Apostrophe Update

You may recall an earlier posting on this blog and the widespread media interest in England and to some extent in the United States about the use, or rather the impending official non-use, of possessive apostrophes on road and place nameplates in Birmingham and indeed other cities and towns.
This pedantic seeming issue rumbles on and so, not sparing myself in the relentless pursuit of wisdom and truth, I wondered lonely down to St. Paul’s Square, Birmingham, which had featured prominently in press comment.
The walk was well worth it, since it turns out that there are not two but three different renderings of this auspicious name on the signs. But at least there’s no doubting where you are, since in an attractive yet relatively modest sized square, there are no fewer than sixteen nameplates! Fortunately, the regrettable tinny modern ones (which are easily bent and which rapidly fade) are not to be found amongst them - at least not yet.
The first of the three ways of rendering the name is in what I will call (for want of deeper knowledge) the classical style with apostrophe and ‘Saint’ rendered as a capital S followed by a superscript lower case ‘t’ underlined and with two commas beneath - as shown in our first photograph. There were eight signs in this style.

There were three with apostrophes only (an example of which is shown in our second photograph) and five sans both apostrophes and punctuation for ‘Saint’.
Elsewhere in the city, such as in my own ward of Hall Green, we can also find the 'St.' rendering for saint and a longstanding absence of possessive apostrophes. While some may argue for this rich diversity, it is unclear which of the versions would get the nod in a tick-box examination!

As for me, my vote definitely goes to leaving it simple in the future!