People Thought These Were Just Old Wood Scraps – They Were Wrong
June 9, 2025
source: Reddit
The Mystery of Wooden Shape Matching on London Houses
If you’ve ever walked the historical streets of London and gazed up at the rij of aging terrace house, you might have seen something rather curious — pairs of short wooden sticks, nailed vertically between the windows, which appear to have no modern day use. These wooden sticks on houses are intriguing mysteries of the past. Some hang loose, neglected for years; others have become fused to the brickwork. What are they? Why do they remain?
“Ever wonder what those little fixtures in the bank still were for? Wooden sticks on houses used to serve a rather more functional purpose for landlords in an era when renting out a home was a much less cloudy, a more transparent, process.
A Mount for “To Let” Signs
Landlords used to advertise through a direct method long before online listings and co-ordinated estate agent boards. They put in pairs of wooden battens between the windows of their homes, a practical example of wooden sticks on houses. When it was time to rent, they had only to hang a painted “To Let” signboard between the battens.
This setup worked well. The battens prevented the signs from shifting, and from causing damage to the brick walls. It would be simple for landlords and their agents to attach and detach the boards with something like zip ties, without tools would be required and without making any permanent alterations to the façade of their property. Once installed, the wooden sticks often remained for years, ready to hold the next sign whenever one was necessary.
A Sign of the Times – Literally
In the 1950s/60s post-war London rented accommodation thrived in every single neighbourhood in the city. One street after another was lined with rows of “To Let” signs swinging from these battens. It was such a familiar sight — part of the city’s everyday visual language, highlighting the significance of wooden sticks on houses.
Between properties, agents reused the same signs, developed a new typeface, or repainted them. They made these wooden mounts useful devices that had a lot to do with the way people found housing. In many respects, the battens became as necessary as doorbells or mail slots.
Fading into the Brickwork
These sticks are not good for anything anymore. Nowadays, letting agents make use of plastic boards, adhesive signs or very occasional purely digital avenues to advertise. But many battens have not, remaining silently in the background on the walls.
When a renovation is done, some homeowners take them down, and others leave them in place. And those battens, so disregarded by most, they have a story, too. Millions of people look at them every year, and hundreds of tourists race to their newest sightings.
Echoes of nostalgia in the everyday
These old wood mounts aren’t grand or decorative, but they mean something. They offer echoes of a time when people could tackle the mundane unprepared — no apps, QR codes or online directories. Finding a room to rent could be as simple as observing a sign hung between two lengths of wood.
So the next time you are strolling around an old district of London and you see, nailed between the windows of a house, two sticks, remember to throw them a nod of thanks. What you are looking at is just a few square feet of that history of housing in the city, but a representative chunk, nonetheless — an emblem of the quiet good old days when wooden sticks on houses were filled with stories of practical utility.