Hackney's Street Sign Clutter Problem: How the Borough Stacks Up Against Amsterdam and Seoul

Hackney Council is in the early stages of a borough-wide audit to identify and remove duplicate street signs, redundant direction markers and repeated information placards that have accumulated across the borough over decades of piecemeal maintenance. The audit, which began in earnest in spring 2026, targets roughly 340 locations across Hackney where signage has been identified as duplicated within a 20-metre radius, a figure drawn from an internal highways assessment circulated to the council's Transport and Infrastructure Committee in March.

The issue matters now for two reasons. Councils across England face a patchwork of legacy signage installed under multiple different funding streams, European structural funds, Transport for London grants, borough capital programmes, each of which required its own physical marker. Now that several of those programmes have closed or been consolidated, the signs remain. Hackney's streets have also seen significant regeneration pressure since 2018, with new residential developments along the Lea Bridge Road corridor and around Dalston Junction adding fresh wayfinding infrastructure on top of the old.

What Hackney Is Actually Doing

The council's highways team has been working with the Hackney Cycling Campaign and local residents' groups in Clapton and Stoke Newington, two areas identified as having the highest density of overlapping signage, to map the worst offenders. Chatsworth Road in Homerton, a stretch that received new wayfinding totems as part of a 2021 town centre improvement scheme funded partly through the Mayor of London's High Streets for All programme, now carries at least three separate signs indicating the same pedestrian route to Hackney Marshes within 50 metres. The council estimates removal and consolidation works for the whole audit could cost between £180,000 and £240,000, depending on how many signs require structural post removal rather than simple panel replacement.

Gillett Square in Dalston has been flagged separately. The square received a significant public realm upgrade in 2017, but subsequent additions, a 20mph zone marker, a no-entry placard, a heritage trail arrow, and a TfL cycling route sign, now compete for attention in a space barely 30 metres across.

How Hackney Compares to Cities Elsewhere

Amsterdam began a systematic duplicate sign removal programme in 2019, coordinated through the city's Openbare Ruimte en Duurzaamheid directorate. The Dutch capital reduced its total street sign count by an estimated 12 percent over three years, consolidating wayfinding onto combined information pillars in dense neighbourhoods like De Pijp and Jordaan. The approach cut annual maintenance costs and, according to urban design researchers at Delft University of Technology, improved pedestrian orientation scores in trial zones.

Seoul went further. Its 2022 Signage Rationalisation Ordinance gave district governments authority to compel removal of any sign duplicated within 15 metres, with fines for non-compliance applicable even to national government agencies. The city's Jongno district reported removing over 2,400 individual signs in the 18 months following the ordinance's passage.

London as a whole has no equivalent legislation. Hackney is working within existing highways powers under the Traffic Management Act 2004 and the Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions 2016, which give boroughs authority to remove non-statutory signs without ministerial approval but require TfL sign-off on any changes to statutory direction markers. That sign-off process, which involves submitting formal requests through TfL's Street Management team, has historically taken between four and nine months, a bureaucratic lag that Amsterdam and Seoul both bypassed through consolidated city-level authority.

Islington and Tower Hamlets have both flagged similar problems internally, but neither has launched a formal audit programme yet. Hackney's early start gives it a potential template, though the funding question remains open. The council has not secured a dedicated budget line for the work beyond the initial assessment phase.

Residents in affected streets can flag duplicate or confusing signage through Hackney Council's Fix My Street portal, which feeds directly into the highways team's audit database. The council expects to publish a first round of removal proposals for public consultation by October 2026, with physical works scheduled to begin no earlier than January 2027, subject to TfL approvals coming through on time.