Postering

Fly-posting penalties have to be addressed to somebody, and the name printed at the bottom of the poster is the name they already have. That is the first decision, not the last one.

None of the rest of this needs a committee, a budget or anyone’s approval. Fifty posters and two people is a real piece of campaigning and the cheapest visible thing available to you this week.

What this page will not tell you

Whether a given wall is lawful where you are standing. Poster rules differ by country, by council and sometimes by street, and a confident summary here would be worse than none.

So here are the questions instead. Every one is answerable by somebody who goes and looks, and the whole set takes an afternoon.

1. Who owns this surface? A lamppost, a bus shelter, a utility cabinet and the wall behind them can have four different owners on one pavement.
2. Is the owner’s consent enough, or is a separate permission needed too? Those are two different things and organisers collapse them constantly.
3. Is there a designated free-posting site or a licensed board here, and who runs it? Many towns have them and almost nobody uses them.
4. What is the penalty, and who receives it? Ask specifically whether it lands on the person who put it up, the person named on it, or the group that benefits.
5. Is there a separate rule about the content? Harassment and public order provisions can catch a poster that the surface rules would have allowed.
6. Who has to remove it, and is there a cleaning charge? This is where the real money usually sits.
7. Inside an institution, what is actually permitted? The students’ union, the university, the hospital, the shul. Written policy, findable, and enforced unevenly.

The kind of body that knows. The council’s enforcement or environmental team. The managing agent of the building. The students’ union communications office. And whoever ran the last poster campaign in your town.

The method for getting an answer out of them is in how to find out the law where you are.

Write down who told you, what they said and when. Institutional policies move far faster than statutes, so that is the note that goes stale first.

The route that mostly works

Ask for the window.

A shopkeeper, a café, a launderette, a hairdresser.

“Could I put one of these in your window for a month? I’ll come back and take it down myself.”

Ten seconds of conversation buys a month behind glass. Dry, at eye height, and in a place where somebody is already standing still.

Community noticeboards, synagogue boards and school boards have an approval route, usually one named person. University society boards mostly want a stamp, and a stamped poster survives, because whoever clears the board is looking for unstamped ones.

Consent is not only the legal answer. It is the durability answer.

What survives a wet Tuesday

Laser, never inkjet. Inkjet runs in the first shower, and an illegible poster is worse than an absent one.

Tape lifts in the cold, usually within a day. Staples hold on wood and on nothing else, so a fence, a hoarding or a telegraph pole, none of which is likely to be yours. Stapling to somebody else’s is fly-posting with a criminal damage allegation attached, so it is a board you have been given or it is not a board.

Paste bonds so hard that removal becomes somebody else’s expensive problem. That is precisely what the cleaning charge in question six exists for, which makes paste the wrong choice on any surface you have not been given.

On a board, use a punched plastic pocket and a drawing pin. It costs pennies and the poster stays readable for months.

Laminate is heavy, slow and gets stolen for the plastic.

Where posters actually get read

People read where they wait. That is the whole rule.

A bus stop, a platform, a queue at a till, a lift, the back of a toilet door. The board by the shul entrance, where people stand about for ten minutes after the service.

A lamppost halfway down a street is read by nobody. It is where most first runs end up.

How many you need is a count, not a guess. Walk the route once with nothing in your hands and mark every place where somebody stands still. Add a quarter for replacements. Print that.

Two people, never one

One puts up, one watches the street and holds the phone.

A person alone gets approached, filmed and argued with, and there is nobody to say what happened. A pair can end an encounter, because one of you can step away while the other is still talking.

Agree the leaving sentence before you set off, so nobody has to invent it while being recorded.

“We’re not doing this here. We’re going.”

If a warden or an officer stops you, answer plainly and take their details. Nothing is gained by arguing on the pavement.

“These are for a community campaign. If this isn’t a permitted spot, tell me and I’ll take them down now.”

When you find yours defaced

Photograph it before you touch anything. Three frames: wide enough to show which street it is, then the whole poster, then the mark itself.

Where a swastika or a threat has been added, that is a report rather than a tidy-up, and in many places it is a crime. Treat it the way capturing evidence sets out, then clean it.

Replace it once. Replace it in the same spot a third time and the campaign has become a contest with one individual, who has more free evenings than you do.

Move it instead.

Somebody else’s poster next to yours: leave it. This is operational, not generous. Tearing down is the exact act you are objecting to, it will be filmed, and the footage will be of you.

“That’s theirs and this is mine. Both of them can be on the wall.”

Pasting yours over theirs is the same act with an extra step. So is peeling a corner.

Assume anything in a contested area lasts hours rather than weeks. The replacement rate is the campaign, and a first run with no second run behind it is a week of visibility and then nothing.

What goes on the paper

No private individual’s name, face or contact details without consent. Where a poster carries a photograph of a person, use the version the family or the campaign has published, because those choices belong to them. That was the rule through the hostage campaigns and it holds for anything that follows.

Never a personal mobile number on a public wall. A QR code to a page you control is better, and you can change where it points afterwards.

And write the sentence knowing it will travel as a photograph with none of its context attached.

Where this backfires

In a saturated neighbourhood you inherit the annoyance. Where people are already sick of fly-posting, the cause gets attached to the nuisance. Good design does not fix that.

The name at the bottom absorbs everything. Enforcement letters, phone calls and the occasional visit go to whoever is printed there.

Where that is one person rather than a group, they carry all of it. They need to have agreed to that beforehand, not discovered it.

Timing changes how you are read. Four people in dark clothes working a Jewish neighbourhood at one in the morning is a report to the police waiting to be made. Daylight, ordinary clothes and an obvious clipboard produce fewer questions rather than more.

Walk the route before you print

Two questions, answered from memory. Which of the spots you have in mind are behind glass and already asked for, and which are lampposts you have assumed? And whose name is going at the bottom?

Then the two lines, because a cue is what separates a plan from an intention.

If it is Thursday 6 August and I am walking back from the station anyway, then I will do the route once with no posters and mark every waiting place on my phone.

If [the likeliest obstacle: nobody free to come with me, the union policy turns out to need a stamp, the print shop is shut], then I will [your pre-written response to it].