A.D. Harvey discusses a once-familiar feature of the inner city landscape. A generation ago one often saw advertisements, or the names of commercial enterprises, painted directly on to the brickwork of old buildings. With the destruction, or renovation, of the older sections of most British towns, these advertisements are now becoming increasingly rare. They seem to have all but disappeared from prosperous communities like Oxford, but a few surviving examples — and even one or two new ones — are still to be seen in the poorer and shabbier parts of some larger cities.