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Focus Summer 2001 - Menu - Index - Previous - Next

 

 

Letters to the Editor


Competition time?

Shirley Way
Croydon


Dear Editor,

I am minded to invite the Society's Executive Committee to run a competition. The objective would be to point out the absurdity of the situation on many of our roads in the context of street furniture. Just how much clutter do we have to put up with on ordinary roads, let alone those in the town centre?

The competition would be by way of an invitation to members - and others - to submit photographs of locations in Croydon. Photographers would have to be warned to take care not to endanger lives (specifically, their own) in taking these photographs, despite the temptataion to go just that little bit further in the interests of the shot. Winning is not all ...

And the winner would be the one submitting the photograph with the most street posts or poles in it. Lamp-posts, bus stops, street signs, pedestrian signs, bollards, cycle racks, all would count; pillar boxes would not, though free-standing posts with mail-delivery pouch boxes would. Posts on private land would be excluded.

Former Vice-Chairman Beverley Sale has already shown us a slide with something approaching a dozen - and that was at the end of his road, if memory serves ... I feel sure that more enterprising people could get a total of at least double that; we may have to limit the count to those within, say, thirty or fifty yards of the camera, otherwise some smart alec would take an aerial shot of the town and say "beat that!".

I said I was minded to seek the launch of this competition; but since there were no takers for sponsoring, in the context of the Mini-Gardens Competition, the Wooden Weed Award for the worst surroundings/frontage of a building in the town centre, I am reluctant to set in train an idea which will come to naught. Anyway, the west side of Dingwall Road (southern half) would win hands down, so no contest there ... and probably no contest for posts if someone stood outside St George's House and snapped from there. Or would there be ...?

Andy Bebington