Croydon's own Calendar Girls

Could this be Croydon's answer to the Women's Institute calendar?
At first glance, Rare Roundabouts of Croydon would appear to have somewhat limited appeal.

But a collection of 12 unique - some would say uniquely boring - pictures of the town's traffic islands is expected to make the bestsellers list (bizarre publications section) ... in Croydon at least.

While the famous WI calendar - immortalised in the film starring Helen Mirren and Julie Walters - features 12 women stripping off, Croydon's calendar features a selection of roundabouts through the seasons.

The cover shot, so good the publishers ran it twice (it also marks the month of August), boasts a humdrum hatchback negotiating a tyre-marked mini-roundabout on Selsdon Road. The backdrop is a nondescript row of shops with one boarded-up.

Lombard roundabout - a drab edifice of bricks, trees and shrubs - heralds the advent of February, while the first days of spring are celebrated by a lonely clump of daffodils and watery sunshine at Addington Road Island.

The highlight of the year comes in May (each page is usefully captioned in two other European languages) when calendar aficionados are treated to a tree stump carved into an amusing relief.

June also features the unbelievably graffiti-free but architecturally lacking walls of a church hall, captioned: "This roundabout's backdrop boasts a spectacular view of Croydon's cityscape."

The year ends on a high note with an aerial shot of Dingwall Road roundabout, complete with scruffy turf.

It all began as a joke last year at the expense of the boss of BB Printers, Kevin Beresford, a self-confessed lover

of roundabouts. His staff focused on traffic islands in their home town of Redditch when testing a new digital camera and produced 100 copies of the calendar which they presented to Mr Beresford. One was sent to Channel 4's Graham Norton show, leading to orders from as far away as Australia.

Mr Beresford has been interviewed by Norwegian radio and has pontificated in a broadcast transmitted to 150 stations throughout the United States. As a result, orders have come from Chicago, St Louis and San Francisco.

For 2004, BB Printers has produced calendars of other "lucky" towns' roundabouts including Bolton, Milton Keynes, Swindon, Grimsby, Cleethorpes, Slough and Redditch. Mr Beresford said: "We sold 10,000 copies of the Redditch calendar but I reckon we'll sell far more of the Croydon version. It is, after all, a much bigger town."

He called it "Rare Roundabouts" because, he says, there were so few such junctions in the town. "That's probably why it's always congested," he said. "Obviously they need more. It works a dream in Milton Keynes."

The calendars cost £7 each and are available via the website at: www.roundaboutsofredditch.co.uk