"In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation."

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle.

Photo by Flickr user Will Rose

As I stood in Hyde Park on Saturday, among an estimated 1 million people that turned out to witness the Tour de France coming to London for the first time ever, I had the rather surreal sensation that I was participating in some kind of mass consensual hallucination.

Elsewhere this weekend, London hosted a Live Earth concert at Wembley and tennis finals at Wimbledon. Just one week after a failed car bomb explosion and 2 years after the 07/07 tube bombings, London was reaffirming its identity through a series of grand spectacles.

With the beautiful weather, the garish skinsuits and sleek machines of the riders, set against the backdrop of landmarks such as the House of Parliament and Buckingham Palace, while helicopter shots of the Thames and the London Eye beamed around the world, London never looked more spectacular, in the true sense of the word.

Transport for London, in looking for a corporate sponsor for their plans to encourage, have entered into a Faustian pact with the Barclays banking corporation.

Launched in August this year, the Barclays Cycle Hire is one of the largest cycle hire schemes in the world (with over 6000 bikes available at over 200 docking stations across central London. In sponsoring the scheme, Barclays have not only got their name plastered all the logo, on the bikes and the docking stations, but also injected their corporate colour, a bright cyan blue, into all livery and signage too.

Corporations like to associate themselves with a particular colour - think of the UPS brown, for instance, or T-mobile's magenta. Barclays cyan is a distinctive colour, and by contributing £25 million to the costs of the London Cycle Hire scheme, have sealed themselves a highly conspicuous brand presence.

According to this article:

"The Mayor sees the Barclays bikes becoming as iconic as London's black cabs, and red double-decker buses. It is not the first time advertising has been built into the cityscape. The iconic Art Deco windows of the Oxo Tower, formerly home to the makers of the eponymous stock cube, on the South Bank of the River Thames were reputedly built to sidestep an advertising ban imposed by London County Council."

As well as sponsoring the cycle hire scheme, Transport for London have also allowed Barclays to brand a series of 'cycle superhighways'. These glorified bike paths, eventually ten routes radiating out from Central London, are designed to permit greater numbers of cyclists to move quickly in and out of the city with improved right of way and priority at junctions.

Whilst the Hire Bikes are ubiquitous, moving adverts for Barclays, the Cycle Superhighways are a permanent branding etched onto the urban fabric.

Barclays Bike hire and Barclays Cycle Superhighways represent the most comprehensive urban spatial branding ever visited upon the city. The streets have literally been coloured in Barclays brand livery.

Looked at another way and it may become a huge Suprematist composition, visible only from Google Earth. Ribbons of colour radiate out from the city, an act of corporate geomancy inscribed on the fabric of the city.

However, the lumpen reality on the ground of these Superhighways is that they are often little more than re-sprayed cyclepaths, and far from cutting a swath through the chaos of the city, are just another part of its culture of congestion. The continuous cyan ribbon is truncated, terminated, dug up and parked upon.

If Barclays really want to go for it, they should take a leaf out of the book of artist Henk Hofstra, who in 2007 painted the whole width of a road in Drachten, Netherlands, a vivid cyan colour, for 1 kilometer. His aim was that the streets would show up on satellite images, perhaps this is where Barclays got the inspiration.

This is the first in a series of posts on Kosmograd sponsored by Portakabin:

Prefabricated buildings from Portakabin.