How Prague wants to protect its famous Lennon Wall from drunk tourists and vandals
- Extra police and surveillance cameras to arrive as protest site becomes open-air gallery
Prague’s Lennon wall, long a symbol of free expression and resistance to communist-era surveillance, is to be monitored by TV cameras and converted into an open-air gallery with graffiti strictly regulated, in an effort to tackle rampant vandalism and obscene artwork by drunken foreign tourists.
Extra police will also patrol an area once renowned as a haven of rebellion against authority but now being overwhelmed by tourism. Some tour guides provide customers in their groups with paint to spray their own slogans.
“The Lennon wall is local but it’s a symptom of a broader problem concerning the whole centre of Prague,” the mayor of Prague 1, Pavel Cizinsky, said.
The move by the Prague 1 municipality, which is responsible for the Czech capital’s historic tourist district, is ironic.
It was the placing of surveillance cameras on the same spot by the then communist regime of Czechoslovakia in the 1970s to scrutinise the neighbouring French embassy that inspired critics to start daubing opposition slogans on the wall. It was nicknamed after John Lennon following his death in 1980.
