Street Furniture Brushing up on...

It's hard to pinpoint the moment I fell in love with street furniture.

Actually, I can, it was about 36 hours ago,

when they sent round the clips we're going to see tonight.

But then, I suppose this fascination

must have already been subconsciously present,

an unrealised latent love, awaiting blossom,

in every bin I filled, every trough I passed,

every public toilet I used.

Which, incidentally, were the original lyrics to that Sting song.

Now, I shout it from the highest hill.

Let me welcome you to the fabulous world of outside over there.

The invisible universe of street furniture.

To unearth the beginnings of street furniture,

we have to determine whence arrived the first street.

Imagine. It's 400 BC.

You and some chums build yourselves a row of houses, then...wallop!

Some bloke arrives and puts his house up smack opposite yours.

Why?

There's the whole of Stone Age Britain to build in.

Why spoil my view?

Next his mates all start moving alongside him

and the bit between you all... Well, that's suddenly a street.

Now, where are you going to park your team of oxen?

Jam yesterday, jam today, but please, no jam tomorrow!

This is the plea of London's motorists.

Recently, an all-out purge by police to stop parking in busy streets

has added to the misery of motorists

who look in vain for suitable car-parks.

This blocking of important thoroughfares

is one of the main causes of the daily hold-ups.

Part of the solution may be parking meters.

-Pardon?

-You're banging my door?

-Pardon?

Don't bang on my door!

Don't bang on your door? I'm not banging on your door!

-Yes, you are.

-Do you mind moving off this bank?

You're right across my school crossing.

Listen here, mate,

-you're on top of the traffic lights.

-Yeah. I'm only going over the road.

I couldn't give a monkey's what he's doing over the road.

I know you couldn't give a monkey's.

When people start earning a living in this country....

what do you think I'm doing, then?

Being a shit, that's what you're doing.

You try sleeping at night, love.

Oh, piss off!

Oh! Oh!

-Are you moving?

-What do you think I'm doing?

-I don't know.

-Of course, I'm moving!

-To me, you're stationery.

-Just a minute, I'm moving.

-Right, move.

-You wear glasses.

-Yeah.

-Are they ordinary glasses?

Well, they have plastic lenses,

Obviously, if I'm...

hit in the face, they won't smash.

What about the ties, if anybody...

They're clip-on, so if anyone grabs you, they just come off.

If I was aggressive and I grabbed your tie,

-would it come off easily?

-Sure.

-It doesn't come off easily.

-It does if you yank it.

-See?

-You're right. Oh, crikey!

Mr Carey, what do the meters actually do to you?

Well, they bite back at us, really.

It's a question, as you're rewinding them,

the spring breaks without any warning at all,

and the meter key with which you're winding

tends to fly back and hit one on the wrist or finger or thumb.

Can you show us, I'm not asking for it to happen to you,

but can you show us what you do?

Wind it as one would wind a normal clock

until the tension on the spring

indicates that you're reaching the peak and you stop.

-Hmm.

-But sometimes during the course of that particular operation,

there's no warning, the spring breaks and the key then flies back

and the speed at which it leaves you is like a bullet.

-It could be quite painful?

-Indeed.

So, what are you going to do about it?

We're seriously considering withdrawing the meter-winding

part of our duty.

Which would mean the meters would be defunct, they wouldn't work.

-No, they wouldn't.

-Mr Carey, thank you very much.

It goes to prove that parking meters are very nasty things.

They are indeed, in more ways than one.

Whew! Poor bloke.

His time had expired and he was just waiting to be towed away.

In TV, we call that sort of prolonged fail "eggy agony".

I reckon the director must have got a ticket the night before.

The parking meter, whose simple mechanics have today, thank heavens,

been replaced by intimidating obelisks

featuring complicated dashboards that require ten minute phone calls

to other remote machines.

They have always been the least-loved of street furniture.

At the other extreme lies the Belisha Beacon.

A jolly striped stick with a bulbous orange bonce flashing away up top.

And kids! They used to have faces!

As this rare footage shows, talking Belisha Beacons

initially were unnecessarily complicated.

"Citizens with surnames beginning in letters A-L

"may now cross South to North, unless this be a second Thursday

"or a first Friday, in which case flow may be reversed before 11am."

By the 1970s, though, the system had really come on.

-Hey, you!

-Who, me?

You went onto the crossing without looking!

Oh, I am sorry!

Well, it isn't every day that you can be told

your road drill is sloppy by a talking Belisha Beacon,

but the children of Hemel Hempstead are getting used to

-Billy the Beacon.

