and the only thing worth looking at is a sign swinging above a doorway. Ours does that. Has done for a very long time.

Most nights, nobody looks at it. That's the honest truth. You walk in, you look at the door, the door is the thing that matters. The sign is the thing you see on the way past, and on the way past is precisely where a good sign is supposed to do its work.

But if you stop — properly stop, hands in pockets, breath going up in steam — you'll notice the leopard isn't one painting. She's four.

What the ladder tells you

Wilf Bailey has painted our cat more times than he can be bothered to add up, and he's the sort of man who adds things up. He's a signwriter out of Tunstall, the kind who still mixes his own colours and still owns a mahl stick with a story attached to it, and he reckons the current board is the fourth incarnation he's had a hand in.

"It's never the cat that changes," he told me, standing under the thing in the wet with a mug of tea he'd brought with him for no reason anybody could work out. "It's the weather and it's the fashion. Weather takes the gold off first. Gold always goes first. Then the reds go chalky. Then somebody decides the lettering wants to be a bit more modern and it isn't, and then I'm back up the ladder putting it how it was."

That's the rhythm of it. Not revolution — correction. Every fifteen or twenty years the cat gets taken back to what she was, and the going-back is the interesting bit.

Gold leaf, black edges and the trouble with being looked at

A proper hanging sign is a two-sided promise. On one side the cat looks left, on the other she looks right, and there's a technical reason for that (both faces want to read properly as you approach) and a spiritual reason too, which is that a pub should be watching its own street in both directions.

Wilf's rule is that you always paint the eyes last. Not for luck, he insists, and then admits it's a bit for luck.

"You do the ground, you do the body, you do the lettering, you do the gold, and then you leave it a day and you do the eyes. If you do the eyes too early you've got a picture of a cat staring at you while you finish, and that puts you off. Never paint a face that's watching you paint the rest of it."

I asked whether that's a widely held belief among signwriters. He said it's a widely held belief among anybody who's ever had to finish a job under supervision.

Standing under the board on a dark November evening is a funny sort of education, because you can see the layers plain as day if the light's coming from the right angle. There's a faint ridge where the old edge of the gold sat, a millimetre proud of where the new one does. There's a patch near the lower haunch where the red has gone slightly warmer, because that's the coat that was mixed by hand rather than ordered in. Small things. Nobody would notice. Except that everybody notices, they just don't know they're noticing.

Why a leopard, and why here

The name itself is older than any of us and has done the usual pub-name tour of the town's memory. The story that gets told is that the cat came in with the local landowning families and their heraldry — the sort of creature you put on a shield when you want to say something about courage and don't much mind whether it's a leopard, a lion or a bloke in a helmet. Some of it is documented, some of it is pub-told, and the pub-told version is invariably better.

What's certain is that a leopard on a board in Burslem stopped being a piece of heraldry a very long time ago and became a piece of local furniture — the sort of thing you describe a route by. "Past the Leopard, then left." There'll be a hundred people in this town who couldn't tell you the pub's phone number but could draw that cat from memory, badly, and with real affection.

Public art, hanging at head height

Here's the argument I'd make, and I'd make it with a pint in my hand because that's the correct posture for an argument.

We pay a great deal of attention in this country to art that has been given a plaque, and almost none to art that has been given a bracket. And yet the sign over a pub door is the most-seen, most-repeated, most-democratic piece of painting in any town. It doesn't ask for a ticket. It doesn't have opening hours. It does its work in the rain, at eleven at night, to an audience of people going home from work who are too tired to give it any credit at all.

A good one says: somebody cared enough about this corner to commission a small, expensive, slightly old-fashioned thing and then keep it in good order. That's not decoration. That's continuity with a ladder.

So on the next filthy November night, before you push the door, step back a few paces and have a proper look. Check where the gold's gone chalky. Check which way the cat's looking. Then come in and get warm — she'll still be out there doing her shift.

And if you see a man with a mahl stick and a mug of tea, standing in the wet and squinting upwards, say hello. He'll tell you what's wrong with it, at length, and he'll be right about all of it.