Hold The Handrail – TfL's horribly confusing safety posters

I can't be the only one who finds Transport for London's safety posters rather ill-conceived. TfL's graphics do not enhance their messages – their posters are confusing.

The design team seems to have overlooked that many people who use the network are visitors and tourists from other countries for whom english is not their fist language, and it's no good mentioning a handrail in big bold capital letters if the handrail mentioned is not clearly indicated in the image, whether you understand the language or not. 

A depiction of a hand actually holding the handrail might have been a nice idea, with the words placed in such a way they they highlight/enhance the handrail in the graphic. I'm also surprised that none of the posters include a pleasantry or an explanation, such as 'For your safety, please hold the handrail'. 

Let's start with the buses – signs like these can be found at the top of the stairs on many routes:

At first glance, it appears to say, HOLD HANDRAIL. Ah, but no, there's a tiny little THE at the end of the stairs, looking like an afterthought. The message might make better sense if the 'designers' had aligned the words with the handrail(s) and, for clarity, added a hand holding the handrail at bottom left. Note the handrail is here depicted in yellow, but on this bus the rails are orange. 

A similar version of this can be found on the underground where the handrail is coloured black as per the moving handrails on escalators yet, but they've painted the side walls blue when, in reality, they are are actually silver colour. 

The handrails in the graphic are barely noticeable at all. The poster seems to be luring us into a golden sunset where a little white 'the' is waiting to take us down a fiery tunnel (to hell?). 

Travelling down the long Elizabeth Line escalators at Farringdon, I spotted this animated version which starts with the world HOLD in roman, then it becomes italicised as HANDRAIL appears across it in white. It wasn't until I looked at these pics that I noticed the word 'the' again hiding in there. 

These signs are bonkers. Someone took the time to design this. And someone else approved it. It beggars belief. 

I think at some point they realised that these posters make scant sense, so someone had the bright idea to link the word HOLD with the visual depiction of the handrail, thus we see a series of posters where the O appears like a ring on a curtain rail that, being fully circular, only slides up and down or laterally but can't let go of the rail, as shown below within the carriages:

Call me pedantic(!) but I am not sure many of us refer to a vertical pole as a handrail.

Moving on, they also created a series of alternative poster designs on this theme, as shown here below at Holborn station. These dispense with the chunky drop shadow letters, as shown above, instead using TfL's Johnston typeface:

These posters depict a mysterious androgynous figure, almost silhouetted at top right, who has speared a big Polo mint and is about to spin it around. Holborn station is slathered in signs of this design – on the platforms, in the tunnels that connect the Central and Piccadilly lines, before the escalators and pasted into the gaps between the escalators, as shown here, viewed from the bottom, the top and mid-journey (ascending):

Heading up towards street level, I struggled to snap the second two pics above. It's almost impossible to read these things as you glide past – you'd need to be at least 8ft tall to be able focus on them, let alone be able to read the content. The message is therefore lost in transit. 

At street-level, on the concourse, three of them are pasted on the wall:

I'd love to have been a fly on the wall during the creative brief for this. I think the design department was first tasked to create the blue poster and, when someone slipped over on a wet floor, they adapted it for the green version and then realised that people with bags are an issue and so the purple poster was made. Somewhere in the middle of all this, the orange Don't Rush version was created.

If you read the smaller text here, you'll see that some of these posters advise us to use the lift which, here at Holborn, is misleading in two respects; 1) you might already be half way up an escalator at this point, and 2) there are no lifts at this station. Or stairs for that matter. 

The purple poster irks me the most and I wonder what message do they think they have conveyed here?  Considering how foreboding this is, what with the colour scheme of black and purple and that shady figure, it looks more like they are telling us to watch out for luggage thieves who might steal our suitcases. Or, perhaps that dark figure is supposed to be you/me, suggesting that we should hold the handrail whilst we slide our luggage ahead of us down the pole?!  Hmm, letting go of the bag is not a good idea and this is why I think another poster was created on this subject (see further down).

Got Luggage? Eurgh!  This kind of short question-heading is everywhere these days and I really don't like it. It requires us to do an upward inflection at the end when we notice the question mark! Add to that, the use of 'got/get' which is lazy and can always be replaced with something better.

On the subject of luggage, this next one is sublime, for all the wrong reasons...

The design style here is quite similar to the one on the buses. However, here, the two words that have been given the most visual emphasis are 'the' and 'too' – leaving the instruction to 'hold the handrail' lost within a red wheelie bag that seems to tell us that we should place our luggage sideways across the footplate, thus blocking up the space for anyone who wants to walk past. It certainly doesn't show us to hold the bag and the handrail which is what they are trying to say here. 

