This week’s ‘Open Doors’ event – involving Parade Gardens and The Colonnades – has been a great success. You have until tomorrow to ‘explore the past, experience lost spaces, and engage with the future.’
It’s certainly a delightful and invigorating experience – however one local visitor, who wishes to remain anonymous – wasn’t delighted with everything they saw.
Those dreadful ‘lovelocks’ seem to be creeping back again. The photographs show some of the lantern mounts on Grand Parade.
This person writes:
“I worry about the damage caused to Bath’s historic spaces and ironwork by lovestruck padlockers (lovelocks).
We are struggling already with a rising tide of graffiti since lockdown: this just seems like another form of the same thing: Jin loves Chen, Mike loves Mia, Astrid loves Anders etc.
Why doesn’t Bath declare itself a padlock free city and make efforts to deter this behaviour, which seems to me like a form of graffiti that can cause long term damage?
The Council spent time and our money removing the weight of padlocks from the historic little bridge in Sydney Gardens a while back, but you can see them still appearing all around the city and on the Bath Skyline. Many cities around the world have had to do the same thing.
Another more friendly option would be to provide a specific location/structure that people could be allowed to use.
I’m sure that IronArt could create something beautiful that could be placed somewhere in Bath specifically for the purpose, and then the old padlocks removed and recycled, and the structure refreshed every now and then!”
Sounds like a great idea but bear in mind that the combined weight of these things can cause collapse – as happened to a section of the bridge railings lining a ‘pont’ over the Seine in Paris.
I applaud the idea of having a dedicated place for the padlocks – it would then become a piece of artwork instead of graffiti !! How to police it though?