Greenwich Peninsula, SE10 “Amazingly We’ve Found A New Bit Of London To Live In ” Oh dear. If at first it seems a bit confusing as to why the hoarding talks about inventing new traditions etc. etc., things start to make more sense when taken together...

Greenwich Peninsula, SE10

Amazingly
We’ve Found
A New Bit Of
London To Live In

Oh dear.

If at first it seems a bit confusing as to why the hoarding talks about inventing new traditions etc. etc., things start to make more sense when taken together with the ad campaign created for GP by The Beautiful Meme. It’s all horse-drawn wagons and flag-waiving land rushers: “BE A PENINSULA ORIGINAL”. 

Once again, I cannot imagine how a conversation which began with ‘what shall we do for our ad campaign for Greenwich Peninsula?’ somehow ended up with manifest destiny. If I’m being kind, I can almost sort of vaguely see how pioneering (as a verb) might have emerged as a rallying concept. We are talking about living in the shadow of the Millennium Dome, after all. But as a noun, pioneer has a history, closely linked to colonisation and imperialism. And then to use the word pioneer in a campaign which makes unambiguous visual and linguistic references to the historical pioneer of American, 19th-century expansionism, you really have to wonder what in the hell they were thinking. Or not thinking, as is more likely the case.

And then the whole ‘hey guys, we’ve found a new part of London to live in’ is pretty much the cherry on this car crash of a cake. Herein lies the dreaded tabula rasa - the mythical idea of a blank slate of land in which no one previously lived or had any stake - which is actually quite brilliant in that the campaign manages to subtly reference the most horrid aspect of pioneering expansionism (the total lack of awareness or care or consideration for the fact that in Australia, America, and elsewhere, there were already native peoples inhabiting the land). I’m not pointing this out to make a direct comparison, and I don’t know enough about the existing community in Greenwich Peninsula to make a case here, but I do believe that there is no such thing as undiscovered land in a city like London. 

I also believe that signs matter and though I’d like to say that I’m surprised at the level of unthinking idiocy behind these hoardings, of course I’m not. It did amuse me, however, to read that the clients brief to TBM was apparently to send them the South Park ‘SoDoSoPa’ parody and say this is exactly what we don’t want….

Photo via James Evans.