Why is the City of London running an advertising campaign reminding people not to despoil the streets at Christmas? Asks James Ford
The City of London has many ancient and arcane traditions. The City Corporation, the Square Mile’s local council, can trace its roots back to Anglo-Saxon times. Not only is the Corporation led by a Lord Mayor but it has Sheriffs, Aldermen and even a Chief Commoner. It employs a Remembrancer and a Swordbearer. Those who hold the much-vaunted Freedom of the City have the right to drive sheep over London Bridge (a privilege denied to lesser mortals), to carry a naked sword in public, or demand to be hanged with a silken rope if being executed.
These antediluvian and anachronistic anomalies are essentially quaint and harmless, adding character that livens up municipal monotony; just another example of English eccentricity to baffle and bemuse tourists. Like Morris dancing. Or cheese rolling. But sometimes – just sometimes – even the most quixotic of councils is shaken from its regular routines. That was certainly the case this week when the City of London was compelled – one imagines very reluctantly – to launch an anti-defecation strategy.
Yes, dear reader, you read that right. In 2025, real, adult people are dropping all-too-real deuces on the streets of the Square Mile. And it’s not just one or two: for it to warrant an actual strategy (backed up by a public information campaign) then the public pooping must have reached epidemic proportions. Streets that were once perceived as being paved with gold are instead festooned with filth.
Ofcourse, after reading about this (in CityAM, naturally) I had two successive reactions. No sooner did my stomach stop turning than my mind began boggling.
This sort of thing was surely unthinkable back in the days before the financial crisis. In the late noughties, when I worked in the Square Mile, you could leave Abacus, APT or All Bar One without having to watch where you stepped. Nobody needed to tell us to use the facilities in Reflex before we left. And you never accidentally made awkward eye-contact with someone on the roadside as you made the way to the night bus or cab rank.
Society in decline
So, what has changed in the ensuing years? Is this a sign of what has become of London’s nighttime economy? Is this a comment on late-stage capitalism? Is this a dirty protest against the failing economic policies of the current government? I suspect that it is any – or all – of the above.
It has come as a revelation to me, but it seems that – on those very rare occasions then when I am forced to contemplate what might motivate a banker or commodity broker to take a dump in the street – my mind inevitably turns to Edward Gibbon’s reflection in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “all that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.” (Afterall, if this sort of outrage does not qualify as a symbol of a civilisation in profound decline, then what does?)
This sort of thing is probably the norm in Paris. (Or Croydon). We might even expect that the odd, thoroughly inebriated reveller frequenting the fetid fleshpots of the West End might get caught short occasionally. But, in the Square Mile? There can be no clearer indication of a retrograde step for society than when the citizenry of the capital’s most celebrated business district feel it is ok to drop trou and use its thoroughfares as a toilet.
I must disappoint any reader that was hoping I might suggest a rational public policy solution that could stop (or even reduce) the amount of human effluence on the streets of the Square Mile or any of London’s boroughs. I would argue that the successive inventions of the water closet, the U-bend and the modern flushing toilet really should be enough to prevent this problem entirely. This is a failure not of public policy but of human decency. If the public really needs a local authority to remind them not to poop in the streets, it is not just proof that something has gone very, very wrong with society but arguably a sign that the end times are nigh. Being hanged – with or without a silken rope – is probably too good for the phantom public poopers.
James Ford is a former advisor to Mayor of London Boris Johnson