I get a few emails and messages about Dartmouth road, a lot of people seem to think it's shabby. I'm not saying that's not my view, merely the views of others.

I will eventually get around to doing a bit of 'What if Forest Hill' but I have a few other things to do first as this is something we do in my spare time, unpaid, because we like doing it. I will soon be a local business as we are setting up on our own as an ecologically friendly design & branding company after 18 years of working on brands big and small. We liked working with Fairtrade, charities and smaller producers like Loseley/Hill Station, Lyme Regis Foods, Berry Brothers & rudd more than the likes of Tesco, Aol, Axa, Natwest or large multi-nationals (although some of those were ok like Waitrose who were brilliant to work with). We want to use some of the profits for good causes and where possible do work locally. The what if project is just that though. A project. That we do. Unpaid. Because we believe in this.[/align]

I think it's important to raise the design of shop fronts as a topic and get people talking about it as it has been ignored (or so it seems) by the council. There are very good guildelines for shop front design, created (and paid for by) Lewisham council. It's an excellent document. Yet of the shop owners I have met, no-one knew about them, very few had met the town centre manager (unless she told them to move their A-boards outside their shops they seem to have little or no contact). Why pay for a document of that type, or a document like the Forest Hill masterplan when you don't enforce or carry out what they say?

Even people who work for the council didn't know the guidelines existed, I found them when I met one of the guys behind the Sydenham High Street Improvement Scheme. I stuck pdf's and a link to them on the 'What if Sydenham' blog if you are interested:

LEWISHAM SHOP FRONT GUIDELINES/

Remember how beautiful Forest Hill looked in all those old photo's? Our streetscapes were far less cluttered back then. Shopfronts were sympathetic to the building, signage was crafted by people who knew what they were doing, shops were kept neat and tidy, goods were neatly displayed. There wasn't the amount of clutter and signage back then that we have now and there was, dare I say it, more taste.

Amazingly it's more expensive to rip out an original shop front than install a generic, nasty metal one.

It's more expensive to put up an illuminated back lit plastic sign (from about £1000) than signwriting and raised acrylic letters (raised letters cost from about £8 each plus fitting).

Our high streets used to be beautiful. Yet we spend thousands making them ugly.