For nearly a year, commuters and residents walking past the double-sized billboard on Victoria Road—just between the railway bridge and the steps to the Pembroke Road car park—were treated to a rather dystopian sight.
Last summer, a Superman film poster went up on the board with the ominous tagline: “It begins.” And begin it did. Over the winter, the poster steadily peeled away, disintegrating to reveal the hidden layer of an even older advertisement for the sci-fi movie Mickey 17. What started as a blockbuster movie promotion slowly morphed into a manky, sticky eyesore featuring actor Mark Ruffalo glaring down at Victoria Road dressed as a tyrannical space dictator.
The famous prophet, Superman
Fearing that the giant sheets of peeling paper would eventually be lifted by the wind and turn into a hazardous, litter-strewn mess, we thought it was time to step in. We reached out to our Ruislip Manor Ward Councillors to see if the advertising company or the landowners at TfL could be reminded of their maintenance responsibilities.
A Community Thank You
We are absolutely delighted to report a victory for local tidiness!
A massive thank you goes out to Cllr Susan O’Brien, who promptly picked up the case on behalf of residents. Cllr O’Brien quickly escalated the dilapidated state of the billboard to Transport for London. It seems her nudge was exactly the Kryptonite needed to get the responsible parties moving.
A Clean Slate for Victoria Road
If you walk past the site today, you will notice a drastic improvement. The billboard has been fully stripped of its peeling layers, thoroughly cleaned up, and returned to active duty. In fact, the area looks so much tidier that the board is already displaying its second brand-new advert since the clean-up!
Keeping our local area clean and safe is a team effort, and it’s brilliant to see a quick and effective response from our local representatives when things fall into disrepair.
When that original poster went up last summer, it ominously warned us, “It begins.” Almost a year and a lot of peeling paper later, thanks to Cllr O’Brien, we can finally say: It ends.
Why the Billboard Across the Road Won’t Suffer Superman’s Fate
While we spent months watching Superman disintegrate into a peeling, sticky mess on the railway embankment, the billboard just across the road by Ruislip Manor station was quietly upgraded to ensure it never suffers the same fate. Traditional paper posters rely on gallons of heavy-duty glue and chemical resins that eventually fail in the rain, causing them to flap in the wind and making them virtually impossible to recycle at the end of a campaign.
The solution to our peeling eyesore problem? Screwed-on plastic. That billboard’s signage now uses rigid Correx boards that eliminate the need for glue entirely, meaning they stand up to the British weather without turning into a manky mess. Even better, they operate on a “closed-loop” recycling system where old boards are simply unscrewed, washed, de-inked, and turned into new ones—cutting their carbon footprint by a massive 80%.
Read the full story: Plastic on the high street? Why the Ruislip Manor station billboards don’t use paper posters
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