Contender for first official complaint...

...Since the article appeared in the paper the other day, more and more use seems to have been made of the official poster boards. But one or two still insist on putting stuff on the bus stop opposite outside Headington Hill.

Trouble is, now that they are using paste to put posters up on the boards, they've decided to use the same to put stuff up on the bus stop. So now instead of being easily removed the morning after, they are stuck fast and leave a mess when you try to take them off.

Incidentally, did anyone in Magdalen Rd get consulted on there being a 5am license for 1000 students at the Bingo Hall on Saturday 30th April for this May Day Ball? Apparently only the police have the right to object to Temporary Events Notices as opposed to regular licenses.

Anyway - for using paste on the bus stop, Escape and the May Ball crowd might very well find themselves the first venues/organisers complained about to the licensing panel:

No exceptions...

...just because I am an employee of the university doesn't mean I should tolerate littering by the Students' Union or events associated with it or its societies. In fact I specifically asked them before I started my campaign to be good and not participate in this kind of advertising as I would not treat them any differently. And I asked them to inform their societies and so on to respect the law and not litter and flypost. But here we are. At least they're easier to collect and bin than the ones scattered on the floor, but lamp post stickers are still clutter and litter and visually intrusive:

Widening the whingeing...

I notice someone has ripped out the brand spanking new timetable boxes from the local bus stop "King's Mill Lane" stop on Marston Rd:

Art for litter's sake...

A nice twist to the campaign - some folk are doing some kind of community art project on Brookes's Headington Hill Hall site and they seem to think that flyers attached to cars, that of course become litter the second the owner returns, is great art.

Roll on Turner!

Sexy birds...

Very odd one today. I can only assume it was an attempt at art. The phone box on London Rd was absolutely plastered with fake prostitte made up from famous works of art.

And then - sometimes cars come back to haunt you. There was this Seat that used to park blocking entrances and turning areas in the hall all last year (students in residence are not supposed to have cars in Oxford but how do we know which belong to whom). And sure enough, today he (or she) turns up in flagrant disregard of all the rules of the road parked up on the pavement by the London Road gates.

Chaps, or whoever you are, double yelllow lines and zigzags apply right to the edge of the highway, including any footpath, and parking adjacent to a pedestrian crossing can be just plain dangerous.


(The person next to the car is nothing to do with it - just a passer by.

An explosion in a bus stop...

...there were dozens and dozens of these Fuzzy Ducks fliers plastering the windows and left on the floor of the westbound Pullens Lane stop today. Needless to say the ones on the floors were completely useless, merely litter, with nobody showing any interest in picking them up.

Solutions...

Now, lest anyone get the impression that I'm just a Mr Angry killjoy, as I've already said I support many of these venues. I wrote in support of the Zodiac's planning application for the Tile Shop and so on, but in the Oxford Mail article they quote:

Tim Hopkins, manager of the Cellar Bar in the city centre, said: "I hate litter and think a lot of these tactics are very disrespectful to our area. But clubs do need to advertise, so I don't think the problem will ever go away completely. But I do think it could be done better."

He suggested the council sell advertising space at bus stops, put up boxes for flyers, or even establish a traffic light system of acceptable sites, such as boarded up shop fronts, and unacceptable sites, such as telephone boxes.

Tim is, of course, one of the chaps who replied nicely to my original email saying very much what he said here. And I've also been thinking about bus shelters and sponsorship. The two bus shelters close to Brookes are both crap old dirty things that aren't really up to modern standards. But there's a policy of not replacing shelters outside the town centre I believe unless it's done with advertisers' money such as those owned by MAI (part, I believe, of that nasty right wing American media group that staged pro-war rallies across the US in 2003).

So if it's good enough for MAI, why not in specific places for local firms? Could a consortium of the major venues get together and buy new bus shelters for these spots? I seem to remember that when a local parish council paid for a new shelter in Wood Farm it cost about £1700. Probably too small for these areas but the bigger ones could be useful, and then dedicated to local venue advertising, instead of Pepperami adverts or whatever on the MAI ones.