Ah, but, hold on, (see what I did there?!) this wheelie bag seems have made the journey up the escalator all by itself. Note that the handle is depicted as being away from us, suggesting that this is not our bag but the property of some poor soul who has let go of their luggage but is now out of view somewhere on the concourse at the bottom!

As regards the typography on this one, the message to 'hold the handrail' is completely muddled. It's as if someone recalled Katherine Hamnett's T-shirts back in the 1980s but didn't grasp that they work because the largest words in those statements were the ones that were the most important. Instead, here we see HOLD, the most important word, in italics on across the top of the bag, black on red (and vice-versa) being the worst pairing of colours for legibility. Instead, 'the handrail too' in white letters stands out as some kind of cryptic puzzle.

I was going to continue here and address some of TfL's other posters of this type but I think I will save them for another day.

In the meantime, please hold onto your hats and bags and handrails, in anticipation.

……

Update: w/c11Nov: I found another one – this is within the below ground tunnels at Waterloo:

This poster depicts a spiral staircase, yet is placed at the top of a straight flight of stairs. Note the depiction of teeny tiny treads on the stairs and I'm also querying the rotation of the spiral being as the one at my local station at Holloway Road curves round and down to the left, making it a clockwise descent. Do they vary station to station?

Puzzled by a London Puzzle at Christmas

Last week, on Christmas Day afternoon, I cleared the table, poured the wine, and got to work on a PuzzleMap jigsaw of London that I'd found whilst rummaging at a charity sale last summer.
I am happy to report that all the pieces were in the box but, oh boy did I find some other things amiss.

The completed puzzle – 1000 pieces, 19"x27"

Having looked online at reviews for this item people say they really enjoyed doing the puzzle but found the image on the box lid hard to follow because it shows additional map at the left and right sides.
Well, never mind that, dear WordSearchers, you should be more concerned with the inaccuracy of the place- and road-names and the confusion as to why so many insignificant streets, parks and locations have been identified as worthy for inclusion yet other, more important places, have been omitted, and where are the tube station signs for Oxford Circus, Bond Street, Chancery Lane and Hyde Park Corner? Ditto Marylebone and Fenchurch Street rail stations? Did they just fall off the map?!

A crash (one of many) at the junction of Lyall Street and Chester Row.  South Kensington tube stain has been renamed (who knew?) and there optional spellings for the Jameses. In the fourth pic four street names include extra/repeated letters: Roseberry St (+r), Skinnner St (+n), Centrral St (+r) and St. Johns St (+s).

Barnard Park is depicted as a very important district in North London, almost as big as Islington, and Barnsbury Rd has been mis-named Barnsbury St, a silly error because there is a Barnsbury Street further north which runs east-west. In central London alternative spellings are given for the gallery and the body of water that separates the parks, and South Carriage Drive has been mis-named as Carriage Rd. The third pic shows Leather St and Halton Gdn which everyone knows should be Leather Lane and Hatton Garden. Note also in that pic that Stanland Street, a quiet back street, has been selected for inclusion. Ditto Jockey's Fields (which needs no possessive). The last pic shows examples of names without Rd/St/Av endings; Marshalsea (Rd) and Tabard (St) – I could have included plenty more pics of those; Bressenden (Gdns), Grt Percy (St), Appold (St), Wood (St), Vauxhall (St), Lombard (St)...

More errors include (with the correct spelling in brackets), Townshed Rd (Townshend), Edgeware Station (Edgware), Stanland St (Sandland) Plender Rd should be St and, probably my favourite, Long Acre St (delete St).
You probably think I have studied the whole thing like a pedantic sub-editor with a fine-tooth comb – Nope! – I just noticed these things as I was doing it. It wasn't until I'd spotted about ten, when I had barely completed half of the puzzle, that I started jotting them down and then taking photos – this explains the changes in picture quality depending on available light at the time. I have spotted errors mainly in the central and north-east areas because I am not so knowledgeable about the south and south-west, so there must be lots more I don't know about.
I wonder, how did all these silly errors slip though the net? It is fairly evident to me that it wasn't checked before it was printed. Existing maps such as the A-Z can't just be scanned and copied; there are copyright issues and so this had to be redrawn from scratch and, I suggest, in a hurry. Perhaps some of the mis-spellings might actually be mis-hearings with one person shouting the street names to another who typed them onto the map. Or, perhaps it was created as a task on The Apprentice?!!

