Everyone seems to have a view on the Nottingham ‘A’ Board controversy (they were going to call it A-gate but that’s a microcrystalline variety of quartz and could get confusing…) with even Gail’s Man at Nottingham Daily Photo recording the recent protest by city centre businesses in his inimitable style. So I thought I’d get in on the act by taking a walk around the city centre and sizing up the problem.
There are a lot of ‘A’ boards as it happens… but there’s also loads of other stuff that could cause problems for disabled people, especially those with a visual impairment. This appears to be an intrinsic part of any modern city centre. As the photos below show, there are litter bins, benches, phone boxes, permanent advertising hoardings and a whole host of other ‘obstructions’ on the city’s pavements. Amongst these the ‘A’ boards seem to be a small problem.
I suppose the City Council would say that all the street furniture shown in my photos is necessary in the city centre but ‘A’ boards aren’t. They may have a point here but I’m sure there is some compromise that could be reached to help soften the blow for city-centre businesses.
How about some sort of licensing system rather than a blanket ban? Businesses could apply for permission to have a board outside their premises and the City Council could send someone (after a suitable three-month training coarse, with necessary health and safety qualifications and personal protective equipment…) to see if the sign was necessary and whether or not it represented a real danger to passers-by. If it was needed and wasn’t likely to cause an injury, it could be approved.
Seems reasonable to me. But then I suspect that the ‘A’ board campaign is much more about the City Council making the city centre look clean and tidy than it is about the genuine needs of disabled people. Like the removal of ‘aggressive’ beggars some years ago, the motto for City Centre Management is ‘City first, citizens second’.
Clumber Street/Bridlesmith Gate
St Peter's Gate/Bridlesmith Gate
Low Pavement
Street drinkers targeted for city ban
News that Nottingham City Council will be seeking the power, next year, to ban all street drinking is, on balance, good news I think.
Sights like this might be a thing of the past in Nottingham
Although I like to think of myself as an advocate of civil liberties, there has to come a time when certain sorts of behaviour by individuals are curtailed in the interests of the majority… and I think street drinking is one of these.
Usually associated more with summer activities (and weather) than with this time of year, there are still certain places in the city where you frequently see people wending their way down the street gripping a can of Special Brew or a bottle of cider and there are a number of well-know haunts where groups of street drinkers gather and share their various tipples. Whilst this might constitute a fairly low form of anti-social behaviour, it can be intimidating for many people, is often accompanied by loud drunken banter and can sometimes be a pre-cursor to more serious forms of behaviour that are far more problematic than the mere drinking of the alcohol that’s caused them.
But the question for the authorities has to be: How enforceable are such rules? There are currently three designated ‘no drinking’ zones in the city, one of which is around Hyson Green and another in the city centre, I believe. Following the introduction of the first of these, the authorities were slow to get to grips with drinkers around Asda and, when they eventually did, they only succeeded in forcing them to move to other parts of the area not covered by the ban or where they were less likely to be detected. Like CCTV, the effect of such prohibitions can often be simply to move the problem to someone else’s back yard rather than address its causes or actually rectify it.
It seems to me that if the city is serious about tackling this issue, they should be considering working with some of the charities that address homelessness, alcohol-dependency and the other social problems that lead to these people feeling the need to spend a significant proportion of their day out of it on cut-price supermarket plonk and beer that could double for rocket fuel.
Whether they have the wit, wisdom or will for that though, is another matter.
On a lighter note, presumably, if a city-wide ban does come into force, the drinkers will have to give up, hide or move over the boundary into the county. That might be good for city residents but I can’t see Mrs Cutts at County Hall being very happy about it… which is probably another good reason for the City Council to do it as soon as they can.