Regular readers of 66000 may recall a piece about the launch of the inmidtown brand identity. I am not a fan. It’s good to help people understand more about what’s on offer in this underappreciated part of London, but why smear a fake brand identity over three historically rich areas – Bloomsbury, St Giles and Holborn? Writing in The Telegraph, Robert Colvile responded to the initiative like this:
‘“Midtown” is the geographical equivalent of Nick Clegg’s plans for the Lords: an act of moronic vandalism that sweeps away centuries of history in favour of something shiny and soulless. But let them try it. From King Lud to Red Ken, the mighty have attempted to leave their mark on our capital. Sometimes, if we’re feeling very charitable indeed, we actually let them.’
I’m not against new names for areas. I don’t insist on calling our capital Londinium, for example. I remain unruffled that some people have abandoned Fitzrovia (itself a neologism in the 1940s) for Noho. I even leave my metaphorical revolver unmolested when people refer to Silicon Roundabout. I just feel Midtown – which works perfectly in north America – is out of place in London.
The new gotomidtown banners haven’t done much to soften that feeling. If you wish to promote the area’s links with great writers (OK, good writers when on form), you have to do better than this:
The Bloomsbury Set, based in the area included Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster.
It doesn’t even make sense. The AWOL comma aside, the copy reads like something a cheap content farm would produce for an awful listings magazine’s website for students with English as a third language. May Woolf’s ashes rise from the garden at Monk’s House and catch in the throat of whoever produced that banner copy, until they write something worthy of the area.
Tim
4 Comments
Have to agree. I’ve noticed an acceleration of Americanisation of late here in our dear city. And as an American I can spot it a mile off. There are more expats around, for sure, than 15 years ago when I moved here. And don’t get me wrong, there are parts of British/London culture that I positively bristle at. Nonetheless, when I saw these banners on my morning commute I burst out laughing.
Apparently I moved to Midtown overnight, and am now a resident.
The thing is that nobody takes any notice of the banners, like so many signs and inexplicable bollards that officials decide to plonk in public space – for whatever reason. I’ve never seen one person looking up at them or having a read.
They don’t seem to be the result of careful city-planning, something with a real idea at the heart of it, but are more about simply ‘placing’ something ‘official’ in an area where lots of people (ie. for the Olympics) are going to be. It’s as if the local authority just feels the need to ‘have’ something there, to flood the space with official paraphernalia in order to deal with the fact that lots of people from different places are coming together in central London.
Also, most of the things mentioned are incoherent. One banner notes that Ghandi once dined on a restaurant on High Holborn which isn’t there any more. Another tries to invent an urban legend that Oliver Cromwell’s ghost still haunts Red Lion Square (his dead body was kept at Red Lion Inn for a night), but nobody thinks that. You can’t create an urban legend with a council sign.
Already the banners are outdated, and just look like urban mess or the remnants of something gone wrong that nobody can be bothered to clean away. If the point is to look good for the Olympics, then they are having the opposite effect.
I’d like to move back – officially – to Bloomsbury/the West End please.
A concerned Midtown resident
Kevin; ‘an acceleration of Americanisation of late here in our dear city’ – if that carries on, tourists from north America may as well stay at home!
Midtown resident; well said. I think many of us react against the attempt to impose meaning on a place. It’s painful when done by a business, outrageous when committed by those who are meant to represent us. Those other banners sound bizarre. Or as Kevin says; laughable.
Leo Szilard taught himself theoretical physics and even got Einstein to teach him statistical mechanics. He was recognised as a genius even by Einstein, Max Planck, Heisenberg, Nernst and Franck. His method of working was unusual. Work for him meant thinking. He stayed in the West End at the Strand Palace Hotel and every day for a month soaked in a hot bath all morning, thinking. Szilard first grasped the idea of a nuclear chain reaction waiting for a traffic light to change in Southampton Row, Holborn and he realised the power of atomic fission and the energy it could release.
6 Trackbacks
Somewhat irascible new piece by yours truly on the inmidtown campaign’s abuse of Virginia Woolf http://t.co/HOml1P5X #branding #Copywriting
Somewhat irascible new piece by yours truly on the inmidtown campaign’s abuse of Virginia Woolf http://t.co/HOml1P5X #branding #Copywriting
Ha. I like this blog post re: rebranding bits of London. What would Woolf say? http://t.co/nBWOsgA6
They lived in squares, loved in triangles, and now reincarnated in PVC banners.http://www.66000milesperhour.com/2012/07/back-to-midtown/
Midtown? In London? Let's hope no-one asks me where that is. @66000mph agrees. http://t.co/9d8PdZ1a
Midtown? In London? Let's hope no-one asks me where that is. @66000mph agrees. http://t.co/9d8PdZ1a