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Описание: I took the photo above in Dawlish Road in November 2019. It shows cans and other litter tucked behind a Virgin Media phone cabinet, The photos below (please scroll down) are from 2004 and 2005. At that time I contacted Haringey Council to see what they could do about phone cabinets used like waste bins. A senior Council manager told me the street cleaners had been instructed to use their broom handles to push out the litter and then sweep it up. (Nothing wrong with wooden low-tech.) Things improved for a while. I also asked if maybe there was another solution. I don't remember getting a specific answer. But Haringey did have a phase when many hundreds (thousands?) of extra litter bins were placed across the borough's streets. Did more official space for litter reduce the amount of packaging, bottles, cans and other trash behind the phone cabinets? I don't know. But over the years my impression was that as long as there's space left, some people continue to shove rubbish between the cabinet and nearby wall. Using this as waste storage space. An Impulse to Tidiness? Liz Ixer and I once speculated about "an impulse to tidiness". I still have this hope. Liz made a list of nine types of litterer. This was the first: "There is sometimes an odd sense of 'tidiness' about some litterers: these are the ones who carefully pop their cans and paper down the backs of utility cabinets, balance them on walls or tuck them down the side of planters. A little bit of them knows what they are doing is wrong and they hope by being 'tidy', they offend less (perhaps there's a distant memory of a mum or dad telling them to put it in the bin). On the other hand, here's Liz Ixer's third type: "[...] littering is a civil liberties issue. You don't have the right to tell them what to do with their lives, including what they do with their litter." A Fiickr member in Croydon, South London, had a similar observation. That some people seem: "deliberately to avoid normal bins like the plague, but will put rubbish into abandoned boxes / fridges / cars; rubbish heaps attract rubbish .... Looks like bin designers need to have a re-think. Maybe we'll see future bins dressed up as rubbish heaps... now that's a thought!!".

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