Signs of greatness

Ed Hall’s work is designed, quite deliberately, to stand out in a crowd. You might have seen his pieces at Venice Biennale or the Southbank Centre. But you are equally likely to have seen an original Ed Hall held up in the background as a media-friendly union leader, Unite’s Sharon Graham or former RMT boss Mick Lynch perhaps, is interviewed by journalists.

Hall makes banners, specifically the kind of fabric banner, with slogans and detailed pictures, carried by trade unions on marches. His work has been seen by thousands and thousands of people, but most of them could not name him as the maker. He makes around 20 banners of varying sizes each year, usually for political causes, but also for the performances and installations staged by the artist Jeremy Deller, with whom Hall has collaborated for over two decades.

Over the last two years, much of Ed Hall’s time has been dedicated to projects with Deller. The artist has been spearheading a series of events, roughly themed as The Triumph of Art, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of theNational Portrait Gallery, NG200. And Ed Hall’s work has hung over dancers dressed as standing stones in Dundee, been displayed alongside a giant inflatable Beryl Cook lady in Plymouth and fluttered over a collection of folkloric dream creatures in Llandudno. The culmination of the celebrations was a giant party in London’s Trafalgar Square. Ed Hall stitched everything from the massive event-defining pieces hung from Nelson’s Column to the signage for more practical areas, such as the space for lost children.

“I wondered what the people of Plymouth would think about a giant sign saying Hello Sailor,” says Hall. “But I went to the event and had one of the best times of my life. For Trafalgar Square, I initially wanted to do copies of some of the paintings in the gallery, but we went with slogans.” The banners were suspended from scaffolding around the column, rather than directly attached. “It’s Grade One listed, it’s a national monument and everyone was terrified we would hurt it in some way, plus they don’t want to give any encouragement to anyone who might want to do it in the future… the mayor’s office were not at all keen at first,” he says.

Of course, those future banner hangers so feared by the Greater London Council could well be protesters marching under another of Ed Hall’s creations. His work with Deller, for all the artist’s whimsical anarchy, represents the more establishment side of Hall’s output. On the whole, his banners are explicitly, unavoidably, political. Alongside his union work, he has also created pieces for Stop The War, The Anti-Nazi League, Unite Against Fascism and the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign amongst others.

“For 30 years, I was in an ordinary office, an architects’ office for Lambeth Council,” he says. “I studied architecture at Sheffield University in the 1960s. That was back when the steel works were still going full pelt and the sky would go orange at night in the winter.” After graduating, he worked for the councils in Liverpool and Greenwich before landing at Lambeth.

“I wanted to work there because it had a very well-known director, Edward Holland, who actually ended up living in William Morris’ Red House in Bexley. But I stayed with Lambeth for 30 years. It’s where I started to become hostile to Thatcherism and the Conservative Government. We were building 1000 council houses a year, and we were just one borough, and people could live in them for reasonable rent with a security of tenancy. But then it started to dawn on me that this was going to come to an end. There wouldn’t be any council house building. And the ones that were already there would be sold off. I had only been slightly political before that, but by the early 80s I was the Unison convenor for my section of 800 people.”

His involvement with Unison led directly to his entry into banner making. It wasn’t planned. As his union colleagues saw it, Ed Hall was someone from the architecture department and that meant he could draw. “I was virtually the only person in the frame who could make them,” he says. “So that’s how I got into it.”

Hall works mostly with cotton drill, a fabric that hits the right spot between being robust enough to withstand the demands of a protest march and light enough to manipulate. “It’s heavy shirt material,” says Hall. “It’s incredibly easy to work with. It doesn’t stretch, it doesn’t move, you can put it through a sewing machine. It hangs nicely. It’s perfect.”

