I’ve been wandering around Edinburgh for the last seven days. It’s a tangle of old streets, volcanic rock, super green grass, bone-chilling dampness, nice suit and tie combinations, and dusk that starts at about 2:30 p.m. It’s a bit hard to walk on all the cobblestones, and the “newer” flat paving stones are a bit slippery, but the sound of footsteps on European sidewalks is nice and they echo differently than they do in Toronto (more wood buildings, maybe).
There is not very much postering in the city centre. Out in Leith, the port area (and Trainspotting book/movie setting) it’s a bit Detroit-y-er (if Detroit had more 1970s social housing brutalism) and there is more blank crappy walls inviting posters (though it has been undergoing its own Parkdale-like gentrification which, I think, translates into the availability of veggie burgers and better coffee) -— but much of the core here is like a giant outdoor architecture museum, so people probably feel bad postering and messing up the historic stuff.
I’m ambivalent about posters. I like that they’re around, and they make a city seem lived in, but then I also think it’s ugly and just more visual mess (physical mess too -— on more than one occasion I’ve leaned against a pole in Toronto that had just been wheat-pasted -— such a mess). They do play a role though. I saw this on Hobo Society thing on a pole that invited a Google search. I don’t know why, there was just something about the sign (and it’s, uh, semiotics) that made me enquire further. So we went there. That it was a boring collection of chain smoking Scottish indie-rock-kids wasn’t important — negotiating the city by the hints and clues it presents is more fun than pre-planning in a guide book. I wonder what visitors to Toronto think of all the postering (if they don’t immediately dismiss it as a mess), and if it’s helped anybody find the good stuff. Hopefully they won’t have to pay three pounds each to discover the dull places.