This Event Is Cancelled, Courtesy Of Tower Hamlets

By · August 23, 2010 at 10:20 am · No comments · Miscellaneous · Report an error ·

Looks like bad news for all those into their funky house and dirty pop, if this poster on Old Ford Road is anything to judge by. The ‘new era of club culture’ in the East End, with “massive DJ’s/PA’s” (sic) every Friday night, has been cancelled! Dang and blast. Still, nice of the organisers to let everyone know by putting a huge ‘Cancelled’ sticker over the poster.

But hang on, what’s that text at the bottom? Looking closely at the sign, the following small print can just about be read:

“This poster has been cancelled by London Borough of Tower Hamlets”

A quick visit to the Tower Hamlets website turns up this press release from mid-July, including the following comments from Councillor Shahed Ali:

“This is a creative way to crack down on fly-posting. We’re showing would-be fly-posters that they’ll be wasting their money if they put up illegal advertisements in the borough. It can take up to 45 minutes to remove just one poster and often scraps of paper are left behind – but it only takes a couple [of] seconds [to] stick the ‘It’s Cancelled’ sticker on.”

We have to give them credit for originality. Will this state-sanctioned subvertising actually do what the council hopes and discourage flyposters? Or will it royally piss them off and encourage reprisals, whilst simultaneously irritating the hapless citizen wrongly lead to believe that their favourite club night has been called off? And has anybody seen these signs in other parts of London?

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  • http://undefined Caspar

    Heh, clever. I’d noticed a bunch of ‘cancelled’ events around Bow and thought it was odd the organisers had bothered to go out and advertise the cancellation.

  • http://undefined Adam Bowie

    I saw some of these near Victoria Park a few weeks ago, and didn’t notice the small print.

    I was slightly suspicious about the cancelled signs though, since it struck me that it was unlikely so many events were being cancelled and that the promoters had bothered putting up notices to explain they wouldn’t be on.

    Instead, I put it down to some kind of internecine warfare between two groups of promoters.

  • http://undefined Martin

    Original? Glasgow City Council started cancelling posters a few years ago, and I think even they may have borrowed the tactic from elsewhere. It looks an awful lot like Cllr Ali (or perhaps Tower Hamlets press office) have borrowed some words from this newspaper article about Glasgow’s scheme too.

    (Glasgow also makes it a condition of venues’ licences that fly-posting doesn’t take place for events taking place there. Promoters quickly worked out that they could just omit the venue name and their target market would probably be able to work out the club.)

  • DeanN

    Yeah, I was in Glasgow recently and saw them too. First time they’ve been in London though, to my knowledge.

    Well spotted on the cut-and-paste press release job.

  • http://www.karinski.net Talia

    Tower Hamlets have been doing it for a couple of years too. I saw them first in, I think, 2007?

  • http://undefined DeanN

    The above photos are from Tower Hamlets. According to their own (plagiarised) press release, they’ve been doing it since July.

  • http://undefined Gary

    So ubiquitous were the ‘cancelled’ stickers in Glasgow when I used to go out there that I often wondered why no-one just started a club night called Cancelled and let the council do their marketing for them.

    You’re welcome, club promoters of Tower Hamlets.

  • http://undefined Martin

    Having had a look through some news archives, it seems that South Yorkshire council were cancelling posters as far back as 2001.
    Meanwhile, on BBC News, there’s a bunch of stories from 2004/5 from Bristol, Leicestershire, Luton, Newquay and a TfL scheme in Islington.

    It’s a clever idea, but funny how all the councils seem to think they’re being original…

    (In Worcestershire, they came up with the bright idea of contacting the worst offenders and “telling them to stop”.)

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