Capital Punishment

‘HOWEVER much the Government tells us that we’re all getting cleverer, the evidence suggests otherwise.

New York? Milan? Tokyo?

Visit London, the capital’s tourist board, put five pictures up on its website and asked visitors to identify where they were taken.

According to the Times, fewer than one in ten respondents identified the Thames, with a quarter mistaking it for the Amazon.

More than half (including three-quarters of Londoners) believed a picture of Regent Street was of Italy. Only 1% identified a shot of Covent Garden, with more than two-thirds again opting for Italy.

And more than a quarter thought that Brick Lane was in the Indian sub-continent.

Okay, so people are not always entirely honest when it comes to online polls and besides the pictures were deliberately meant to confuse.

But it’s not the failure to identify five of London’s most famous areas that is most worrying – it is the fact that no-one seemed to work out that the pictures on a London tourist website were just possibly going to be of, er, London…’

Posted: 19th, August 2004 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink