Signage

A hand-painted sign on one of the Tin City shacks names the building and gives a brief warning, the lettering applied directly onto the corrugated iron front in white house paint. The sign is large enough to read from the dune approach: the shack's name in capital letters along the top, a smaller line beneath. The strokes are uneven, the spacing improvised. Years of weather have softened the paint down to a matte off-white against the grey of the iron. A second smaller sign nailed to the door frame adds another line of instruction or attribution. Sand has built up against the lower edge of the wall, taking the bottom of the sign with it.

Signage at Tin City does what signage does in any settlement that grew without planning: it does the work of street numbers, postcodes, and property registers, but in language the residents wrote themselves. Some of the shacks have a name lettered onto the front; others carry a painted number. Some carry warnings, some carry a welcome, some carry both. The naming and the lettering predate the formal licence system; they belong to the period when the shacks were technically illegal and the residents preferred their own informal addresses. The signs have stayed up. They are still the way the community refers to the buildings.