“Rash of Hutt Road Posters”

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 174, 20 April 1937, Page 11

“Rash of Hutt Road Posters”

Sir,—l was glad to read in "The Domiuion” that someone has seen fit to protest against the increasing disfigurement of the Hutt Road (especially toward tue city eml) by garish, daring ousters. On Saturday 1 bad occasion to drive a visiting friend to some of the Hutt \ alley beauty spots. He was delighted with what eventually 1 was able to show him. but at the beginning of the journey he laughingly asked me whether 1 had taken him out to show him something or sell him something. The strauge thing about this rash of posters now spreading on the Hutt Road is that many of the hoardings have at their tops the letters "N.Z.R.” It would be bad enough if the posters themselves contained railways publicity, but most of them advertise commercial products, including a make of motor-car, which presumably takes a certain amount of custom away from the railways. In other words, the Government itself is in the hoarding business, advertising products which compete against itself, and carrying out a beauty-spot desecration policy, which several members of Cabinet have condemned from time to time in public utterances. Furthermore, apart from any question of beauty or ugliness, the whole principle of advertisements being bellowed at motorists (the posters are placed primarily for them) is wrong. When a driver is approaching an overhead bridge, with traffic whizzing to and fro beneath it. he does not want to be reading from letters three feet high in exhortation to buy someone’s tea, or tires or boot polish. He should have his eyes on the road. Similarly, at a difficult junction, if any poster be deemed suitable it would be one warning him to expect traffic from the right or left, as the case may be, not a quadruple-life-size, reproduction of a half-nude girl grinning at all-comers. These and other posters should come down. Their presence cannot be defended on any grounds other than those of the crudest commercialism, and even these grounds lack substance when it is considered that New Zealand is catered for with an adequacy that amounts almost to prodigality by every conceivable medium of legitimate advertising.—l am, etc., EYESORE Wellington, April 19.