Dear LPG,

I hope that when we get to the age where reading the pages of this website becomes of interest, all of us older people have experienced the odd visual eccentricity as we have been on our local and global travels. Many of them commemorate people of note who have origins in the local area; others are designed to make us think, while others are beautiful when we are discussing the artistic pieces of street art around us.   

But the saddest thing is that the local pieces tend to have initial significance and spark a little interest when they first appear. In contrast, we humans tend to have an overlying capacity for adapting, and after our first look at such pieces, we readily accept and ignore the ones we pass every day. 

I saw a couple of short-term items that only the old or very young are likely to notice simply because they have so much more time than those drowning in work and providing for their families. I think that to appreciate the significance of such artwork fully, it is necessary to walk rather than drive or pass it on public transport, which are also activities that perhaps the young and old are more likely to practise. The strategic placing of these two pieces will undoubtedly reduce the opportunity to observe them, so I felt the need to employ my mobile smartphone to take a picture and bring their limited life to the fore.  

I want to draw your attention to two of the smaller and more short-term pieces I came across recently during a walk around the borough. I call them the ‘Study of a somewhat publicly private convenience by day’ and the ‘Study of a collection of discarded tyres by night’.

I am sure the ‘artists’ who left them on our streets did so hoping that the council could calculate the optimum time before their thought-provoking usefulness might have expired.  

But it makes you think… 

SA, Catford 

LPG found some examples of more conventional Lewisham Street art…

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