I heart shopfronts

Got a little project going over at flickr. It’s called The Global Shopfront Library (grand, huh?). I love shopfronts, you see. Good ones are like vivid, friendly paintings. Walking down an interesting street with a real variety of shops on either side (current favourite: St Albans Road, Watford) is like watching a movie about the community you’re in.

Of course, that’s why you need the variety. A string of just-like-all-the-others chainstores is paralysingly boring (although the efforts made by chainstore managers to make their shopfronts stand out are often a treat in themselves).

So, what I want to do is build a huge kind of worldwide guidebook to the imagination and invention of shopkeepers everywhere. In fact, in my imagination it’s a kind of colourful flickbook of shopfronts. The Flickr group is here and I’ve put up a simple web page at shopfrontlibrary.com. You can also keep up with new additions by following the group on Twitter (imagine! shopfronts on your phone!).

So, obviously, I’d like you to add your own photos to the pool (you need to join the group first) and encourage others to do so. If you’re going to add pics, you could geotag them and then they’ll show up on the map, which already looks pretty cool and global. If you’d like to help (who wouldn’t?), drop me a line and you could be an admin for the group.

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