Tourism bosses lock horns with lovers over ritual
It is, they claim, a tradition dating back millennia – a declaration of love designated by attaching a padlock to a monument and throwing away the key. Except it’s not.
Tourism chiefs are growing increasingly exasperated at the “love locks” trend, and are urging visitors to leave their locks at home or face fines.
“When you look online, there are plenty of places that claim the tradition goes back thousands of years,” said Dr Ceri Houlbrook, a lecturer in folklore and history at the University of Hertfordshire in England. “But when I started digging, I found that there is no evidence to suggest it’s older than the 1980s. Even then, it was nothing to do with love.”
Houlbrook’s research traced the tradition to Pecs in Hungary, where padlocks attached to a public fence were a sign not of love but of punk dissent towards Soviet rule.
“It was really in 2006 and Federico Moccia’s Ho Voglia di Te (I Want You), the Italian teenage romance novel, that did it,” she said. In it, the characters attach a padlock to a lamppost near the Milvio Bridge in Rome and then throw the key in the Tevere (Tiber) River.
“Moccia claims to have just invented the custom,” Houlbrook said. “The novel was so popular, people began imitating the practice.
“It just grew from there. How rapidly it spread is quite amazing.”
Houlbrook now has a database of more than 500 love lock sites across 65 countries on every continent bar Antarctica. The plague of the locks has caused problems across the world, from London and Melbourne to New York and Paris.
“Love is strong, but it is not as strong as our boltcutters,” Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona says in a new social media campaign against the locks.
Tom Jenkins, head of Etoa, the European tourism association, said: “As declarations of lasting love go, the locks are a strangely ephemeral way of showing it.
“More and more destinations are waking up to the fact that if they want this to stop, they need to take them away immediately. It’s become like graffiti – people copy each other.”
In Bakewell, in northern England’s Peak District, the council is seeking to remove the locks placed on the Wye Bridge – known as “love lock bridge” – as it looks to carry out maintenance work.
In Newcastle, after about 5000 locks were removed from the High Level Bridge over the Tyne, people tried to put new ones back on. Anyone crossing Westminster Bridge, Tower Bridge or the Millennium Bridge in London can expect to see locks attached.
Destinations are becoming increasingly aggressive in their deterrents. Officials in New York issue fines of up to US$100 (NZ$160) to anyone caught love locking.
The New York City Department of Transportation removed more than 11,000 locks from the Brooklyn Bridge in 2015. The same year, authorities in Melbourne removed 20,000 locks from the Evan Walker Bridge after their weight began to cause structural problems.
In Paris, parts of the Pont des Arts, a pedestrian bridge over the Seine, collapsed in 2014 because of the weight of locks. This year, hundreds of padlocks were removed from fences around Montmartre.
“The locks are a form of both vandalism and litter,” said Jeff Stebbins, a spokesman for Grand Canyon National Park. The park is grappling with the fact that many couples who attach locks then discard the keys in the park. At many bridges, keys are thrown into the river below.
Houlbrook believes the trend is past its peak, given that a younger, “more cynical” generation would not dream of doing something so “corny”.
Tourism chiefs are adjusting, often by installing structures for tourists to attach locks. Others have installed containers for people to put the keys in.
“There are ways around it,” Houlbrook said. “Destinations need to adapt.”