I paid the area around North Strathfield train station a visit on Friday. To my untutored eye, it easily looks like the most heavily vandalised area in the whole of Canada Bay. I don't venture out that way often, so I was quite shocked at how bad some of it was.
The Council meeting to discuss the Graffiti Management Strategy that I went to included a business owner from this area. He talked about the money that he'd spent on installing roller shutters on the front windows, and more money that had been spent on cleaning them. He was quite upfront about the disgust and annoyance that he felt. He is an example of the sort of small businessman that is bearing the brunt of graffiti - in that he has to pay for cleaning and avoidance measures out of his own pocket.
A couple of shops on the main street opposite the station. Note that the letter box has been defaced, along with the awning out the front of the mini mart. The shop behind the letter box has had its windows etched quite badly, and there is some graffiti on the wall between the damaged windows.
A few doors up - the office of
Basketball NSW. They should be ashamed of themselves in letting their shopfront deteriorate this badly.
Update - I found the
Basketball NSW web site and sent this email to the admin manager:
I went past your offices in Queen St last week and couldn't believe the state of your offices. I'm not sure what kind of image you are trying to project, but it is not a particularly professional one.
I suggest you send someone out the front with a bucket of paint to clean up the graffiti. I couldn't tell if you were running an office from that site, or a squat for crack dealing junkies.
If you are particularly hard pressed to find someone to do it, I suggest you try the Canada Bay Council graffiti removal service.
http://www.canadabay.nsw.gov.au/business_services/information_for_businesses/graffiti_removal_service.html
If you want to know whether it is any good, walk down the road to JMR Creative and ask them about it.
A view of the shop next to Basketball NSW - it has also been heavily tagged.
Another view of the Basketball NSW premises - note that even the light poles have been defaced (more on that in a minute).
The fence alongside a house around the corner.
Almost every vertical surface in this area has been defaced - including all the Telstra posts.
Another example of a defaced light post.
I went along an alley behind the shops and photographed the rear of the premises.
The first shop.
The second shop.
The third shop.
The fourth shop.
The fifth shop - the only one showing no graffiti, but it also looks to be freshly painted.
The sixth shop.
At that point, the battery in my camera went flat. The rear of every shop but one had been defaced.
The bike lockers outside the train station.
Another view of the bike lockers.
As for the light posts, I went down the street to the underpass and counted all the defaced poles and the total number of poles. I found that 75% of the poles showed some sign of vandalism, although a lot of it was faded, and the black paint favoured by taggers does not show up well against a wooden pole. Still, it was an awful lot of defaced poles.
It only took six months, and numerous requests and followups - but in the end, we got a result. Some organisations are more painful to deal with that others, but most come around in the end. All you need is a truckload of tenacity and the ability to grit your teeth in the face of an obstinate unwillingness by some people to do anything about their image and their work environment.
