Dinah Okoro
Master bender · owner
Apprenticed to Ted in 1996, bought the shop in 2011. Bends everything over 10mm and all of the script. Known for the double-back return, where the two runs have to stay parallel while the glass is still moving.
The shop
Fifty-two years, one bench, three people and a great deal of glass
Crossfire has been in Unit 6 since 1974. It has never been anything other than a neon shop, and there has never been more than four people in it at once.
1974 to now
Ted put a ribbon burner where the forge had been
Ted Marchetti took the lease on Unit 6 in the spring of 1974, when the arch still had a wheelwright's pit in the floor. He filled the pit, put a bench along the north wall where the light was worst — you bend better in the dark, because you can see the glass go — and lit his first tube that October.
For thirty years it was pubs, chip shops, a bingo hall in Catford and one municipal swimming baths whose sign is still up. Dinah Okoro came in as his apprentice in 1996 on a six-week trial, stayed, and bought the shop from him in 2011. Ted still comes in on Thursdays and still says the ribbon burner is set too high.
What changed was not the work but who wants it. Half of what leaves the shop now goes to film sets, galleries and private collections. The other half is still a landlord who wants OPEN in the window and wants it to last twenty years, which it will.
On the sheet
How a sign gets made, in five steps and about four weeks
-
Step 01
The drawing
Whatever you have — a photo, a font name, a sketch on a beer mat. Priya redraws it full size in red pencil on gridded paper. That sheet is the sign; everything after it is following the line.
-
Step 02
The bend
Tube is heated over the ribbon and the crossfires, section by section, and laid straight onto the pattern to check. It goes soft at around 700°C and you have about four seconds before it stiffens again.
-
Step 03
Bombarding
Electrodes are sealed on, the length is pumped down to vacuum and run hot to drive off everything inside it, then dosed with neon or argon and a bead of mercury. This is the part nobody sees and the part that decides how long it lasts.
-
Step 04
Ageing and wiring
Twenty-four hours lit on the rack. Colour settles, weak seals show themselves. Then the tray, the standoffs, the transformer and the test certificate.
-
Step 05
The wall
Cal and Dinah fit it. Fixings suit the building, not the catalogue — we have done listed brick, glass shopfronts and one narrowboat.
-
Afterwards
Twenty years
A properly made unit runs 40,000 hours or more. When a length does eventually go, it is one length — bring it back and we rebend it.
Who is here
Three of us, and Ted on Thursdays
We do not photograph the benders — the shop is dark and everyone is wearing safety glasses. Each of them is shown by the bend they are known for instead.
Cal Wrenn
Electrics · installation
Came from stage rigging in 2014 and has done every installation since. Sizes the transformers, does the testing, and will explain the difference between a lit tube and a dead lead at any length you like.
Priya Raval
Drawing · survey
Draws every pattern and does every survey. The reason a job takes a week before any glass is heated, and the reason the glass only gets heated once.
“You can tell a machine-made sign from across the road. The bends are all the same and none of them are quite right.”
Ted Marchetti, who founded the shop in 1974 and still turns up on Thursdays
Come and see it being done
The shop is open to visitors on Thursday afternoons. Ring first — if the bombarder is running we cannot hear the door.