Good as its word, Croydon Council has acted to remove the posters for Boxpark which had been fly-posted around the borough last week. And true to Croydon form, it’s been a bit of a botch job.
Efforts to remove the fly-posted Boxpark poster on Portland Road has been quick, but not well done
As Inside Croydon reported, among the sites the posters appeared on was one shop front on Portland Road – a property which the council is trying to ready for re-opening next month as part of its publicly funded regeneration efforts in South Norwood.
But it is not known whether the council will be taking any legal action and seeking a prosecution against those responsible for the fly-posting.
“That’ll be up to Hamida Ali, she’s in charge of enforcement,” was the opinion offered by one senior Town Hall figure.
Ali is the rising star in Tony Newman’s Labour-run council, first elected in 2014 and already a cabinet member. She also happens to be a councillor for Woodside ward, near the Portland Road incident.
Croydon Council, it should be noted, has loaned £3million of public money to Boxpark to get them to set up their food and booze outlet next to East Croydon Station. So the fly-posting is a bit embarrassing all round.
Croydon Council has been boasting regularly about how it is coming down hard on fly-tippers and others who have been rubbishing parts of the borough – anyone dropping as much as a cigarette butt who fails to cough up the required £60 on-the-spot fine has been dragged into court and given a criminal record and additional fines running into hundreds of pounds. So it will be interesting to see whether such a hard line is maintained against those responsible for the Boozepark posters.
“It’s important that the council is seen to be acting fairly in all cases to deter this kind of anti-social behaviour,” the Town Hall figure said.
Councillor Hamida Ali: will she ensure those responsible for fly-posting are fined?
Earlier this week, Roger Wade, the founder of Boxpark, denied that the posters were anything to do with him or his company, but he told one resident that he would “have a word with our contractors”.
And the Town Hall source suggests that someone in the council planning department had raised the fly-posting issue with Boxpark and insisted that they should get the posters removed immediately.
Whoever has been out trying to remove the offending posters have not been wholly successful, it has to be said.
“It looks like they’ve been at it with his fingernails and tried to hide the mess with something ‘positive’,” a South Norwood resident said of the scene today.
The “something positive” is a council poster advertising the scheme to give away empty shops for galleries and coffee shops in Portland Road in a competition which had a deadline of … four months ago.
The resident certainly wasn’t impressed by the efforts to clear up the fly-posting. “After complaining to both the council and the owner of Boxpark, is this the best attempt they can do at removing the illegal fly-posting? It adds insult to injury.
“Is it because we’re a run-down working class area that they treat us with such contempt? If it had been the centre of Croydon, I bet they’d have done a better more professional job.”
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I would suggest that the effort put in to remove the poster more than equals the effort put in by Veolia to keep our streets litter free.