I don't know whether one could get leaflet dispensers as well for the shelters maybe?

Nice press coverage...

I got a half page on the Oxford Mail today, thank you very much down there! They sent a photographer chappie a week or so ago and I thought they had maybe dumped the story.

This will move tomorrow when it gets shunted into the archives, but here's the piccie anyway - I hope they don't mind me using it:

Getting a bit better....

I have to say, over the past couple of weeks things have died down a little. Still, regular as clockwork on a Tuesday night the Fuzzy Ducks lot come round - I nearly caught one of them last week I think. They must have walked straight past me and gone on to stuff their tat into the fence loops at the top of Morrell Hall.

People have started using the poster boards again, so I don't know if the message has been getting through. And it's a long time since I took any flyposters down off the bus shelter or the trees around Cheney Field. Of course it could just be that the person that Brookes Community Liaison pays to go round and remove them is beating me to it!

But down in halls the problem is as bad as ever really. Flyers are the worst. Posters, the people could put up and go round again and take down relatively easily maybe an eyesore overnight, but they're not as bad as flyers that just litter all over the place, encouraging people to treat the whole place as a general refuse tip. Cuckoo Lane was cleared over the Christmas holidays, after the flyers came the empty coke bottles and food wrappers and I'm sure they would not be as prevalent if the flyers did not give the general impression that it's okay to litter:

We're closing in...

...if you are the preson who is distributing this stuff from halls of residence down John Garne Way, you should know we are closing in on you. We know where one load of leaflets clearly intended for distribution were delivered to someone's bedroom and if I recognise you doing it there will be at least university disciplinary procedures to go through even if your employer doesn't care...which they won't:








Oops - and another car park has emerged on the pavement again...just for note:

If you thought Valentines was bad...

...think again. March 7th and they're already advertising for the May "Ball" (presumably in a muddy field somewhere with loads of pills and no sit down meal as any true ball should have...did you people not go to decent schools?):

Now for something completely different...

I really want to keep this blog specific to flyers and flypostering, but I couldn't help notice the irony here. Something we complained about long ago when the building work started on Brookes's new Buckley building, so it'll not come as a surprise that I'm a bit annoyed the problem is back, especially as we are just about to try to embark on a campaign to get students to stop double and pavement parking the cars they're not supposed to have in Oxford down at John Garne Way.

PAVEMENTS ARE FOR PEOPLE. Double yellow lines and zig-zags apply right to the edge of the highway, which includes the pavements. Blocking out vision in front of pedestrian crossings and entrances is particularly dangerous:

On campus crap...

...today I took a slightly different route home through campus just to see if it was going on on there too...unsurprisingly, it is...These from Fuzzy Ducks again:

Happy Mondays...

...at least someone has gone mad with flyers in particular this morning.





And these nice people from Oceans & Collins - they want to maintain an upmarket image around the city apparently. This really does it for me! I'd go here for a sophisticated drinks, wouldn't you?

Innovation...

...well, it is a centre of learning I suppose. Innovative use of fencing:

St Valentine's Day Messacre

They're everywhere today. Hardly any surprise I suppose since some venues have been promoting this year's commercial love-fest for weeks already, but with it also being a Tuesday it means they're all getting mixed in with the weekly "Fuzzy Ducks" trash-fest...

Some of these are quite sweet really...

...the hand made Maxwell's ones with the big love heart on tear my heart pulling them down, but in some ways they are the worst, not because of what they look like but because I always find them stapled into trees. Now, I am no rabid tree-hugger but the staples leave a terrible mess of tatty scraps of paper on trees and, well, it's just not what they are there for.

It all makes work...

...and the cleaning machine only came round Headington Hill yesterday and managed to get most of these up, so true to form another load get dumped overnight: