Piccadilly Circus was once the 'best display of popular art anywhere in London'. What happened?

A famous 1966 guide described Piccadilly Circus as the real centre of London and the focus of everyone’s night out. The entry describes how the buildings are “covered with illuminated signs which are one of the best, least self-conscious displays of popular art anywhere in London”.

In 1998 a digital projector was used at Piccadilly Circus for the Coke advert, providing its first digital billboard, and through the 2000s there was a gradual move to LEDs. By 2011, no neon lamps remained. Wikipedia points out that “the number of signs has reduced over the years as the rental costs have increased”, showing that even advertising is a victim of the city’s landlords.

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Although, over the same period of digitisation, the difference between advertising and the city’s inhabitants is also something that has eroded. 

In January 2017 the six remaining screens were turned off to be combined into one ultra-high-definition curved Daktronics display called The Piccadilly Lights, which is a global advertising icon according to its creators Ocean Outdoor, who “specialise in the art of the outdoor”, by turning “spaces into places through a deep understanding of environments”.

They also have screens on Carnaby Street, Leicester Square and many other locations around London.  

Sat on the steps of the statue of Eros late one evening, the glare of the screen making me feel like a four-year-old sitting too close to the TV, my mind cast back to 2004 when I was still fairly new to London and for some reason had gone to an open mic night at a comedy club.

The comedy club was somewhere between Deptford and Greenwich, and the acts were not good. On stage, adding to the bad feelings in the room, was a manic compere. His act was shouty and administrative, wielding his power to stop other acts when he thought they’d gone on long enough, then bringing on the next ones.

He was swearing a lot, as I remember most of the acts were that evening, often at the audience after their primary and only material had failed.  

Amidst this regrettable atmosphere, a middle-aged man with a black beret, dark glasses and a long leather coat came onto the stage. He took the microphone from its stand, pulled up a chair, and sat down, one leg crossed over the other. He looked like a slightly more artsy Morpheus from The Matrix, and in a silky smooth American accent he began, “You get all kinds of television nowadays. You’ve got your satellite TV, your remote-controlled TV, your digital TV, your plasma TV, your cathode-ray tube TV, your RPTV… And you’ve got your terrestrial TV, your HDTV, your internet TV, your LCD TV.”

The list was long and soothing to listen to, but then it ended abruptly with him blurting out, “And the next thing you know, I get back to my hotel room, and the TV’s turned itself on and was jacking itself off.” The room remained silent, and the compere quickly stepped in, “Right, get off.” And after a nod of understanding, the man stood up and shambled off the stage to take his seat back in the audience. 

I’ve never been inside the theatre @sohoplace or any of the Outernet’s new music venues, or the £350-£3,500 a night hotel that makes up this connected new city centre district, but I have been to the offices of the private equity firm Apollo in 1 Soho Place, the mixed-use office block by AHMM architects that is built over the Oxford Street entrance of Tottenham Court Road tube station. It was just after Christmas and I was left alone in the fifth-floor reception area as my guide went off to search for the appropriate keycard.  

After passing between a large built-in wooden desk and Christmas tree, the room opened out onto a huge and luxurious waiting area. On a massive grey rug set in the centre of the parquet floor were two expansive sofas with built-in end tables, along with a single lamp and four steel-tube and leather armchairs, all set around two square marble coffee tables, which were angled side by side with a stylish gap.

I walked over to the full-length window and looked down between the offices of 1 Soho Place and the @sohoplace theatre at the plain grey paving stones that have the honour of having been granted the first new Soho street name in 72 years.  

At either side of the island of contemporary furniture were gridded shelving units built into two walnut-clad walls. I took a seat and watched as an art handler placed 15 different coloured glass sculptures on a 3×5 grid of shelves, one for each illuminated cube. On the same wall, about 60 centimetres over, there was an alcove of equal size to the grid that contained a flat-screen TV.

The security guard remarked that the sculptures reminded him of the emeralds from Sonic the Hedgehog, but the polished glass shapes were actually more varied. Some were discs, others more freeform, and the rest were different cubic crystal formations whose point of balance the art handler was struggling to find. 

The shapes mostly came in pairs that were randomly assigned colours of orange, blue, green, transparent, or brown, and they were being carefully swapped around on the instruction of a woman curating the display.  

When she was happy, she video-called New York, where it was 8.30 am. The head of the design team was already at his desk, and the woman stood back so that her phone camera could get the whole configuration in. She asked if there were too many orange ones on the left-hand side, but the designer didn’t answer. He was in a trance, purring and wowing at these bits of coloured glass.

“I’m sorry,” he managed after a while, “I didn’t listen to a word you just said, they’re just so beautiful. I can’t take my eyes off of them.” The video call ended, and the woman shrugged her shoulders and said to her assistant, “If they’re happy, we’re happy.” 

They carried the artworks’ empty packaging out on a trolley, and I walked over to take a closer look at the baubles stacked on their individual shelves. I thought about how perhaps the days of making unusual, complex objects that are difficult to decipher are now gone, and in their place are luminous forms like these, whose existence seems to be a sly way of taking revenge on the human capacity to think. 

Across the road, I could see an advert for UNICEF on the screen on the side of the Outernet’s NOW Building, below which a gigantic walk-in billboard envelops the viewer in its 360° wrap-around LED screens that show mostly adverts and a curated program of contemporary art. My guide returned with the keycard, and as we walked together towards a locked glass door that led on to a passageway flanked by meeting booths, she hesitated. “Sorry, can you remind me why you’re here?”

Oliver Corino is a fiction writer who lives in London. 

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