So what do these say? An easy one to start with:
and a harder one:
Off Commercial Street, and behind Balls Pond Road, Hackney.
For the first correct entry received, a signed copy of my forthcoming Ghost Letters and Syntagmatic Gaps: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Absence.
I can’t get the easy one. Duke of something? The hard one looks like “coffee house”.
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No, not Coffee House. The first one’s not hard if you’re familiar with pub names.
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Duke of Wellington?
Is the second “Forrest House”?
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Yes, Duke of Wellington, of course! But not Forrest House. A clue: it’s an English place name.
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I had time on my hands so I used Google earth to take a virtual walk around Balls Pond Road, Burder Close, Kingsland Road. And I saw “A little of What you Fancy”, “The Fox” (orange chocolate cake), “Newmont Travel” (specialists in reduced rate travel to the carribean), and Montegomery House. Only the last works, but it won’t fit on the sign.
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Well that’s funny. I checked on Google, and no, it’s not there. But on Google street view you can see it as it was a few years back, with more (but not all) letters – and it’s not what I thought it was! Oh dear. It’s not a place name after all, but a name more appropriate to its function as a home for a telecomms company.
For what it’s worth I thought it was Somerset House. But I now see that it isn’t.
It’s on Tottenham Road, just south of Balls Pond Road.
In light of this unfortunate error, I feel I have no alternative but to withdraw the prize offer for this competition.
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Duke of Wellington is on the corner of Brune Street and Toynbee Street – the gable end with the missing letters looks up Brune Street
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Yep, spot on.
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Comtech House?
(BTW, “I thought it was Somerset House.”
I tried to count the emptied spaces of the missing letters. It would seem that there would be no room for the three letters following the “e”.)
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Here’s the street view – http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=Tottenham+Road,+Hackney&hl=en&ll=51.550538,-0.077612&spn=0,0.01929&sll=53.800651,-4.064941&sspn=20.771831,39.506836&z=16&layer=c&cbll=51.545218,-0.077603&panoid=qfYNuJ5MKy9jPnOcNF8grA&cbp=12,35.04,,1,0
Connect House, I think. God knows where I got Somerset House from.
[Still, ironically enough, it does nicely demonstrate the dangers of contamination by subconscious praxis in a paradigmatic analysis, which is one of the main thrusts of my work.]
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I’m not so sure, Mick. The paradoxical distantiation from the lexical legibility of the narrative of lacunae would seem to suggest rather a subconscious aversion to retroactive reconstructionism.
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A subconscious aversion to retroactive reconstructionism? Well, I’ve never been accused of that before.
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in Brum I’ve noticed several “semen arcades”, resulting from missing – presumably removed – letters.
In a layby between my home village and Worcester, there is a notice to lorry drivers saying “No facilities for tankers” which has been constructively and creatively modified several times, no matter how often the T is rewritten by the powers that be.
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Addendum to above: alternations are presumably made by the opponents of onanism.
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Mick Hartley 
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