Art on the Tube is bad news for small businesses
There are no longer any adverts as you go down the escalator at Bethnal Green tube station. What there is instead is this. Now, I know there's a recession on and that advertising is therefore harder to come by than it has been. However, I'm deeply unimpressed by this and not just because it is described by TfL as "Art on the Tube". It's somebody's oeuvre. I'm not going to be rude about it. Before this artwork appeared there were a series of A3-ish sized adverts in frames up and down the escalators. When I rang TfL to ask what had happened, this is the response I got: "The posters were a non-standard size for the advertising industry. Due to the constraints at the station the standard sized panels could not be installed." I attempted to unpack this with Sylvia from the press office, since it was a little, shall we say, opaque. But it was apparent that she was reading an answer she'd received from someone else and wasn't able to expl...