Bad England in England

I think it was the second day that I found this but when I was in Tottenham Court the other day, I decided to take a photo. Before crossing the road at every intersection, you’ll see instructions on where to look for oncoming traffic.


It looked like they couldn’t be bothered correcting it; perhaps for several reasons including costs.
One time I witness road works in progress. I’ve witness road works many times but you’ll notice in that London (and perhaps even the whole of the UK), they’re quite big on building structures using long lasting materials. For example, almost every house or apartment I’ve seen is made of bricks/concrete while in NZ, we use things like weatherboards. I’m not saying weatherboards will not last long but just look at the buildings here in London and a lot of them are very very old and they are still standing.

So going back to the road works, I saw the guys painting the road after laying down some asphalt. The paint used here for road signs are not spray painted like they are in NZ. They use some kind of hard plastic like material cut into strips and which are then exposed to flame torches. The melted product sticks to the road and I don’t think they ever come off. Which would explain why the incorrectly spelt road label above was never corrected. Motorcyclists in NZ often talk about the dangers of riding on the painted strips (i.e. they are slippery and dangerous), I can only imagine how slippery these ones are. There are some roads where the labels are made of several layers. Maybe they don’t resurface roads here in London town.