Its an interesting article in the telegraph too...to save you all the hassle of registration...
Why it pays to put on a bold front
(Filed: 06/03/2004)
Hoardings are no longer blots on the urban landscape. They're hip, eye-catching and even have their own annual awards. Christopher Middleton reports
If you want to see Tim Henman winning Wimbledon, now is the time to visit the All England Club. All right, so the championships aren't on for a few months, but the next best thing is a 12ft-high image of the British Number One in celebratory mode, surrounded by 10ft tall ball girls and 2ft-high strawberries.
Centre board: the hoardings at Wimbledon
The tableau stretches for 30 yards along Church Road, hiding unsightly building works (new museum, ready in 2006), and attracting small clusters of admiring visitors beneath it. A hoarding, yes, but one which presents a friendlier face than the standard, battleship-grey boards and "Keep Out" signs. Why, it's even made of a meshy, string-vest-type material, to let the breeze through.
No surprise, then, that it has just been commended in the Outdoor Display section for this year's Pamadas (Property, Advertising, Marketing and Design Awards), the property industry's Oscars. First place went to the 100ft-high architectural engraving currently swathing St Paul's Cathedral, and a cluster of sky-gazing figures at the foot of Centrepoint was also commended.
What is surprising, though, is that so few developers in the private housing market decide to go for these crowd-pleasing displays, rather than the familar, bog-standard boards.
"Three things put them off," says Jo Wood, of The Sign Company. "First, they can't get planning permission. Second, they like the idea of a wacky hoarding, but when it comes to it they lose their nerve. And third, they're frightened by the cost."
All subjects on which Wood is well-placed to pronounce, since it was his company that created arguably the most memorable site hoarding ever - the legendary "King's Road Books".
These were outsize, fibreglass tomes that lined King's Road, in Chelsea, during the late 1990s. Their basic function was to hide the work being done on the old King's College library site, where 500,000 sq ft of former academic institution were being turned into 289 private apartments.
"Those books generated infinitely more sales inquiries than any other form of marketing we employed," says John Hunter, of co-developers Northacre. "Which was just as well, really, seeing as they cost us about £350,000. At that point on King's Road, there's an awful lot of people passing by."
It's not just in metropolitan areas that this applies. "When you're building a new housing development, you find that of the people who buy into it, a very high percentage will be local," says Ann Crick, who is marketing two new Gleesons Homes developments in Crawley and Christ's Hospital, West Sussex.
"By putting up a big, bold hoarding, you're shouting to the people in that area that you've arrived. You can even use the hoardings as a giant newspaper, announcing when the development will be finished and updating people on how many homes you've sold already." All too often, of course, the end result is not so much bold as boring. The current identikit trend is for hoardings to look like glossy magazine spreads, featuring huge, soupy words such as "Passion" or "Lifestyle", alongside photographs of twentysomethings on leather sofas.
The King's Road Books: shouting that you've arrived
Notable recent exceptions have been the hoardings at Wimpey's Eluna apartments, in Shadwell, east London - where they served as an impromptu gallery, displaying the work of local artist Janet Brooke. Just as arresting (and another Pamada nominee) was the towering mural by Marcus Warren, of Kugel Design, showing how the red-brick apartments at Trevor Square, in Knightsbridge, would look when they were finished.
There is no question that, as well as merely announcing a development's existence, an imaginative hoarding can help to give it a personality. Whole sections of the King's Road hoarding have been preserved by enthusiastic collectors, much like fragments of the Berlin Wall.
Jo Wood's latest creation is an outsize pair of feet at Paddington Basin, in west London, designed to underline the fact that the development is within walking distance of Paddington station.
"Around the time David Blaine was in his box at Tower Bridge, we hoisted up a giant shoe in a large perspex case, to reinforce that walking distance thing," he says. "Again, it brought a lot of buyers in. My next project is cranes. All those hundreds of feet of tower, visible for miles. They're just begging for something creative to be done with them."
• St Paul's Cathedral - Mega Profile: 020 7580 9777,
http://www.megaprofile.com; King's Road Books - The Sign Company: 0800 3288099, thesigncompany.co.uk; Wimbledon Tennis - Icon Display: 020 8302 4921,
http://www.icondisplay.co.uk; Pamadas: 020 7813 2397, pamada.org.uk
Beware of yawning dogs.