Sponsorship of public spaces is a troubling innovation
Can I interest you in a traffic island? That’s right: I said a traffic island.
Or, if you prefer, a roundabout.
It is, I know, an odd question and I can assure you that I am fully aware that a lot is going on in the world, what with Sunak’s desperate (and possibly effective) weaponisation of climate politics, Musk’s destructive impulses, and Russell’s toxic brand. There’s just too much I could talk about, perhaps, to justify spending the next few minutes warbling on about an otherwise forgettable patch of land that serves no purpose other than describing the inner radius of a turning circle.
Yet sometimes it’s instructive to look at the incidental details because of what they can say about the bigger issues. I think this particular traffic island makes a helpful point. This traffic island may well offer an insight into the direction of this entire country.
My viewpoint is from the outer suburbs of nowhere. St Helens, East of Nowhere, to be exact, wedged between the Four ‘W’s of Wigan, Warrington, Widnes, and West Lancashire. It’s a county that is Labour-controlled and has been hardest hit by government cuts to local services, with the government’s statistics playing it as the ninth worst area for employment deprivation. One statistic floating around suggests that “St. Helens has had its core spending power cut by £104 per person more when compared to the England average”, which is in keeping with a broader tightening on council funds, especially in places that do not traditionally whistle the current Tory Party anthem (assuming Sunak’s moved on from ‘Dancing Queen’). A study conducted in 2020 concluded that “Labour councils saw their spending power reduced by 34 per cent, while the average Conservative council suffered an equivalent decline of 24 per cent. Of the 50 councils which received the deepest budget cuts, 28 were Labour controlled in 2010, while just six were Conservative.”
Andy Burnham, the Manchester mayor, has been hammering on about this for some time, arguing with some justification, that the government is cynically using council cuts as a way to motivate voters to punish their locally elected officials given that cuts are seen as the fault of councils rather than central government. It means that councils have been increasingly looking for other ways to generate income. The Institute of Government has previously reported that “[the] share of neighbourhood services spending funded from sales, fees and charges rose from 15 per cent in 2009/10 to 23 per cent in 2019/20, meaning a greater proportion of the cost of services now falls on users”.
This takes the argument back to the point about traffic islands.
There’s a traffic island in the middle of this county that nobody talks about. Not that it matters since I suppose very few people reading this know the area but it’s where Newton Road becomes Broad Oak Road. It’s in a town called Parr which has a very poor reputation locally, often described as a sink estate, a crime hotspot, or more colloquially, as a “s**thole”. Across the road, you’d find The Horseshoe pub (now closed), a Coral book-keepers (still open), The Horseshoe Garage (“M.O.T., Catalyst, Diesel, Service, Free Air”), and a few homes. All told, it is a very average traffic island, in a very ordinary corner of the world.
Yet on an otherwise grim entry point into town, the island has always provided a pleasing aspect, being very round and very green with its four trees and a large central flower bed that blooms in the summer. One could even say it was an attractive traffic island in an area that has very little going for it.
And now the council are trying to flog it.
Yet they’re not alone in this. Sponsorship of public spaces has become one of those “innovations” happening across the country, where local councils are seeking alternative forms of income by any means possible. The squeeze from central government has left councils seeking to make good the shortfall elsewhere.
Well done, you could say, for being proactive. This is the kind of joined-up thinking we needed. What a wonderful expression of the Blitz Spirit. Spitfires. Bouncing Bombs. Don’t tell him your name, Pike…
Alternatively, you might reasonably look at this trend and wonder what price we are putting on our public spaces. In Manchester, new advertising hoardings have appeared in the streets, much to the disapproval of the public. Yet the boards are said to earn the local authority £2.4m a, as well as 2.8 per cent of the revenue from the ads.
Worst still: hoardings previously found only in city centres are making their way into the provinces and, with planning permissions apparently granted more often than they’re denied, they’re overwhelming our streets. Travel on some trains in the North and the advertising screens that were introduced to show passenger information are now also showing ads. These aren’t the old paper ads but bright screens, pumping out light, incessant in the hard sell.
Again, who cares enough to make the point that these innovations are hardly a step forward in how we treat our public spaces? Who in Westminster cares about these streets? Who cares that there are streets in small towns where huge, illuminated screens have been fixed onto the end wall of a row of terraced houses? Does anybody really care that large pink signs are now covering a traffic island because… Well, who is really going to care about a traffic island?
Even as I’m writing this, I’m aware that it might simply be me who gets irritated by the creep of marketing. Certainly, councils aren’t looking at a traffic island and thinking it worth saving. In nearby Prescot, Knowsley County Council (the second most deprived in the country according to government statistics) has already sold advertising space on one of the main routes into a town that had been transforming itself into a tourist destination, with the impressive new Shakespeare North Playhouse. Yet there on the outskirts of Prescot town centre is a traffic island now covered in signs that advertise “SpaceWorld”, which is “Liverpools [sic] number one childrens [sic] party venue 0151 493 1717”. Putting aside the woeful clipart design and the crimes to apostrophes, the signs detract from another attractive island planted with Birch trees.
No big deal, you might say, and perhaps in my own weaker moments I might agree. Who chooses to die on the hill that is Britain’s traffic islands?
Except maybe this time I might choose that fight. The current political climate isn’t merely about a tired Conservative Party limping through to the next general election. What we’re witnessing are challenges to a free-market orthodoxy that raise serious questions about the purpose of the market. Is the free market there – as many of us still believe – to liberate us from oldthink, push forward technology and innovations for the public good, and ultimately bring about a better standard of living by rewarding our brightest and best with fair rewards for their genius? Or is it there – as it often appears – simply to put a price on everything, asset strip a nation because there’s nothing that can’t be branded with a corporate logo?
Or perhaps, yes, it is a small price to pay to keep libraries open and to maintain the social safety net. But one must ask what comes next. What will be the rationalisation when we’re asked to pay to use footpaths, given that parts of our cities have already been sold to private entities whose security guards make it quite clear who is or is not welcome? What next? Hospital dressings that come sponsored by Pepsi? Traffic signs that alternate between hazard warnings and the great price for a bucket of chicken McNuggets? Trees sponsored by IKEA, pavements courtesy of Primark?
I suppose what I’m asking is: is there any part of this country that can’t be bought? And can we even claim to be a country if we’re essentially one giant advertising hoarding available to the highest bidder?
@DavidWaywell
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