London's Tart Cards: Accidental Art and a Narnia of Filth
When I was young and visiting London, I was fascinated by the interiors of the red telephone boxes. The cards plastered across their interiors seemed like the tip of an iceberg, hinting at a world of sleaze upon which the city was floating. The telephone boxes offered a glimpse of London's venereal underworld, yet their rainbow-coloured arrangements, curated entirely by chance, were beautiful and lurid in their own right. They seemed like wardrobes opening into a Narnia of filth, transforming mundane red booths into accidental art installations and revealing a world hidden behind the veil of respectable London life.
Known as tart cards, these small advertisements for sexual services became a familiar feature of London street life during the 1980s and 1990s. Their garish colours, suggestive photographs, extravagant promises and economical typography transformed the red telephone box into something between a commercial noticeboard and an illicit art installation.
The spectacle was constantly being renewed. Young men were paid to follow routes around the city, plastering telephone boxes with fresh cards and sometimes tearing down their rivals' offerings along the way. The authorities removed them, the card-placers returned, and the show went on. It was an endless zoetrope of lurid advertisements, a revolving exhibition that nobody had intended to create.
Their history was relatively brief. Restrictions on advertising in telephone boxes were lifted in 1984, allowing the cards to proliferate. In 2001, legislation made placing prostitution advertisements on or near public telephones an offence. The cards gradually disappeared, taking with them a peculiar feature of the pre-internet city.
Looking back, what fascinates me is their accidental artistry. Nobody set out to create a composition. Each card was an individual advertisement, competing for attention, but together they produced something nobody had designed. Colours clashed and harmonised; images repeated; scraps of paper overlapped. The result was a kind of found art, an ever-changing collage assembled by commercial necessity and left to chance.
But the cards were more than an amusing visual curiosity. Behind the photographs and telephone numbers were real people selling sexual services, with lives and circumstances the advertisements revealed almost nothing about. The cards offered a glimpse of a hidden economy that respectable London preferred not to acknowledge, but told us little about the people who sustained it. It is easy to be captivated by their garish colours, blunt promises and accidental beauty, but I suspect the lives behind the images were more complicated than the cards allowed us to imagine.
They were tawdry and beautiful, funny and unsettling: banal advertisements hinting at an entire world beyond the glass.
Today, the telephone boxes remain, though the Tart Cards have largely vanished. The cards have become relics of a lost urban culture, fragments of a city that once seemed to conceal another, stranger city just beneath its surface. I suspect that underbelly is still there. It is only these vivid glimpses of it that have been driven further underground. This forgotten world of sleazy ephemera preserves a marginalised culture, which is reason enough to remember these wonderful little glimpses into that world.
Read a wonderful article on the Wellcome Collection with further examples here:
View a fantastic collection of "Tart Cards" here:
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