Billboards have been a part of London’s landscape for many years, from Victorian tin plate calling cards to glossy perfume ads to the neon of Piccadilly Circus. And it has had its odd variations too, like the placard carriers and sandwich men who began appearing in the early nineteenth century.

The final blow was dealt to the Oxford Street sign-holder when Westmister banned them in 2008 - or so it was believed. Instead, they just got more ingenious, with GOLF SALE now appearing printed directly onto canary-yellow jumpsuits throughout the West End, or in the case of this gentleman I snapped at Oxford Circus, worn as a hat:

So the ingenuity of advertising design knows no bounds, and we are on the brink of a new explosion, of video and digital screens, of ever larger, brighter, more attention-grabbing screens. The screens themselves are getting cheaper, and as a result they’re popping up everywhere, even if we’re not really sure what to do with them, like the recently installed Tower Hamlets screens on Brick Lane:

You can see this on the Tube too: on the escalator screens that cascade, slinky-like, down into the tunnels, or the new platform projectors where advertisements jump into skittery life. Soon, these will emerge onto the surface, spinning, flashing, yelling. They will know where they are and they will talk to you and they might even, through the magic of mobile phones, Foursquare and Oyster cards, know who you are.

(Photo by Chris Heathcote of a location-aware billboard in Lavender Hill.)

And the question with this kind of advertising is: whose space is this? If you’re walking down the street, do you have a right not to be assailed by advertising? Do you have the right to speak back? Who decides who gets to shout loudest in the public square?

In London, these questions frequently go unasked - and it’s unlikely many people know the answer. But if the future of the city is more screens, then we think people should have the chance to have their say in what appears on those screens.

So one of the themes of Bus-Tops is: this is your space too, and your screens. What do you want to do with them?