The banners, says Hall, usually measure “around eight foot by six foot” (2.4 metres by 1.8 metres) and start as a square of plain cotton drill. “Then I’ll add the border swag, stitching it to the original square.” After that, he paints the centrepiece onto white cotton, before using applique techniques to create the picture and to add any lettering. He works in his garage, “using just a chain stitch and a Janome sewing machine which is brilliant: I bought it one Saturday afternoon and I was using it by five o’clock.” The biggest banners, such as the ones made to hang on Nelson’s Column for Deller’s Trafalgar Square spectacle, need to be sewn by hand as the machine can’t handle the volume of fabric.

To decide on slogans and centrepieces, Hall prefers to meet people in person. “It’s so often the person who says nothing for an hour who will speak up at the end and say the very thing at the end which is so crucial and interesting, and I find that doesn’t happen on Zoom,” he says. For practical reasons, he prefers to put slogans at the top of each banner “because the slogans are dead important, but if you’re out in the street you have to allow for the fact that people’s heads will be obscuring some of it.” A favourite slogans was for a sign carried by the staff of the London Underground: “one of the best I’ve ever come across, ‘underground, but not ground under’.” He’s also enjoyed creating pictures of ships for the staff of CalMac, the ferry operator in the west of Scotland; of the Tolpuddle Martyrs being deported to Australia in 1834 for the crime of forming and union; and of workplace scenes, such as teachers in classrooms.

The first known trade union banner was made for the Tin Plate Workers Society in 1821 to be used in a procession celebrating the coronation of George V. It’s currently held, along with other significant banners, at the People’s History Museum in Salford. The idea of marching under a non-military banner caught on and by 1837 a factory on London’s City Road belonging to George Tutill had cornered the market, creating an estimated 75% of trade union banners. Tutill’s factory was bombed during the Blitz and although the business survived, it changed shape. Nowadays it operates from Chesterfield as Flagmakers UK, producing flags for countries and counties, for ships and for Pride, but not for unions. Today, union organisers in need of a banner can contact Flying Colours Flagmakers in Yorkshire, the family-run Durham Bannermakers, or they can speak to Ed Hall.

It was Hall’s ability to turn a banner around quickly that inadvertently led him to Deller. In 1999, a nail bomb exploded in Brixton’s Electric Avenue, targeting the area’s Black community (in the following weeks, two further bombs exploded in London, aimed at the Asian community on Brick Lane and at the LGBTQA community in Old Compton Street). An organiser called Hall “at around nine o’clock at night saying they wanted something for lunchtime the following day. I stayed up all night to make it,” says Hall. Later that year, Hall hung the Brixton bomb banner up behind a Unison stall at the Lambeth County Fair, held in Brockwell Park. A man started chatting as Hall was setting up, staying for around an hour.

“Three months later he phoned me up saying he needed the Brixton banner for an exhibition,” says Hall. “I thought it would be going to Stockwell Village Hall or a church hall somewhere, so I said ‘tell me where you want it and I’ll bring it over’. And he said ‘don’t worry, the Tate have people who can come and pick it up’.” The banner hung as part of Jeremy Deller’s Intelligence exhibition, held in the Tate Modern in the year 2000.

Since then, the two have been regular collaborators. Ed Hall’s work is held by the British Council and has decorated the UK’s 2013 pavilion at the Venice Biennale as part of Deller’s English Magic show.

Deller, he says, is “very, very good. There’s a clarity to his instructions. You always know what is required. And his social skills are incredible. He’s been to my local pub. You could write a book about how easy it is for him to relate to people.”

For his part, Deller says of Hall: “It's always a joy to work with Ed. It's a 25 year creative relationship we have now. He always surprises me too with his capacity for innovation and problem solving when I approach him with a conundrum… he is truly a master craftsman and is at one with the messaging on his banners; it's an extension of who he is.”

“This work has changed my life,” says Hall. “I’ve met so many people: trade union leaders, Jarvis Cocker. There was one campaign that was going into churches across the UK and I had to get it signed off by the moderator of the Methodist Church, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster and the Archbishop of Canterbury and there they all were in a room together.”

“I want to say to people, just wait until you’re 60 because your life can really begin then. Mine did.”