The streets speak: urban political broadcasts

Stoke Newington Road, just north of Shacklewell Lane.



High Road, near Seven Sisters underground station.

Original government poster available here, and below:



The ad agency's brief: "Redefining petty fiddlers as full-on benefit thieves." Or, 'scapegoating people trying to get by on an unlivable income as criminals.' Jobseeker's Allowance is all of £51.85 a week for someone my age. I'm counting the pennies living in this city on a graduate starting salary; damn right I'd be getting cash-in-hand work under the table if I had fifty quid a week for food/bills/my entire life. Wouldn't you?

East London charity Community Links says:

"From our experience giving advice to over 12,000 people each year in Newham, we know that almost all those defrauding the system do so out of need, not greed. They need a few hours work to tide them over – to pay a surprise bill, or replace the microwave. Declaring it to the Jobcentre would mean any earnings are deducted from benefits, leaving them with no extra money. Punishing these people is unfair, but also destructive – they need stepping stones to a job and higher income, not sanctions which push them further into poverty."

2008/09 figures from the DWP show total benefits expenditure of £136bn. Out of this, fraud amounted to 0.8% (£1.1bn) - which we might contextualise by noting that £0.8bn of total spend was made up of overpayments due to official error. In addition, £0.5bn was underpaid due to official error, so the magnitude of government mistakes (£1.3bn of Getting It Wrong) is in fact rather more than dole scroungers scrounged.

Just so we can understand the scapegoating of the bottom 10% of society in proper perspective, you understand. Advertising won't have any impact on serious fraudsters. It'll do a lovely job of deterring those in legitimate need from claiming money they have a right to, though, and a campaign focused on "hunting down" benefits "thieves" uses such lovely aggressive language to exacerbate middle class prejudices and promote social inequality. Mmmm...

Dead railways: London's underground mail shuttle

Mail trolleys have been speeding for 60 years
along a 23 mile long underground tube system.
The increased usage of the internet made the
most successful railway it_ be_n d_i___' _nd__r

On the pavement outside Central St Martin's art school, Theobalds Road, Holborn.

Mailrail.co.uk and Subterranea Britannica provide context for this pavement tickertape: it's referring to London's Post Office Railway, an automated train system that took post from Paddington sorting office to Whitechapel delivery office. The 23 miles the sticker mentions is apparently the total length of track on the six mile route; the 60 years to which it refers is obscure, as the railway operated from 1929 to 2003.

Then again, informative historical facts are not really why I collect urban interventions like these.

This is orc country...

The white hand of Saruman?

Or just a kid and a visceral statement, I Am Here. This Is My City. The ur-point of the graffiti tag, legible in any culture - fuck your matte black building site hoardings, here is the human element...

Requiem

Leonard Street, EC2A.

This has also caught the eye of the Chaotic Semiotic, who posts the full text. The poem (if it wants to be seen as that?) is certainly worth a read, resonating like something somehow familiar, a "lesser-known Wilfred Owen". Yet after several reads I still can't untangle the mix of sentiment sympathetic to the military (if not to war) with Temple Ov Thee Psychick Youth spelling. Writing about finding a lost book, I called the city opaque. Here it goes further into the occult.

So Human: goodbye to the Waterloo footway poem

Posted 7 October 2009:



Update, 7 November 2009:

Apparently this poem - Eurydice by Sue Warren - is now gone, painted over by Network Rail last weekend. Read more at Time Out: they're calling it 'cultural vandalism'. As the artist says,

"This work was commissioned by the BFI and The Arts Council and, therefore, was installed using public money. Railtrack have defaced something they did not pay for without any consultation either with the BFI, the architect Bryan Avery or with me."

"...damp city streets, their sodium glare
of rush hour headlights pitted with pearls of rain;
for my eyes still reflect the half-remembered moon..."

The urban jungle

Top of Brick Lane // side street off Kingsland Road.
September 2009

Two sides of sex in the city

Two excellent reasons to use my 'sex and the city' tag, and a demonstration of two of its extremes.



Who can say what kind of love is inscribed on this tree - an 'I love you' for someone particular; an injunction to all of us, the public, to love more; an expression of a wider love for the city or indeed for trees? I love how scrawled it is, and that it's not a pristine stencil - whatever kind of love it feels passionate. And then a wingéd phallus, erect and exhibitionist yet just silly enough with its little feathers that I find it cheeky rather than aggressively cocky. A comment perhaps on the wilful independence of sexual desire, lust flying free of any conscious intent.



Behind both, though, the same kind of libidinal urban energy - a statement, "I DESIRE". A Deleuzian desire, not one built out of Lacanian lack but rather a force, a drive.

Hoxton stencillist wisdom, Jan 2009

DON'T WRITE ON WALLS, WRITE EVERYWHERE - now there's a message for a cities blogger. The first part of that instruction is to be ignored, of course, if your glyph has the graphic purity of the tag below.

Stoke Newington, 28 Sept 08

Watch your skin peel indeed - love this haunting intervention in the abandoned church in Stoke Newington's cemetery. The medium is fantastic: moss grown upon felt, we reckoned. Cheers to Caspar for the walk that morning and showing me around his neighbourhood - hope Berlin's treating you well these days!

29 Aug 2008, 15:18

Also, I like this 'fuck you' response to the anti-flyering paint: more than one way to appropriate an urban surface for one's own purposes!

Decorating the City

I love my shitty motorola camera-phone - sometimes it chooses to focus on things, sometimes it chooses not to. We shall pretend, please, that this random variation makes my photos on this blog more artistic, and that it's nothing to do with being too slothful to find/carry/use a proper camera!


By Old Street tube, 4 Aug 08. The tag -ACK (the first letter was damaged) made out of the genius new medium of plastic cups stuffed into wire net fencing.


20 Apr 08, probably East London. Stencilism by now outweighs spray-can graffiti, or at least the good stuff - wonder who to blame for that?! It still looks great, but yet is something of the soft & easy option, I think...


29 Jan 08 - pure Dada.