-Look what I can see! Look at this!

Look, he's grown it, give him a clap, isn't that clever?

He's grown a nose, two eyes, a mouth

and some lovely golden hair.

There's a little girl, in the second row

with a green and brown dress.

Oh, yes, Billy, I can see her. Karen, come along, Karen.

-Good.

-Look all around and listen.

-Very good.

-And if there is no traffic coming,

walk straight across, looking and listening

whilst you're crossing. Oh, that's good.

Give him a clap, boys and girls. Very good, well done.

The Highway Code tells us that it's safe to cross

when the red man changes to the green man at Pelican crossings.

If you walk as fast as you can when it does change,

the green man starts flashing before you get to the other side.

It's too quick altogether, they're almost on top of us

before you get across. My wife is old and has got arthritic feet.

When the man comes on, the walking man,

we start to walk across and before you're halfway across, it...

the red man comes back on again.

Just a hint at the confusion that ensued

once speaking Belishas were withdrawn.

Actually, another drawback of the old talking Beacons

was that anyone within earshot of them,

whether they were crossing the road or not,

had to freeze like a statue until the message was over.

In fact, you saw some bystanders complying with it just then.

You went onto the crossing without looking!

Oh, I am sorry.

-Well...

-The government required such bizarre behaviour,

because it was felt sudden cumbersome obstacles on the pavement

kept pedestrians on their toes.

One minister then had the idea for millions of similar inconveniences

to be installed on our streets nationwide. His name? JG Bollard.

Bollards.

This bollard stands at the heart

of what was once a notorious North London slum.

Rat-infested, bug-ridden, no coals in the bath,

the locals couldn't afford coals. Or baths.

That was only 25 years ago, and yet all that's left is this bollard.

Now, if I could ask you, you live here in Wakefield,

what do you think about the bollards and the railings we see?

I don't know, I sometimes stumble over them

when I've got problems walking and stuff like that.

If there's a Mr Big of bollards, it's Councillor Perry.

Apart from being the former chairman of Islington's planning committee,

he's also a man who likes bollards.

You like bollards?

Yeah, basically.

I mean, if you can design me a nicer one, I'll have it,

but I think these are quite nice.

To every force in one direction,

there's an equal and opposite force in the other direction,

in this case, Charles Wood.

Well, they have no use, they're totally unnecessary.

They're meant to save damage to the cables and the water pipes,

that's the theory.

What's wrong with that theory?

What's wrong with the theory?

Ah! We've got you, haven't we?

Yet another hapless TV reaction.

What IS it about street furniture that so crushes

the vital thrust of debate?

So far, we've seen...

And now...

What's wrong with theory?

Two great minds reduced to mashed potato,

while attempting to communicate the essence of our outdoor fixtures.

Ironically, communication is the sole reason

Britain's most common al fresco architecture exists.

The phone-box. They're everywhere, aren't they?

As recurrent a motif for British life as Wimbledon fortnight,

the British bobby, the great...

PHONE RINGS

Hello?

When?

What, now?

Has this come from upstairs?

Well, OK.

Apparently, it's the 21st century, so I'll start that link again.

At one time in Britain, phones came fixed inside enormous metal boxes!

And they were cemented into the street!

Hello, Vincent, 1234.

I am looking for the man who knows all about

the old-fashioned red phone boxes.

Yep, you've come to the right place.

Certainly the right place, Neil McAllister not only has a phone box

in his back garden, but a house full of 600 photographs of them.

Many are in his first book.

The original phone box was erected in Bristol, 105 years ago.

It underwent a few changes, including the disastrous K3,

which included a stamp machine and letterbox,

like a mini Post Office. There's still one in Warrington.

The problem was, if you tried to use the phone

when somebody was using the stamp machine, you couldn't hear yourself,

because it made a racket, and if you tried to get stamps out,

water got in, stuck the stamps together. Bit of a disaster.

-Hello, Mike?

-Hello.

-Hi.

You've a real passion for these red telephone boxes,

what's so special about them?

Well, personally I like the design of them,

their different styles and the fact that you could see them

on the roadside and I think they're British.

Anachronism ahoy!

I know nostalgia is key here,

but for some reason the producers of this desperate item

are making him use apparatus

that was cutting-edge in Charlie Chaplin's heyday.

Were you sad to see BT take them out of service?

Yes, I think it's a crying shame they did.

I think it was a very poor move by BT.

What do you think of these new, modern, vandal-proof,

wipe-clean phones that we have?

I don't think they're anything... they're nothing like the red ones.

What made you do it?

