Observations on waiting for the bus

On the cover of this summer's hit album A Grand Don't Come For Free, Mike Skinner (aka The Streets) is shown leaning disconsolately against the inside wall of a bus shelter, with its pitched roof and peeling green paint. The image is dated; you won't see many shelters like that nowadays. There has been a bus-shelter revolution. The shelter is no longer a functional piece of architecture, designed to keep you out of the wind and rain; still less is it a civic space. It is a marketing opportunity.

Many shelters are now supplied by just two firms, Clear Channel Adshel and JCDecaux, which have become global brands since the 1990s, winning thousands of street furniture contracts across the world. They are now among those fighting it out for the £100m Transport for London bus-shelter contract. They supply and maintain the shelters free of charge, in return for the right to display advertising in "six-sheet" panels (now known as "Adshels", and also used at supermarkets and motorway service stations). Bus shelters usually have just one panel, but on prime sites in city centres they often have two or more, with rotating displays to maximise revenue.

Bus-shelter ads began in Leeds in the 1970s. The boom began in the late 1980s with the installation of illuminated posters, "Adshel Superlites", and the advent of a data system called Oscar (Outdoor Site Classification and Audience Research), providing information on vehicle and pedestrian traffic. These innovations allowed advertisers to direct their campaigns beyond the unglamorous bus user. The ads are now also aimed at passing pedestrians and motorists, which is why they are big on visual impact and short on copy. The shelters often have a cantilevered roof or windbreak ends extending only part of their width, so that the ads can be seen by everyone.

Adshel has even experimented with moving and talking ads triggered by motion sensors. As they waited for buses, Lancastrians could watch the Blackburn football manager, Graeme Souness, urging them to support their local team: "Hey you! You there on the bench. What are you doing just sitting there?" Others, shivering in the cold last winter, were comforted by "dynamic image" posters in which steam rose from Heinz soup.

As local councils contract out ever more of their public services, street furniture is becoming one of the areas of fastest growth for the advertising industry. Today the bus shelter, tomorrow the automatic toilet, the bench and the litter bin.

Joe Moran is a lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University

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