Littering London's Walls

Sometimes living in London means being subjected to heavy bombardment. And I am not talking about The Blitz or miscellaneous terrorist attacks. I am talking about billboards.

We're all pretty used to the alluring images of scantily clad models peering at us from a bus-stop and luring us into purchasing clothes or products that will never make us look like them (yet, we still delude ourselves and spend spend spend):


We're also pretty accustomed to the periodical floods of political posters during electoral campaigns, which clutter our beautiful city for a month or so, but at least are taken down as rapidly as they were put up (can't say the same about politicians, unfortunately):


What we are not used to is seeing the city covered in sinister messages supposedly warning us about security threats and giving us "friendly" advice on how to behave, should we see anything vaguely suspicious:


For a country that prides itself on respecting individual liberties, we have certainly come a long way. There are over 10,000 CCTV cameras in London (making no difference whatsoever on the authorities' capacity to solve or prevent crimes). Given their wide diffusion, it is legitimate to suggest that most will end up in the background of pictures being taken by perfectly decent citizens or tourists as they snap away at monuments, or at their friends and families.

Is the MET really serious when it asks us to report each and everyone of these individuals? If we did it, we would surely bring the whole police apparatus to a grinding halt.

Some people have the spirit to point out the absurdity of this campaign, but I wonder whether their voices are truly heard outside a few geeky sites I happen to visit regularly:


We seem to live in such a plastified era that usually intelligent people are convinced they can truly affect social behaviour by shouting poignant messages from a billboard. Personally, this campaign has left me with the uneasy feeling that the police force has absolutely no idea how to go about stopping terrorists, and is now resorting to turning London into East Berlin, where children were encouraged to spy on their parents and report any suspicious anti-Communist activity. We all know how well all that went.

I am left wondering, in this era of ever-increasing marketing bombardments, whether anything we see on a London wall has ANY effect whatsoever on our behaviour. Am I really going to stop bullying the kid next door because I see this?


The message is worthy, but fighting homophobia - just like terrorism - will take much more than a few posters. And fearmongering has never been a wise way to deal with threats. Long are the days, alas, when the authorities encouraged Londoners - who were dying under German bombs - with this kind of message:


Or this one, dramatic and reassuring at the same time, certainly one of my favourites:


I just wish citizens, politicians, policemen, terrorists and everyone else that walks around my city every day, just stopped for a moment and thought: wouldn't it be nice if - for one week, even one day - London's walls looked like this?