The Management reserves the right...

In the 1970s, if I took a two-week package holiday to Greece, it probably said something about my up-market social status.

Look here! I'm a traveller, not a tourist, visiting the ancient sites of our democracy! Bringing back a bottle of Ouzo, then inviting the neighbours for a feta cheese and black olive salad while nostalgically sighing, It's not how they serve it in Faliraki.

The town planners perhaps were swept up with this dream, imagining they could sprinkle in our towns the sparkle of a jet-setting Mediterranean lifestyle.

So they knocked down our old buildings, and installed the Agora.

The Greek word for a place of community; a centre of trade; a market venue. Imagine how it bustles with people haggling over the price of walnuts and olive oil!

Or maybe not. This is England, and this is our local Agora.

The building is windowless and heavy, constructed from densely packed red brick, and its position displaces and confuses our sense of the town centre. The building has an empty desolate feel about it; the architectural design, in an attempt at colonnades and corridors, has created small, bricked-in enclosed spaces with a feel of urban threat about them.

Inside the Agora, we have what you would expect in a relatively poor English working-class town. A bloke who sells cigarette papers and lighter fuel, and a woman who sells acrylic cardigans, dusters and - in a nod to our exotic aspirations, probably in the bedroom department - red spice incense sticks.

The locals treat the Agora with contempt; it is a building that was never wanted and is painfully out of place. Every few years residents dutifully fill in a form asking the council to knock it down and alleviate our visual suffering.

I'm not posting entirely in distraction ... I think all these attitudes are revealed in the way the local public treat the Agora signage, and in the way the Agora Management, through their signage, treats the public.

This first photo shows how the signs go up from THE MANAGEMENT (whoever they are). These signs went up a while ago along one of the access routes that people use. Clearly, we're being discouraged from using this route, even though it's one of the quickest and most convenient ways round the building.

Within a very short time, the signs in this route are defaced.

It's not surprising. We have no idea who the management is, who put up this sign, or where anyone responsible for STAFF can be contacted. It's almost nit-picking to add how the layout on the signage is poor, the colour and logo of Agora is dated, and whoever composed the sign can't spell the word possessions.

Then, the idea that an Agora is a place of public assembly is neatly and ironically captured in the words PRIVATE PROPERTY. I'm not even sure what they mean by that. The building? People are still trading inside. Is the door private? The route? But this route is public!

As if PRIVATE PROPERTY isn't enough to put us off, it's followed with the message, 'we're not responsible for what happens to you'. Even I feel like entering into a dialogue the only way I can - write a rude message back to them on their own sign.

So the sum tone of the sign, text and graphics conveys, in our Agora (or this bit of it) that we're not welcome. They could have written, Clear Off. 

And no-one comes round from THE MANAGEMENT to replace what inevitably happens.