Dilkash Lahore: Mall stores allowed one signboard each

Shopkeepers accept decision, but say new design should have been finalised by now.

LAHORE:

Shops on The Mall have been allowed to keep one signboard up on their facades until a new design and format for signboards is decided.

Representatives of the Hall Road and Mall Road trader unions, at a meeting with District Coordination Officer Noorul Amin Mengal on Saturday, agreed to pass on the instructions to their members and ask them to follow them.

At the same time, they said the city government should have made a design for the boards by now, so the shops don’t have to change the boards once again when the format is finally decided.

The DCO said that they would get the new design soon, to be decided by a committee formed under the Dilkash Lahore project, which aims to beautify the city and highlight its cultural wealth.

Earlier, the city government had served notices on the shops on The Mall instructing them to remove their signboards, angering the shopkeepers as they weren’t consulted. They said at the time that they would resist the notices.

At the meeting on Saturday, Mengal said that the facades of four historic buildings would be revitalised as part of the Dilkash Lahore project and work on one building had begun. He said that the project would bring more tourists to Lahore, especially The Mall, and thus give a boost to the businesses on the road.

He said that a facade cell had been set up to decide the size, colour and fonts for the signboards. He said that he wanted to see evolving signboards, so a set of five or so buildings had one design, the next set had a slightly different design, and so on.



The DCO said that having four or five signboards on a building, hiding its architecture from view, was unacceptable. He said that the shopkeepers could choose which signboard they wanted to keep. He said that advertisements were not prohibited, but shops needed to get approval for the advertising signs from the city government so that entire buildings were not hidden behind massive billboards.

Sohail Butt, the president of the Mall Road Trade Union, said the union’s members would comply with the one board per shop requirement. However, he added that the city government should have finalised the format already. He also criticised the city government for not taking the unions on board regarding the revitalisation of historic buildings. He said that the shopkeepers had only learnt of the work on the Diyal Singh Mansion by the “dust storms around the building”. He said that it was very hard to breathe in the area.

MPA Khawaja Imran Nazir also said that the city government should have provided the shopkeepers with the new design before instructing them to remove all boards but one. That way they could have made the change in one go, rather than having to change the signboards again when the format is decided.

The DCO directed officials to cover the Diyal Singh Mansion construction site with cloth and sprinkle water there to reduce dust levels.

He also set up a committee under Assistant Commissioner (City) Saira Umer and including the Data Gunj Bakhsh town municipal officer and town officer (Regulations), along with traders, to ensure compliance with the orders to leave only one sign per shop.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 9^th, 2012.