Was it just change for change's sake, really?

No, not at all.

I think you're right in saying that the old red telephone boxes

are part of history. They were designed more than 50 years ago.

These new ones were designed in the last year,

they're much easier to keep clean, there's a gap at the bottom,

which allows some of the most unpleasant things in a telephone box

to actually escape from it, and not collect in the bottom.

And they're much easier and more convenient to use

-and that's what the purpose of a telephone box is.

-Now, come on.

You're just been sentimental about these old red things.

There are all the facts there, it's clean,

some people wee-wee on the floor, all that sort of thing

and these old things, well, they tend to smell, don't they?

They don't work and they tend to smell.

Certainly, I am afraid it's true that people with wheelchairs

find it difficult to get into these telephone boxes

and there must be more phones for them, that's the answer.

But, perhaps people who are visually handicapped,

people who want to get inside and shelter from the wind and rain,

would find these rather a boon.

These are British, these ones over here continental.

No, I'm afraid I can't accept that at all.

Well, gentlemen, we'll leave it there,

I am sure this debate will continue.

I think they are very good.

Yeah, I have used them abroad when I was in Germany

and I thought they were very practical.

Using them over here, I think it's a great idea.

How do you find the operating of this machine?

Very easy, very easy indeed.

-Better than the old ones?

-Yeah.

-In what way?

Well, they're nice and clean, not smelly,

you've got nothing surrounding your feet, like BLEEP!

Ah, good old public phones!

No searching for a signal, no complicated tariffs,

no expensive updates.

Just inconvenient vandal magnets,

drenched in the caustic tang of diseased male urine.

Simpler times.

Of course, official figures show that only 70% of adults in the UK

have ever used a phone box to empty their bladders.

Some, and I hesitate to use the word snobs here,

would rather "spend a penny".

She was lucky, but these days it's getting harder and harder

to find somewhere to spend a penny.

On the lavatory, every step of its cleaning is monitored

and checked by a computer. When you get in there,

it checks your weight. As soon as you get out,

it checks that you're not there.

When it's convinced that the lavatory is clean and empty,

then it starts the cleaning cycle, but not until then.

Prostitutes use them for their business,

they're in there for 15 minutes and then it's all over,

the door opens automatically after 15 minutes.

Homosexuals use them, people use them as rubbish bins,

if they've bought a new pair of trousers and want to get changed,

they leave the old trousers behind and walk out looking neat and tidy.

Anything at all, anything you think of carrying with you on the day,

you'll usually find in the lavatory sooner or later.

This lavatory in Star Yard is also typically Victorian.

Which reminds me of another story -

of the goldfish a former attendant kept in one of these tanks

in the Holburn gents.

A fish that went down in the world when the water level dropped.

These fish don't live here, of course, we just popped them in.

It's quite clear that a Victorian loo was quite a work of art.

Here, one might say, one finds the only true democracy,

because all men are equal in the eyes of...

CLEARS HIS THROAT

A survey in this magazine, Municipal Engineering,

shows that in the last 11 years,

almost one public lavatory in every four in London has closed.

The survey was commissioned by the magazine's editor, Chris Birch.

I like Soho and I do quite a lot of drinking in Soho

and every time I have three or four pints after work in the evening,

I have got a problem.

I religiously empty my bladder before I leave the pub.

I will walk five minutes to Piccadilly Circus Tube station

and go to the gents there and empty my bladder a second time

and by the time I get home to Fulham Broadway, I am bursting!

And there's no loo there?

No, there used to be two, one on each platform

at the underground station. They were both closed in, I think, 1966.

Yes, I can sympathise with our bibulous chum there,

but I think the problem he raises is not so much

an abdication of council responsibility as the fact

he appears to have a bladder the size of a dry-roasted peanut!

You'll have noted, too, there were further bollards visible

in that package and, indeed,

they are in many ways the ORIGINAL reality stars.

Annoying, seemingly pointless and no TV show can guarantee their absence.

There's really no avoiding them.

Right, Bruce, let's have a look at the damage you've done, then.

Pretty severe, by the looks of it.

It looks severe, but compared to what would happen to metal bollards,

it's nothing to get alarmed about.

There are no lamps or anything inside the bollard at all,

so there's no damage to that.

All that's going to be needed in this case is a new body shell.

Because you wouldn't be able to use this again.

That one you wouldn't, because it's been damaged.

Now, apart from the obvious safety factors,

-it's also vandal-proof, isn't it?

-It is very vandal resistant

and it's been used in a lot of places where the vandals operate.

