In some ways London is so modern and advanced compared to my home town – we have nothing as convenient as an Oyster Card, Online shopping is years ahead and London embraces multiculturalism in a way I wish the rest of the world would.   On the other hand, there are some areas – I guess because it is harder to change a society that’s been around so long – where London is still living in the past.  I’m surprised how much of London is still paper based (banks especially) and I find companies still like sending letters, rather than emails.

But a lot of this slow-to-change stuff is great actually, and one total charmer is the regular news updates from The Evening Standard.  Basically The Evening Standard has little stalls set up at the entrance to every tube station where they hand out (used to sell*) their paper every evening.   Throughout the day however they are constantly updating their customers on the latest headlines using their blue and white signboards.  The one I saw today was printed, but usually they are just written out by the stall guy in permanent marker.

I keep coming back to this concept of London as a big bad city, but things like this – a major circulation paper using a bunch of blokes writing on big pieces of paper as a major selling tool – make me think of London as almost romantic.  And the guys are so…. British.  The ones I see are big burly white guys wearing cabbie hats and sporting thick accents – from somewhere I’m yet to discover in the UK.  It’s beautiful, personal, brash, gritty (what a gay word).  It’s something you would never see in Sydney because we didn’t exist in the time where paperboys cried out the headlines, we never had that growth to go through.  Plus it just doesn’t seem very economically viable in this day and age – imagine suggesting in today’s corporate boardroom that your advertising budget should be spent in this way.  Well, I think Sydney missed out.  Absolutely LOVE IT.

Of course today’s headlines are all about the forecast snow dump expected from tomorrow.  Stay tuned!

* For anyone who’s interested and doesn’t already know, up until October 2009 The Evening Standard cost 50p and The London Paper and The London Lite were distributed for free (there are the papers famous for being so hot off the press you get black fingers from reading them).  These free London dailies ceased publication in around November 2009 (Friday 13th November for the London Lite) and The Evening Standard took up the gap in the market.

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