The blurb on the box, and online, reads: 

• Learn the layouts of famous cities piece by piece as you assemble our PuzzleMaps with friends and family. 
• Perhaps you are planning a trip and want to orient yourself before you go, or perhaps you want to remind yourself of favorite corners and neighborhoods you have explored on foot.  
• The perfect gift for the person planning a first trip or the world traveler who knows a world class city from the ground up. 
• Made from high quality laminated paper board
• PuzzleMaps will challenge the best puzzlers, inspire curious minds interested in far off places and delight world travelers.
• PuzzleMaps are made from post-consumer recycled material

Is it me, or does last bullet seem to contradict the fourth?
You may have noticed the American spellings here and on the map itself such as Av as the abbreviation for Avenue – we Brits prefer to use Ave. Design Ideas Limited, the company that produced this puzzle, is indeed American and, according to the box, is based in Springfield*, Illinois. But they must have internet access over there and they must have access to maps of London. It's inexcusable. Though quite amusing too.
I am going to leave the finished puzzle on my table for a while yet – it sort of pleases me in a supercilious "I know better" way. Perhaps I'll write to Design Ideas and suggest that it could form the basis if another type of puzzle all on its own; a sort of cartographic spot-the-diffence as part of a range called MapMistakes or StreetSearch...?!

*Incidentally, Springfield is not just home of the Simpsons, it's [something like] one of the most common town names in the U.S. – probably why Matt Groening chose to use it. 

Misinformation at Camden Lock Stables Market

Whilst wandering around Camden a few weeks back I stopped to read an informative hoarding along the site that is being developed immediately south of Hawley Road in Chalk Farm Road. It was all about Camden's history and contained some interesting little snippets with web addresses for further info.
I crossed the road and entered the market building, wandering around assessing how things have changed so much in the past 30 years since I used to go there on a regular basis in the 1990s. I stopped for a while near the steps that lead down to the underground old stables markets and I watched people posing with that dreadful statue of Amy Winehouse. It was then I noticed the words above the tunnel: "STABLES MARKET SINCE1854"
Whaaaaat?!  No no no!!!

Pics from this year, left (above tunnels, near Amy) and right (above northern exit to Roundhouse), plus an older pic in the centre

Dear reader, there have been stables for the railways' horses, and a hospital for them since 1854 but the market didn't arrive for another 120 years. Yes, 120 years later.
Back at home I started searching for further ref thinking I must have mis-read or mis-understood something.
It gets worse...

I found that not only are the current signs misleading, they are replacements of old signs (see above, top left and centre and compare them with the first three pics) and so a chance to clarify the meaning of the date as referring only to the site and not the market had been missed.
Further to that, in many cases the date has obviously been squeezed in as an add-on/afterthought as if the marketing team decided that a bit of Victorian would somehow boost sales (more about this at the end).

So let's get this straight... Pay attention please...
Pre-1972 the area that is now called "Camden Lock" was a ramshackle collection of old warehouses with a timber wharf. Some of those buildings were renovated to create workshops and. In 1973 the tenants opened their doors to the public and these included five Hornsey College of Art students who made jewellery. In 1974 they started a small crafts market on the bare ground next to the road immediately to the north of the canal bridge. The success of that venture attracted more designer-makers to the area turning Camden into a haven for artisans and artists.

The hoarding in Chalk Farm Road gives the correct date ...  and another mistake – notice that the figure 8 is the wrong way round – we are seeing its underside!  

With its rapid success, what started out as a small Saturday market quickly expanded to cover a wider area spreading into other adjacent spaces, such as empty railway arches and offices. The old horse hospital alongside Chalk Farm Road became the home of the antique and bric-a-brac trade. However, the labyrinth of subterranean tunnels and stables remained mostly unused until the turn of the century.
In fact you can get most of this info from Camden Market's official website. Though there are a few tenuous things in there including calling a AmyW a 'Camdonite'. Er? Where is Camdon?
for reference I have been checking through my two editions of "The Markets Of London", first printed 1983. The 1989 revised version reads of Camden Lock: "... making things and selling them is back in fashion; 'small is beautiful' seems to be here to stay... it is all very relaxed and pleasantly informal..." Not much of that is relevant now. Sad.
Camden Market is one big street food dispensary now. And Chalk Farm road is one big shoe shop). Most of the independent designer-maker, vintage or specialised stalls have moved on or given up.
Camden is now a market for the tourists now who, once they have taken that Amy Wine house pic and a couple of selfies to tick off the London experience from 'to do' list as they truffle down their stir fry at one of the picnic tables that have replaced the stalls.
The oldest market in Camden is in Inverness Street which probably started in 1860 when it was moved from the main road into the side street.