all watched over by screens of loving grace · 2009-11-03 16:09
On Saturday, a new urban advertising screen was turned on in London. This one’s a little different to the norm though: it’s 176m above the ground, 60m wide and 5m tall. Oh, and it wraps around the BT Tower.
(bad photo – it’s hard to take a picture of)
It can be seen from Aldwych, the South Bank, parts of the City, even glimpses from Clapham Junction. It has a brightness of 3000 Nit (candela per square metre) – or over 810,000 lumens in total. Standard laptops and desktops operate at around 250 Nit, a screen designed to be seen in daylight is 500 Nit, a cloudy day is about 2000 Nit, and the Moon is 2500 Nit. Looking a different way, it’s equivalent to over 1000 60W light bulbs (average 800 lumens).
Although it’s displaying an Olympic countdown, as well as BT branding, it’s designed to be permanent – at least until 2014.
I was interested in the planning permission – so I’ve dug it out of Camden’s website (here and here).
This is the notice that was displayed asking for feedback on the planning permission:
Slightly smaller than 270m2. Unsurprisingly, there was no response on either side lodged with the council. It’s not a part of the city which lots of people visit.
The application focuses on two aspects: that it’s an upgrade of the lighting equipment that has been deployed on the tower since 2004, and that there’s no impact to the listed building itself, and St Pauls sightlines. Construction was started before planning permission was granted.
The proposal does show a mockup of what the screen would be like, but most views are shown with a calmer purple background – there’s one view with a white background, which is considerably brighter.
I’m actually not against this screen, but I do worry that existing planning processes aren’t suitable for things that, well, radiate. Surely something that can be seen in over 8 boroughs should be the responsibility of the Mayor, rather than the borough where the screen is located? Also, paper planning documents are not a suitable medium for adequately assessing the impact of illuminated and animated signs.
In the UK, the advertising networks have kept within current planning by using static imagery on their billboard replaced by screens. In the US, there have been attempts to railroad through legislation allowing billboards to be changed to animated, illuminated signs without any public questioning, such as in Los Angeles (now overturned, but with a lawsuit in response).
There should be a civic discussion about how, why and where screens are deployed in public space, rather than the question being asked per application.
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Just a technical note, but one of the reasons it’s so hard to take a photo of is precisely its brightness. Compared to the coloured lights on the rest of the tower on Saturday, it would regularly overexpose my camera, while if I deliberately exposed for the screen, it would appear to be suspended in space. Only the fireworks rivalled it, but they only lasted a couple of minutes, not a few years.
On the other hand, examples like that give me a fresh appreciation of exactly how sophisticated human vision is.
— Paul Mison 3.11.09 #