LONDON (April 30) – Greg Thompson, president of the Old East Village Community Association, is a guest next Tuesday on my Rogers TV show, McLeod. We taped the segment last night.

As I was driving home from the studio I was thinking about something Mr. Thompson told me. Compared to the rest of London, he said, Old East is “gritty.”  And he meant that in a good way – a part of the city that is edgy, diverse and definitely not cookie-cutter.

What a great way to describe an interesting, but often disparaged, slice of London.

At that precise moment, as I rolled along lower Beaverbrook Ave., I spied the huge red-letters-0n-white-background ‘Now Renting’ sign atop one of the new apartment blocks on Proudfoot Lane and asked myself, out loud as a matter of fact, what’s wrong with that?

If you were going to use one word to describe all of London, not just Old East, gritty is not one that would come to mind. Nice is a word that’s often used – but bland, dull, conforming would pretty much do as well.

And that’s what is wrong with all the nonsense this week about hauling down the banner signs from the upper reaches of a few downtown buildings. We’re trying to impose communal will on a city when, in fact, city stands for just about everything communal does not.

Cities are supposed to be edgy, diverse and definitely not cookie-cutter – gritty, in other words.

A few years ago the sign Nazis on city council turned down a proposal for a large electronic sign atop one of the buildings along Richmond St. Too distracting, they argued. Whoa. These are the people who would have told a young Picasso to put away his crayons lest he make a scribble.

If London ever hopes to grow up and become a city that attracts creative young people, that rocks with energy and style, that is a place with a postal code folks from all over would really like to have as part of their address, it’s got to get over this notion that nothing can offend, that everything must be neat and tidy and, Lord only knows, never make a noise or emit a smell.

I’m not advocating that we should just let everyone do whatever they want. There do need to be some rules. Design is important, but it need not be monolithic. Colour is important, but it need not be pastel. Optimum land use is important, but it need not be uniform. You might want to add a few more.

But once we have our short list of things that are truly important, a smart city would say: Now, go be creative.

Personally, I don’t think my short list would be saying much about signs atop tall buildings, whatever they were advertising.