London: Where neon never dies

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On the far outskirts of Eastern London, a weathered sign in front of a ramshackle warehouse reads "God's Own Junkyard" in flickering neon letters.

Here Dick Bracy, known as 'Neon Man', more than 40 years ago began shaping - and collecting - neon signs in all forms and colors. Many of them for the sex shops and strip bars on the seedier side of London Soho.

He even got so famous that some of his signs appeared in movies like 'Eyes Wide Shut' and 'Blade Runner'.


Dick Bracy died in 2014. His son now runs the warehouse, which opens to the public on weekends, and when you walk inside you find yourself in an almost impenetrable jungle of humming tubes of light.

Old advertising signs share space with sculptures made from discarded neon pieces. Everything is slightly too much, and somehow that is exactly right.



Some of the signs are still working. Others have gone dark or are missing letters or are doing something in between that produces a color no one originally intended. The ones that have failed partially are, if anything, more interesting than the ones still functioning as designed.

There is a lot of neon in the world that exists to tell you to buy something or go somewhere or that a place is open. This neon has stopped doing any of that. It is just light now, humming to itself in a warehouse on the outskirts of East London, which turns out to be a perfectly reasonable thing to be.


That night, when I closed my eyes, I could still see the shapes and colours moving in the dark.

I have seen worse things to fall asleep to.



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