London's Nameless Streets
Evening Standard 06-08-1996
To the amazement of foreign tourists and the irritation of Londoners, a large proportion of London's street name signs are unreadable or non-existent, as Christopher Long has discovered...
London boroughs which fail to provide clear street name signs are infuriating Londoners, hampering the emergency services, and endangering and baffling visitors to the Capital, it emerged this week.
Across large swathes of London, hundreds and probably thousands of street name signs are either obscure, covered in graffiti, hidden behind undergrowth or quite simply
non-existent.
"It's not so bad for us cab-drivers because we have to learn them all by heart," says
33 year-old black cab driver Garry Slattery. "But it's really bad in some boroughs
and it can cause us real problems when other drivers don't know where they are or
end up crawling the streets looking for signs which don't exist."
"Some boroughs like Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea aren't too bad and Hackney and the Park Royal area in Brent are getting a lot better, but there are others,
like parts of Islington and Camden, which are appalling."
London's emergency services find the problem worrying too so much so that the Fire Service has had to produce printed guides and organise seminars to try and encourage council officials take the matter seriously and to carry out their obligations, which many of them signally still fail to do.
"Most of our crews know their patch pretty well so they can usually find their way
around," a Fire Service spokeswoman says. "But the problem gets serious when people
see a fire, find a phone to report it to us but then haven't been able to see a sign
identifying the street concerned. That can be serious and we may have to spend a lot of
time trying to identify the location using landmarks."
London's Ambulance Service reports similar findings. They say that the increasing
use of mobile phones makes the problem worse.
"People often see an incident and use their mobile to contact us. But this can present
problems if they don't know the area, can't see a street name and we can't locate
where the phone's being used from."
The problem is also adding to traffic congestion and makes driving far more hazardous
for other road users, according to cab driver Garry Slattery:
"Normally people get out a map and plan their journey if they don't know the route.
But if there are no street signs, that's pointless. So you get people driving with
one hand, holding a map in the other, trying to work out which street is which."
"Then, if there is a street name, but it's only visible to traffic coming in the other
direction, you get drivers over-shooting the turning and peering back over their
shoulders to catch the name and then slamming on the brakes and doing sharp turns
too late and all against on-coming traffic they probably haven't seen properly. It can
be a nightmare."
Worse still is the problem for continental drivers who are accustomed to clear signing
and find themselves adrift and lost in a nameless warren of streets with traffic so congested that they can't stop to ask the way even if they can speak English.
The Evening Standard tested the problem in Islington, Hornsey and Camden and found
hundreds of obscurely marked streets. Among the common problems were:
"I'm surprised that Londoners can cope with it," says Margret Scherer, a 28 year-old
German linguist who recently settled in London.
"London is a huge international capital which should be aware that many foreigners
have to find their way around. Many things are well organised here but why are so
many road signs obscured by trees or placed just where they can't be seen. Often
there aren't any signs at all! In a car in London it's difficult to drive safely if you can't
see or don't know where to look for this simple but important information."
She's also quite baffled by the fact that the house numbers are usually difficult to see or not marked at all. Garry Slattery agrees:
"Why can't they make a policy on long, major roads of marking which way the numbers are going and whether they're odd or even on one side or the other. You can drive up and down roads for ages before you know whether you're heading in the right direction."
In many European countries street names are positioned at every intersection as well
as at intervals along major roads. Furthermore, householders and businesses are required by law to display clearly visible numbering.
Here in London there are still street signs such as "Pond Road, N" dating from the days when London's postal districts were divided quite simply into N, S, E and W.
The Metropolitan Police say that, like the fire and ambulance services, their officers
have learnt to cope with obscure or non-existent street signs by learning the area
from frequent patrols. However, they were unable to say how the average motorist
or pedestrian might cope. "If motorists can't see the signs then we would suggest they pull over to the side of the road," a spokeswoman says. "If they drive dangerously as a consequence of trying to read obscure signs then, of course, they would be liable to prosecution."
Islington Council, with a large number of obscure or non-existent signs says that
it has agreed a new design for street signs and that thirty new ones are due for
erection with orders pending for a further forty.
"We don't actually have anyone driving around periodically checking for missing signs," a spokesman says, "so we have to rely on the public contacting us if action is needed. Furthermore, we can't just trim back undergrowth. We have to get the owners to do this under the powers of the Highways Acts."
"The Evening Standard's exercise is valuable to us but in the end we need the public to keep in touch with us."
This, however, is unlikely to solve the problem since it is visitors to an area who are likely to need signs and notice their absence rather than residents who presumably know where they live.
Camden too has produced a new street sign design and new name plates are beginning
to appear in some parts of the borough.
On a short sample car journey, chosen randomly, from Belsize Park to Crouch End via
Highgate and Holloway, the Evening Standard found the following:
© (1996) Christopher Long. Copyright, Syndication & All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
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