The boot, the knee, the elbow, the fist, doesn't do it any harm.

The sort of heavy test you gave it in your testing operation, I gather.

We've got one very large lad in our works

and we had this thing set up, much as we have here,

and he had a go at it.

He finally took a flying leap and landed with both feet

near the top where he got the most leverage

and there was no damage done.

Monty Python once did a sketch about vicious gangs

of keep-left bollards attacking teenagers.

Until I just saw that clip, I had no idea it was,

albeit in reverse, based on an actual phenomenon.

Attacking inanimate public objects?

Really? That said, we all have our breaking point.

BELL RINGS

What happened exactly?

Well, it was ringing... on Saturday morning,

it was ringing at 3.15, twenty to four and five to four,

so about five to four,

I jumped out of bed and I said, "I'm going to fix that bloody bell",

got a hammer, put my dressing gown on, went down to the kiosk,

smashed in the kiosk window, reached through

and smashed the switch from the wall.

I thought there were regulations to stop that bell ringing

-after 10 o'clock at night?

-There's a notice inside the kiosk,

for all the taxi drivers to see that it should be off at 10.30.

It just doesn't happen?

No. Some switch it off, others will come and switch it back on again.

I wonder, is there any other reasonable way

in which you could have stopped that bell?

Well, I need not have been so drastic, I admit,

but I have been complaining about the bell for 18 months

and nobody has done a damn thing about it and I thought,

"Well, this will probably get something done at least."

The first thing about it is, he shouldn't go around

smashing private property, which it is private property.

If a person doesn't have a key,

is there any alternative to smashing the bell in order to silence it?

Well, the bell is on the outside, a bit of cardboard,

anything with a little backing on it,

would quite easily stop the bell if pushed into the actual bell itself.

Shocking stuff.

Perhaps some of the women watching this

might take a look at their partners just now.

Are they blushing?

If so, they could have once been the kind of youth,

who kicked a traffic bollard just for kicks.

Or ran screaming "Banzai!" toward the local church bells at Evensong?

We're better than that, aren't we?

Instead of incomprehensible violence toward street furniture,

shouldn't we be singing its praises?

Incomprehensibly.

# Daylight comes And the lamps go out

# All over the town

# One's been hit

# A lorry did that! But it didn't fall down

# See them by the side Of the motorway

# All in a line They stand silent and tall

# Short ones, too

# We need them all Our streetlamps... #

-Hello, Dave.

-Hello, Auntie Mabel.

It was me who reported the lamp. It wasn't working last night

-and I nearly fell over in the dark.

-We'll soon get it going again.

That's all working, so I will go up and check the lamp.

-Can I go with you?

-Yes, of course.

Blimey! I thought they'd have been outside Earth's atmosphere by then!

That thing must have been moving slower

than the song-writers' creative juices on that rotten tune!

In fact, on much of the footage we looked at,

the outside amenities seemed to be playing tricks of mind and memory.

I mean, didn't telegraph poles use to be bigger than this?

Do you have some problems, Mr Talbot?

Yes, I think I've cut my binding wire too short

-and I wondered what to do about it.

-You have, I see.

How many turns have you got round there now?

I have got 18, so far.

-18, and you know how many you should have?

-Yes, there should be 30.

30, yeah.

Yeah, it's definitely too short, the only thing to do

is to loosen this one right off.

It'll still hold the tension on this ratchet and tongs,

you can then come down, cut yourself another length of binding wire

-and start again, that's the best way. OK?

-Yeah.

-OK.

When they leave here, these apprentices

will have sufficient knowledge of equipment and techniques

to be able to cope with the next stage.

I'm not sure I'm entirely at ease with those images.

It was like a GPO vision of Golgotha.

Also, how do they know those same men won't crack under pressure

when they have to start working at altitude?

Speaking of which, back at the kids' TV version of Gravity...

It could be that the lamp's worn out, just like my Bob at home!

So, Dave is putting a new one in, cover it up.

It'll think it's gone dark and turn the lamp on.

Look, it's working!

Streetlamps have not always worked like this, oh no.

What makes this so special is that it's a sewer-ventilating lamp.

The heat of the lamp at the top draws up the vapours

through this hollow stem.

We don't want to lose this, it's not only beautiful, but unique.

As unique almost as this gentleman,

who's among the last of the old-fashioned lamplighters.

The irreplaceable James Mason there.

Do you know how much more respect you'd have for this programme

if James Mason was in charge?

Let me give you an idea. Wisbey!

Ladies and gentlemen, Wisbey IS James Mason.

