Stop sticker scourge

It is not fitting for a Borough of Culture to have most of its lampposts festooned with stickers offering ‘massage’ by ‘hot new girls’.

And not only lampposts; they are put on wheelie bins, rubbish bins, trees, garden walls, phone boxes, post boxes, bus stops, bus shelters, shop fronts, street furniture of all kinds and yes, even school railings!

Many of us try to peel them off but this is not always possible, especially if they have been up for a few days. So we scratch and scrape to make them useless but leave a scruffy mess which gets added to every time there is a new crop.

Let’s face it, there is not a great deal of beauty in our environment - all the more reason why we should not have to put up with these eyesores.

The council has been active at times in removing stickers and painting some of the lampposts with special paint on which stickers can’t be stuck. However, the people doing the sticking - who, one must admit, are extremely determined and invincible - easily find many other surfaces.

It is high time that this scourge is stopped once and for all by the council and the police. As local residents there is little we can do. We can spend half a day removing hundreds of stickers in one high road (and we have done) but this is not prevention. Weeks or even months go by when it seems as though the thing has stopped, then it comes back with a vengeance.

But objections are not just on aesthetic grounds. It is likely that the ‘new girls’ who are advert-ised are young women brought over from abroad not realising what they are expected to do. The Evening Standard recently exposed the extent of ‘modern slavery’ in London. I expect these ‘girls’ fall into that category, no doubt not even getting most of the money earned by their labours.

If we want the world to revel in Waltham Forest and its culture, we need to smarten up. Or maybe the council has it is mind to keep the sticker industry going and use a bit of the grant to pay Grayson Perry to make a collage from the stickers as a contemporary art form?

Vicky Tudor Matcham Road, Waltham Forest