Outdoor Advertising and Improvement in the Nineteenth Century

This chapter deals with the crystallisation of opposition to outdoor advertising in the first half of the nineteenth century. It argues that the common types of outdoor advertising—largely posters, vans and sandwich boards—caused serious nuisance on urban streets, attracting the ire of local government. Whilst it shows that cultural commentators of the period objected, the chief opposition came from government regimes of improvement that sought to eliminate nuisance and ‘civilise’ outdoor advertising in a city that was increasingly crowded and disordered. Examples of initial forays into advertising control were thus prosaic, positioning outdoor advertising as a material nuisance in bustling streetscapes, rather than as an aesthetic problem. The chapter also shows the response of the advertising trade, which was to organise and consolidate the industry, promoting the advertising station over less ordered forms of postering to bring them in line with governmental desires to alleviate the chaotic and disruptive nature of outdoor advertising.