The laminated A4 sheet appears on the lamp-post outside the corner shop sometime in the night, and within a week the rain has buckled the plastic pouch and turned the photocopy blue at the edges. The notice is addressed to nobody in particular and to every adult in the postcode at the same time. A six-line description of the proposal in the flat register of development-control prose, the address of the site, the place where the full application can be inspected, and a date by which any written representation must be received. Twenty-one days from the date of first display, which is the statutory minimum councils must allow before they can determine an application.

The strange part is that the notice is the building's own ghost made visible before the building has gone anywhere. The shopfront is still trading. The Victorian terrace still has its tenants. The car park still has cars in it. And yet the sheet on the pole, in its unread and weatherproofed way, is already describing the place in the past tense, in the dry syntax councils use for things that have not happened yet and might not. Erection of a three-storey block of nine self-contained flats with associated parking, cycle storage, refuse store and amenity space. The proposal has not been approved. It may never be approved. But the sheet has introduced the future as a piece of municipal furniture, and the present has become the version of the street that the proposal will replace.

You can stand and read one of these for as long as you like and nothing will be clearer at the end than at the beginning. The description is technically complete. It is not legible in the sense of giving you any image of what will happen. The language is engineered to be neutral enough to survive an appeal. Active verbs are converted into nouns. Heights are given in metres above ordnance datum. Materials are described as proposed elevations finished in stock brick and standing seam zinc. The thing the prose refuses to do, by training, is to picture itself. You have to take the drawings down from the council's portal and find a planner who likes you to learn what the notice actually means, and even then it is provisional until the committee meets.

Telegraph poles get a different layer of paper. The Electronic Communications Code gives a broadband operator the right to put up a wooden pole of up to fifteen metres with only twenty-eight days' prior notice to the local planning authority, and no statutory requirement to consult the residents whose front gardens the pole will face. Some councils ask operators to laminate a courtesy A4 to the pole that is being installed, naming the next pole, the company, and a date. There is nowhere on the sheet for the householder to register dissent that would stop the installation. The notice is not asking. It is announcing. The grammar of the planning notice has been carried, intact, into a regime where the consultation period is decorative.

What this leaves on the British street is a continuous low layer of paper futures pasted onto its furniture. Most of the notices belong to applications that will be granted, often with conditions, and turned into the buildings they describe. Some belong to applications that will be refused, withdrawn, or appealed to inspectors and won on the third attempt two years later. Some belong to operators who will put the pole up regardless of what the council says. A few belong to proposals nobody at the council can later remember receiving. The sheet is taken down when the application is determined, or stays up until the rain unmakes the plastic and the staple lets go, or both at once. The street has by then long since stopped reading the lamp-post and resumed its own business, and the next sheet appears two doors down, addressed to the same nobody.

I think the unease they produce is not about the proposals themselves, most of which are unobjectionable infill that any honest assessment of the housing shortage would welcome. It is about the address. The sheet is written to a public that does not assemble to read it. The twenty-one-day clock starts on a day no one notices, runs through a window of attention no one has been given, and closes before most of the people the proposal will affect have understood that a clock was running. The notice is a working piece of democratic infrastructure that has been engineered to look exactly like litter. That is the trick the pole has learned, and it learned it long before any of us were paying attention.

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