Sandwiched Out

Human billboards given their marching orders

‘The End is Nigh’ or so it seems for those sandwich board men on London’s busiest shopping streets. Traditionally used by doom mongers to warn the rest of us about the impending apocalypse, sandwich boards are shortly to meet their own untimely end. By mid August Westminster City Council plans to rid Oxford Street and Covent Garden of those unsightly signs – now more commonly neon coloured and informing shoppers of a bargain ‘Golf Sale’ just around the corner.

Placards on Oxford Street have been part of London’s street furniture for more than 100 years. Granted they make the street look ‘cluttered’ – the justification for slapping them with a £2,500 fine – but so do plenty of other unsightly additions. Chewing gum, cigarette butts, people gobbing and, well… people in general. The 100,000 shoppers you have to dodge past just to get from one end of the street to the other are very un-feng shui. I suppose it would be ridiculous to ban them.

There are plenty more irritations that living in London entails – the 'Sinner, Winner' guy at Oxford Circus and the free newspapers thrust into your hand at the busiest public transport hubs are two that immediately spring to mind. But is the pole bearer – or the human advertisement – really the worst of them? And so bad, in fact, they need to make up laws to ban them?

I’d argue that they perform a public information service. OK, so you might not want to know where the ‘Golf Sale’ is but plenty of people do (or presumably the shop keeper wouldn’t pay someone £4 an hour to stand there with a neon sign all day). Holding a board upright for eight hours a day while avoiding streams of stressed out shoppers hardly seems the most rewarding job but it’s still work for plenty of people – most newly arrived in the country – keeping them off the streets, metaphorically at least.

Once, freemen of the city were granted such freedoms as being permitted to herd their sheep across London Bridge. Merrily they could swagger around the City with their sword drawn and get uproariously drunk without fear of arrest. Now we’re not even allowed to stand in Covent Garden with a piece of cardboard strapped to our chests.

It strikes me that getting rid of the billboard-on-legs is just another case of the ‘bah humbug’ spirit that sees such innocent things as the sound of the ice cream van reduced to a mere four seconds. As if their seasonally affected wage wasn’t precarious enough, ice cream sellers are – like the sandwich boarders – having their means of making a living swiped from under them.

Just think of the untold damage these kind of petty laws are doing to the city’s entrepreneurial spirit. Next, we won’t be able to buy an umbrella from a street stall that springs up in the middle of a downpour. Or those sugar coated roasted chestnuts will suddenly disappear. Then where will we be? Cold, hungry and sodden, that’s where.

When you’re dodging out of the way of the cut-price theatre tickets sign, stop, look and appreciate it – most likely this’ll be the first time you’ve done this, if we’re honest, as well as the last. What you’re looking at may have little artistic merit, printed in an unremarkable font and could possibly be hand written in black marker pen. But just think, London will be a less colourful place without it. And now how are you going to know when the end is nigh?

Stars of Screen and Stage

London’s theatres had more people through their doors in 2007 than ever before and this - cue a Royal Box full of reality TV stars with jazz hands - helped along considerably by tickets sold off the back of ‘Grease is the Word’ (you guessed it, finding Danny and Sandy for ‘Grease’) and that other terrible one ‘Any Dream Will Do’ for Joseph-wannabes. Surely Shakespeare is doing theatrical somersaults in his grave, or at least a soliloquy or two, to prove that London’s theatre scene is indeed worthy of record-breaking praise but that all of London’s a stage, above and beyond 'The Sound of Music'.

Could I See You by the Lake, 3pm?

Do you remember getting excited at school when your teachers said you could have a lesson outside? St James’s Park recently hosted the grown-up version of this by setting up an al fresco office. It’s all part of a campaign to get Londoners to make the most of the capital’s outdoor spaces and we like the gimmicky ‘nature’ of it all but, in reality, no one ventures outside their stuffy offices to actually work – so they could have forgotten about the Wi-Fi and boardroom and just put out some more deckchairs.

Top Architects Choose Un-shaky Ground

Richard Rogers’ Terminal 5 at Heathrow hasn’t made the shortlist for this year’s Stirling Prize, awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects, but perhaps it’s for the best that this salt is not rubbed into that particular wound; labelling the sparkling-new, really rather large terminal architecturally attractive in some way could really send the Heathrow protestors over the edge. Much safer water is the nomination of the Royal Festival Hall for its iconic revamp, restoring it to its 1950s splendour and doing the South Bank proud in the process; it’s the only older building in the running.

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