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The London Culture of Smoking: Bye bye
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by kate | June 29, 2007 at 08:52 am
976 views | 3 Recommendations | 3 comments
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Only a few more days left in which one might linger in a London pub with a pack of Silk Cuts for company. The smoking ban will cover all public places in Britain, including offices, pubs, clubs and bars.
From 1 July pubs and restaurants will have to display prominent "no smoking" signs around their premises.
Regardless of your view on smoking, or your committment to public health debates over freedom of individual action, the ban is a significant moment for Britain, where tobacco has played a major role in culture for...um like forever.
An interesting initiative to document this smoking culture has just been launched by Redeye, the-phone-book Limited and moblogUK. The project, called "Smoking Out", aims to collect pictures and videos of people's "favourite smoking dens". The pictures will be displayed in a gallery at www.smokedout.net.
Taking part couldn't be simpler, just text pictures or video of your favourite smoking dens to 07725202020 with the key word SMOKE in the body of the text. Alternatively, you can simply email them in to: smokedout@moblg.net
It is a current-events, hardware free version of the 2005 project, Six Degrees of Smoking. In 2005 on the networked-performance blog Jo-Anne Green explained Six Degrees of Smoking like this:
Six Degrees of Smoking a global artistic collaboration to delve into the secret lives of lost
lighters. Lighters are handed out or posted to those who wish to be
involved. The recipient then photographs themselves smoking a cigarette
and submits it via MMS or email. He then passes the lighter on to a
fellow smoker (either a friend or a stranger) and the process is
repeated. Each lighter is numbered and so they can be tracked on their
travels.
Another artwork to recall in fond nostalgia for London smoking culture, and to seek out hoping for an arty glimpse of a current event unfolding in real time, would be "Traces of Fire". This is a 2004 artwork by Volkmar Klien & Ed Lear in which silver cigarette lighters containing tracking IDs were left in London pubs. In the words of the artists:
Everything starts with a pub-tour.
Couple of drinks, couple of cigarettes, off to the next bar.
Couple of drinks, couple of cigarettes.Then - moving on.
Next day, same thing.
Couple of drinks with a couple of cigarettes in a couple of pubs.In each of the pubs we leave behind a nice silvery lighter.
Each silvery lighter equipped with a nice little transmitter and its own transmission
id.
(Check out the site for a strange, moody video demonstrating the project)
The lighters were tracked and mapped in real time as a way to explore the patterns of the objects' movement through the city. I don't know if this project is still "transmitting" - unfortunately, I doubt it, as 3 years is an eon for media art - but it would have been a poignant way to watch the ban unfold, to see the lighters, circulating, moving, transmitting, mapping, and then to slowly...stop.
.
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at 10:14 on June 29th, 2007
I have added 4 photographs to support my comments.
We have had the total smoking ban in Ireland for a while now. It was introduced to protect the health of employees working in pubs, restaurants and nightclubs. In general there was an amazing amount of public support for the ban. But since the ban began there have been a number of un-welcome developments. Initially the pubs noticed a big drop in business until they didcovered that they could set up outside smoking areas and initially this did not impact on the public in general.
More recently pubs and restaurants in the cities and towns began to apply to local authorities for permission to set up outdoor smoking areas on the public footpath and as this generated revenue for local government they were more than happy to agree. Now after waiting many years for proper footpaths in Dublin city centre we have lost most of the new space to outdooe smoking areas. This is not an improvement.
There is also another downside. If you are dining in a restaurant you will be disturbed by the constant flow of smokers in transit to an from the outdoor smoking area.
at 07:13 on July 6th, 2007
kate, I like this story. It's good stuff. now london is just like california ! almost !
at 04:38 on June 19th, 2008
That was a total foolishness to ban smoking in pubs, where man come to drink beer and to watch football. Maybe it would be better to raise the salaries to those working there or to upgrade their air vents.
signature: “I like to drink coffee and smoking cheap cigarettes before bed. I dream faster.” (c) Steven Wright: Coffee and cigarettes