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As the Museum of London relocates from London Wall to the old Smithfield Market site, it has reverted to its old name, the London Museum, and chosen a brand new logo – a pooping pigeon.
The new design features a white porcelain pigeon trailed by a golden “splat”. It’s a choice that the museum’s director Sharon Ament interprets as a metaphor for London: “The pigeon and splat speak to a historic place full of dualities, a place where the grit and the glitter have existed side by side for millennia.”
In a blog post, the museum explains that the pigeon was chosen because it has remained for a thousand years “an impartial and humble observer of London life”, watching over the changing city and ultimately becoming a London icon itself.
Brand identity wise, this is a bold choice. It’s fair to say that it has generated some bafflement: a few have called the choice crude, embarrassing and a waste of money. Some of these reactions clearly consider the pigeon not just irrelevant and insignificant, but also repellent.
This is all very understandable. Arguably our least favourite feathered friend (besides, perhaps, the antisocial seagull), the urban pigeon has long been established in the UK as a public nuisance.
Pigeon excrement is the obvious problem, given that a single pigeon drops around 11kg of excrement per year. A flock of 80 pigeons (and pigeons do like to congregate) will create nearly a tonne of droppings in the same period. Buildings and public sculptures suffer a loss of dignity when caked with pigeon poo. But more importantly, diseases associated with pigeon droppings include the fungal lung infections cryptococcosis and histoplasmosis, and the infectious disease psittacosis, tellingly known as ornithosis.
So it is no surprise that pigeons have come to be regarded worldwide as thoroughly unwelcome pests – “rats with wings” as coined by New York City Parks commissioner, Thomas Hoving in the 1960s.
In cities all over the world, pigeons have been actively discouraged by spikes, netting and other low-cost deterrents that act as “defensive” or (perhaps more honestly) “hostile” architecture. The message is clear: pigeons aren’t welcome here.
PR for pigeons
The war on pigeons feels like hubris, however. Pigeons continue to find places to roost, even on gleaming new developments. Their seagull rivals come to snack on the corpses of pigeons trapped in anti-bird netting. Crows and magpies have learnt to make nests from anti-bird spikes. Nature finds a way, even in cities designed to deter it.
There is a case to be made for appreciating the ingenuity not just of clever corvids and crafty gulls, but the resilience and opportunism of the urban pigeon too. As the Museum of London points out, the pigeon has been around for a long time, the descendant of domesticated doves imported after the Norman Conquest. Escaping from dovecotes, these birds followed their rock dove instincts, but swapped sea cliffs for the city’s eaves, lintels and architraves.
They are indeed an admirable example of the urban wildlife that nature enthusiasts and urban ecologists have begun to celebrate. As Ament rightly points out: “We share our city with others, including millions of animals. Pigeons are all over London and so are we.”
Implicit in the anti-pigeon line is the fact that the pigeon is, like many people, too easily portrayed as out of place. Urban pigeons are, for the sociologist Colin Jerolmack: “explicit trespassers on spaces that we’ve decided are supposed to be for humans only”. That makes them vulnerable, but in the same ways that some kinds of people become vulnerable.
It has been recognised that antipathy towards urban animals turns alarmingly quickly into mistreatment of human beings, such as rough sleepers who suffer from the use of “defensive architecture” to police them out of city centres: a decent society wouldn’t treat people as pests.
More troubling still is the crackdown on unwanted migrants. I have written elsewhere that the histories of pigeons have become strangely entangled with the histories of Caribbean migration to London and the UK. There is an uncomfortable parallel between the fortunes of pigeons and people, both once welcomed and even celebrated, but increasingly vilified, all the way up to the creation of “hostile environments”. In the words of blogger Tim Hamlett, pigeons are “another group of immigrants we don’t like”.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Colombian artist Iván Argote has been commissioned to install a 16ft tall hyperrealistic sculpture of a pigeon on New York’s High Line public park. The point of this gigantic pigeon perched unnervingly above Manhattan’s west side? Argote is keen to remind us that we are all in some sense immigrants, and we shouldn’t be too quick to say who gets to stay, and who gets to be deported (or worse).
As High Line art director and chief curator Cecilia Alemani puts it: “It’s a sculpture that talks about many other quite profound issues such as the relationship between the human world and the animal world, and ideas of immigration and who has the right to be the guest in New York city.”
I am all in favour of the London Museum and its pooping pigeon, then. The controversial rebrand directs our attention to the long history of London, the stories of its many different communities and their routes to the capital, but also to the contribution of its less loved residents, even the ones with wings. These humble birds could do with a PR boost. In the appealing words of a friend to pigeons in my hometown of Nottingham: “Every dove deserves love.”
Philip Howell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
