Shit London Awards 2012 – The Results

Another year and another batch of sometimes amusing and often vaguely depressing photos to have a look at.

Yay.

The Shit London Awards are now in their second year of celebrating the crummy, weird and outright rubbish sides to the capital. These are awards open to all with no particular photographic skill required to enter ( you may notice that ). This is photography which doesn’t favour a DSLR over an ancient camera phone, where the focus isn’t on focus and where composition isn’t part of the competition.

Featured below are the winners and runners up in each category. Thank you to everyone that entered this year, there were so many great entries and many of them will be posted on this site in the days to come.

 Best Overall Photo

Winner – Andrew Smith

Pigeons have no respect for anything. When they’re not eating our discarded chips, hanging out under railway bridges or shitting on statues of the great and good, they’re showing their haughty disregard to the Boris Bike scheme in the only way they know how.

Look into those beady little eyes and what do you see?

An almost total indifference to the problems of inner city congestion and carbon emissions, that’s what.

Second Place - Closed Pub – Daniel Higham, London  

Third Place – Toilet Warning – Neil Carpenter, London

Best / Worst Shop Name 

Winner – Barbara Cummings, London

This is a real “what came first, the chicken or the egg?” situation here. Did the owners of this place open in Turnham Green just so they could take advantage of this spectacular piece of punnery or did they only realise that the dry cleaning, location and pun stars had aligned so perfectly after they’d secured premises?

Sadly, we many never know…unless we asked them…which we won’t.

Second Place – Bond Pun – James McDermott, London

 Third Place – Uninspiring Restaurant, Micheil Smith, London

 Most Depressing View from Work 

Winner – Richard Lambert, London

Most people spend their entire day staring at a computer screen either working, checking their Facebook and Twitter or looking at pornography. Sometimes it’s nice to tear your eyes away from the screen just for a few seconds to let your eye take in a view that is made from something other than pixels and remind your self that there is more to the world. Spare a thought though for those of us who have to make do with views like this.

What can a view like this do to someones psyche? All this view says is “There is nothing for you out here, no joy, no light, nothing but grey bricks and stained concrete. Give up your foolish dreams and accept your miserable fate”

The sad thing to consider is that the day the scaffolding was put up was probably the most exciting in this views bleak history.

Second Place – Multi Storey Car Park, Sabrina Hamilton, London

Third Place – Barbed Wire and Bins, Suzy Harrison, London

London’s Ugliest Building

Winner – Naomi Roux, London

Abandon hope all ye who enter. This grim edifice is located naught but a javellins throw from the Olympic Park but seems to have just escaped the brush of regeneration that swept the area clean. There’s an Orwellian edge to this building that at one time almost certainly housed some mysterious and yet mind bendingly dull organisation.

On the plus side it does appear to have a flying saucer parked on its roof which can never be a bad thing…except in that movie Independence Day, that didn’t go too well for those buildings at all. Would aliens bother visiting Stratford? Surely if they were going to they’d have done so during the games, that was their window of opportunity.

What was my point again?

Second Place – Grim Prospect – Kerry Wadsworth, London

Third Place – Bleak House – Camilla Brix, London

International Photo

Winner – Katja Forbes, Sydney

You know, it’s nice that you want to hand on your mattress to someone else, really it is. But the very mention of “no visible stains” has got me wondering what invisble stains there are on there. Plus if you were to take that home and sleep on it ( which I’m not….for one it makes me feel weird that I’d have taken it off the streets and for two it’s all the way down in Sydney which is way too far to go even if it is for a free, possibly soiled mattress ) you’d always know that you’d be lying on the phrase “Free mattress, no visible stains”. It would probably end up weedling it’s way into your dreams.

Second Place – Poorly Named Shop, France – Patrick Galvin, London

Third Place – Amusingly Named Shop, Gothenburg – Bart Harris, London

All the winners and runners up will be on display alongside hundreds of other Shit London photos at the Shit London Christmas Exhibition at the KK Outlet, Hoxton Square until the 22nd of December.

28 Responses to Shit London Awards 2012 – The Results

1. 

   Reply
   Matt December 10, 2012

   Lovely to see my local dry cleaners walk away with the prize they deserve. I’m pretty sure until recently they had a similarly named rival too.

   Also thisbupisclose.com/

   • 

     Reply
     Mr Snooze December 16, 2012

     Turn ‘em Clean is a fine name.

2. 

   Reply
   Dominic Sayers December 10, 2012

   Second place in your London’s Ugliest Building is a Grade II* listed building en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Paul's_Bow_Common

   It is horrible, mind.

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4. 

   Reply
   Tamara in NZ December 11, 2012

   Is “Standard Tandoori” perhaps a pun on Standard and Poors, thereby raising it to the level of social commentary?

5. 

   Reply
   Graham Tanner December 11, 2012

   Seeing your picture of “Poorly Named Shop, France” reminds me that I have a photo of a similarly “poorly named shop”, which was coincidentally also in France!

   Down near Marseille we encountered a ladies hair salon called “Fanny Coiffure”. Pictorial evidence *is* available!.

   • 

     Reply
     Ben Mulhall January 9, 2013

     haha, i also have one from south Spain along the same lines. A fabric store named “fanny colour”. Pics also available

     I also once encountered a factory near Vennice simply called “Fart”. Sadly, I dont have pics of that one

6. 

   Reply
   Jo December 11, 2012

   Love it (laughs). I feel so sorry for the obedient guy who looking for a ‘Black Ladys’ to boss him around. He sounds sincere and has probably had a really shit life. Awww bless him. There’s a real charm to these images though. Kinda makes me warm & fuzzy for my own shit yard.

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