Street clutter – defined as poorly placed or redundant objects on the pavement that negatively affect pedestrians or other users – makes London a worse place to live, work and visit.i Worse for pedestrians, who have less space to move around, and especially for disabled people, who sometimes find they cannot use the pavement at all. Worse for businesses, who lose out on footfall when streets aren’t clean and attractive. And worse for our national and international reputation, if visitors encounter messy or even dangerous pavements when they arrive in our city. 

In principle, street clutter could be an easy problem to solve: most of the objects involved are not especially large, and they would be physically easy to remove. But London is held back by complex governance and a lack of clarity about who owns which object on pavements, whether it should be considered as clutter, and if so who should remove it and on what timescale.  

In this report, we have considered the objects on London’s streets which get in the way of people walking and wheeling: not all of them are clutter all the time, but they can be some of the time. We have focused on central London because this is where the problem is most acute, but many of our recommendations apply to other urban areas as well. We’ve included phone boxes, bollards, benches, planters, signage, barriers for utility works, advertising ‘A boards’, rubbish bags, shared bikes and scooters, outdoor dining tables and other fixed or movable objects, but not intrusion from light and sound, flat posters/art/visuals on pavements or walls, or pedicabs and street performance. 

In case studies of three London streets, we found a high level of street clutter across the board but significant variation in what the major problems were – this shows the range of challenges that we face, but also that some problems don’t exist much on certain streets, demonstrating that some areas already have good strategies in place for dealing with certain types of clutter. The most common objects we found on streets were A boards, e-bikes, rubbish bags and bollards. Some bollards are necessary, and e-bikes can be less of a problem when they are parked well, but we think that London can and should remove A boards and rubbish bags. Some objects, such as bike docks and planters, can sometimes be placed in the roadway instead of the pavement, prioritising pedestrians over parking spaces. 

In our recommendations, we set out steps for national government, the GLA, local authorities and business improvement districts to reduce clutter, and get world class pavements for our city.