A new way of tackling graffiti?

Has Greenwich Council come up with a new way of deterring tagging and graffiti? Thanks to a reader's email it looks like they might have, of course it might just be some enterprising local resident as well? Still, let's hope it works. These photos was taken near Vanburgh Road.

If it does turn out not to be the Council's Cleansweep department, but instead someone else then here at Greenwich Watch we wait for the Council's legal department to send the copy-write threats to anyone they think is behind it. Its not like they haven't done that before...

UPDATE: Looks like we're slow today, this has already appeared at another local blog, the Greenwich Phantom.

Trying to clear up a mis-understanding
There has been some talk about our last post both on this site and another local blog, Greenwich Phantom. Various people have accused us of "stealing" photos and stories. Whilst is it difficult to prove innocence we will try, as we know that credibility is all you have on the internet. As the Screenshot below shows we did receive an email and assumed that the sender was the person who took the photos, may not have been the case, if it wasn't we are of course sorry to the person who did take the photos. In the screenshot we have blocked out the email address of the sender of this email as we do not know if this email was sent as a joke, a misunderstanding or to try to lead us down the wrong path.



If you look at the time stamp on the email and compare it to the time that a similar post appeared on the Greenwich Phantom you will see that it was a couple of hours later. Now this is where the Greenwich Phantom may get their knickers in a twist again, we do not consult their blog before posting every post. Nor are we what you would call a regular reader, again, sorry but we're busy. Our post did not go up on Saturday due to paid work getting in the way and so it was not until Monday that the post went up. We do of course attempt to check what we can but only from sources which we would guess would be relevant, and so we did not check the Phantom's blog this time.

As soon as it was pointed out that the photos appeared on another site we posted an update pointing people in the right direction and other than that there is little we can do, we won't be taking the post down as we have never deleted a post or comment and we're not about to start now.

So, to the Greenwich Phantom and the real photographer, no we did not nick your story or photos we were emailed them and then posted them in good faith. We have now pointed people in the right direction and explained what happened. We are sorry if you do not accept that but if you have a problem in the future how about you come to us rather than trying to fire a warning shot on your blog? We took steps as soon as we could to do something about it but there is of course a time lag. As it would appear that they did appear first on your blog we congratulate you on getting the photos and on the photographer as well, they did make us laugh.

Now on to the real point of all of this, isn't it a shame that a nice little part of the world is always being vandalized?

Council prepares for logo rebranding?

Oh yes we're back, we hope the Council didn't think they would be getting rid of us that easily. After ten glorious days in the Costa Del Cheap Seats we have returned fully relaxed and invective free (we fired him... again). What news do we bring? Well just a little thing that we noticed whilst we walked through the detritus that is Woolwich. We have reason to believe that the Council is about to go through a rebranding exercise. Why would we think this a reader may ask?

Well, we spotted someone walking along with a Greenwich Council branded plastic carrier bag (greener Greenwich huh?). Whilst the bag appeared to have the three lines that nearly got us sued once buried in the corner, the bag itself was blazoned with the word Greenwich - in official Greenwich green (which they claimed they owned) - along with a rather nifty sort lightening flash streak going upwards.

It kind of looked like a projectile sneeze to us, but then what do we know about graphic design? We reckon, if the idiotic scrawl of a tree the Tories decided to have cost them £60,000 then this scrawl, being even more childish, probably cost at least the same. Whether it really is a new logo rebranding we do not - as yet - know, but they still spent money on it.

Council legal department threatens us

It appears that the Council has had enough. We've received an email from Russell Power, the head of Legal, demanding that we stop using a logo similar to the Council's and, bizarrely, the same font and colour. Apparently, the use of "a rectangle shape with three lines running through it" as well as using "the same colour" and "the same style of lettering and the same size of font" makes it look like the sites are linked.

Russell, bless him, has written to Blogger so no doubt we shall receive an email from them shortly. Apparently the primary concern is people might think there is a "link between the Council and [the] blog".

Clearly the last story about Chris Roberts getting shouted at by Ken Livingstone must have made Roberts so angry he got on the phone to Legal. We hope the IT department has enough monitors to cope!

We have taken what Mr Powers has said and acted accordingly though. You will see above that there is no longer a rectangle, you will of course also note that there are only two lines and they are NOT the same as the Council's. We've also changed the legend to ensure no one get's confused. We're not going to change our use of the font though as it's a standard font available everywhere, as for the colour, we quite like green.

We're glad the Council takes fair comment and freedom of speech so seriously.