Wrong approach to graffiti battle

Councillors Eden-green and Dixey are quite right to say that graffiti and litter blight has made Canterbury an “urban slum” [Gazette, January 30]. The council claims to be doing everything it can, even employing an environment officer, one of whose duties is to remove tags, and recently employing a senior officer tasked with finding strategies to deal with graffiti, but the situation just gets worse.

Much of the graffiti has been here for months, some for years, and the council seems unable even to get rid of it from its own property. Catching the odd offender is useful but will not solve the problem. There is a particular demographic aspect in this: young and mostly male, tags are their individual signature, displaying how ‘big’ and ‘cool’ they are. They are prepared to travel some distance to display their tags.

In the 1990s when I was working at the city council, there was a similar outbreak of graffiti. Our research showed that the only way to deal with these tags is to remove them as soon as they appear. With financial backing from the city council, the Canterbury City Centre Partnership employed contractors to carry out twice weekly night patrols of the city centre and to remove every tag that appeared. The campaign was successful and the city was blight-free for some considerable time. There is no point in tagging if no one sees it.

The longer the graffiti stays, the more people, especially young people, become inured to it and think it an acceptable part of modern life.

What kind of image do the council and business groups in the town want for Canterbury? The graffiti is a huge embarrassment and I certainly would not encourage anybody to visit Canterbury at the moment.

The money spent on employing staff would be far better spent in direct action.

Mansell Jagger

Former Director of Planning Harbledown, Canterbury