Up till now, we've pretty much concentrated

on the cold and the lifeless.

But whither the human street furniture?

These artisans and their props who we pass each day,

yet barely acknowledge. What about them?

And, by the way, if you are still looking for something

cold and lifeless, I'm your man these days.

48-year-old Stuart Redmond is spearheading

one of Britain's growth industries.

The next few weeks should see a staggering 66% increase

in the number of small businesses like Stuart's.

Not that you'll notice any breathtaking shortening

in the dole queues, it's just that the number of shoe-blacks

on the streets of London is about to leap from three to five.

Only 50 yards from Stuart's licensed patch of Piccadilly pavement,

Sailor Davis, his deadly rival,

wields his brushes for the opposition.

I first knew Stuart, he was a paper-seller

and there was another one-legged shoe-black,

who'd been dead many years,

he used to work alongside him

and when the bottom fell out of the paper-selling,

he asked him to come along with this.

The two rivals have been watching each other even more closely

ever since Sailor left Cherry Blossom in 1958

and signed up for Kiwi, taking all his brushes with him.

The transfer fee has never been disclosed.

Do you think that the change of polish,

you've changed to the other side now,

are you polishing better or worse than you used to?

This is difficult to answer, but I can put it this way,

when I was Cherry, people used to say, "I don't know how you do it,

"I will never use Kiwi again," now I use Kiwi,

they tell me they never use Cherry!

First three months, it was a bit dodgy,

you start hitting people's socks, things like that!

You have to be very careful. Slow.

After six months or so, you gradually get faster with it.

Up until now, I have never had a pair I can't improve on.

When that day comes, I suppose that's the time to pack up.

The shoeshine men of old London.

An art form ruthlessly vanquished by the rise of the trainer.

I think it tells its own story that on the exact same area

once occupied by Alf's flat cap,

now stands the biggest Nike store in Europe.

It's fair to say that whereas once street furniture was there

to assist people in their daily lives,

today, it exists chiefly to order them about.

Gone are the milk machines, the horse troughs,

the water fountains, the phone boxes

and here are the myriad garish tin signs

telling you what you can and can't do and where you can and can't go.

Even the pillar box, that sturdy old begetter of the internet,

is on borrowed time.

Here some children, yesterday, look at the last one in Britain.

And laugh at it.

LAUGHTER

This is George Corner, he's 71 years old, and a Boy Scout.

He owns a shoe shop in Batley, Yorkshire

and he's come down to London

to demonstrate his one, all-consuming passion in life.

Well, I think, at 71, you need something to keep you fit

and I think it certainly does that.

Once you've jumped the pillar boxes in London,

what's your next ambition?

I shall jump the pillar boxes abroad, probably.

I have already done Scotland and London,

London has been one of my great ambitions.

And then, of course, I shall do Ireland, probably, and Wales

and, who knows? There's no limit to this.

But there was. There was a limit to it.

In the 1980s, as global warming increased the size

of all street furniture, George Corner found his unique gift

could not keep pace with events.

The last item George attempted there was, of course,

a gaily painted World War II maritime mine,

a terrific piece of street furniture

and a fixture of any seaside town Worthing of the name.

-OFF-CAMERA: Worthy.

-What?

-Worthy, you said Worthing.

-Ha! Freudian slip!

Bollards!

This is the spring-back bollard, which was commonly first produced

25 years ago.

You can see why it's called the spring-back bollard.

It has a springing mechanism...

SPRING SOUND

We've got to be careful that we don't just jump on the bandwagon,

so to speak, and go for the latest design of bollards.

When a bus approaches, the bollards are lowered automatically,

buses, mail delivery vans and emergency vehicles

carry remote sensors.

A car tries to nip through behind the bus. You can imagine the damage.

The hero of the highway, Robo-Bollard, the bollard with bite.

What do the locals think of the latest guardian of the High Street?

Oh, I think it's terrible.

The whole issue is rubbish.

That's the ones which shoot up.

-Yeah.

-No.

-But on the other hand?

-Yeah.

-No.

And we are done. Yeah.

Everything, I think. Phone boxes, parking meters.

Telegraph poles, pillar boxes, bollards...

Yeah. That's it.

# So, when you come To the end

# Of a packet of fags

# A bar of chocolate

# Or a bottle of gin... #

Hic!

# Don't be an untidy so and so

# Just stick them in the litter bin

# Stick it in the litter Stick it in the litter

# Stick it in the litter Stick it in the litter bin! Oi! #

Goodnight!

# Let the time go by

# I won't care if I

# Can be here on the street where you live... #