Hoarding the boredom

Imagine this scenario, you are finishing catching up on the mornings posts on Dezeen and enjoying a cup of green tea when your boss puts a virgin sketch pad on your desk and says it is now company policy for every employee to have one on their desk. Ok you think, but then your boss explains that you can't use the sketch pad. No reason is given as to why you cannot use the sketch pad but it has to stay on your desk and consume precious space, but more importantly look and be painfully dull. Its pages empty, its potential lost.

This is exactly what is happening to Croydon right now if you exchange the sketch pad for some site hoarding and the boss figure for the local council and / or landowners. An unsightly urban plague, these temporary hoardings turned long-term residents isolate spaces all over the expanse of the town from burnt out London Road buildings to the many unoccupied sites around the tired East Croydon redevelopment areas. The fact that these hoardings remain a completely unexploited artistic and graphic outlet is beyond belief, and you do not have to be the next Francis Bacon to understand the opportunities that exist from these otherwise useless additions to the street facades.

Ahead of Croydon's youthful and experienced artistic communities alike exists a definite and logical opportunity to seize a flexible variety of large scale blank canvases from what is currently a collection of over-scaled oppresive timber boundaries. As well as these boring hoardings that hoard further boredom there exists a bounty of other elements in our urban landscape that all have the real potential to become fantastic graphic surfaces by simply adding some imagination and medium, and there are without question a unique collection of people out there who would fulfill this dream for free. A plentiful amount of these characterless boundaries, alleyways and train bridges already exist around Croydon ready for these artists, but are presently all guilty of offering nothing towards the current direction in establishing the thought provoking aesthetic that Croydon is desperately trying to brew. 

This depressed element of the urban environment can be forced to re-evaluate itself, and just like in the 1970's when Jamie Reid and Malcom McLaren helped imagine the revelation that was the punk aesthetic, now is the time to use these canvases to express a fresh regionalist graphic for our small pocket of South London.

TW