Turning a blind eye

If you fancy a life-size racing car on your roof, or a giant Japanese pagoda in your back garden, there's somebody (apart from your neighbours) who may be less than amused: your local planning officer. Planners aren't crazy about you turning your home into an individual statement.

And if you live in a conservation area or a listed building, the book of regulations will fall on you with a thud. But do all these rules and regulations mean that London is becoming too manicured and conventional? The wacky is also part of our city's personality.

Walk up from Camden Town Tube station towards Camden Lock and an extraordinary sight greets you: a pine rocking chair nearly two storeys high, giant Timberland boots, a skull, a witch, an angel, a huge pair of jeans ... In the early 1990s, when business was slack, shopkeepers began putting up giant fibreglass signs to attract customers. Kavoos Kavoossian displays a Centurian tank on the Georgian shop front of his Army and Navy surplus store, while an aeroplane decorates his other shop down the road. The tank went up in 1992.

"Everybody else was doing it," he says. "We get lots of tourists, they really love it." A typical example is Andrea Hejduckova, 23, who is on holiday from Prague with her sister Iva, 21. "It's brilliant, original," she enthuses. "There's nothing like this in Prague."

Shopkeepers are cagey about whether they asked the planners first. According to a Camden Council spokeswoman: "You need planning permission to have any inflatable or fibreglass items above a shop front, but the area north of Camden Town Tube is not in a conservation area. We've only allowed it in the non-conservation area."

To architect and broadcaster Maxwell Hutchinson, this relaxed attitude typifies the inconsistencies of planners. "They take a very tough line on comparatively small issues: I argue with them about the disposition of glazing bars." But the fact is, Camden Lock's phantasmagoria of bizarre signs has become such a feature of the area that there would be an outcry if it went. Hutchinson agrees: "It's amazing, so unlike London. I think it's good fun."

Inspired by Camden Lock, a large mammoth rears above the Collins Gallery in the Caledonian Road. Richard Collins and his son Adam, who sell contemporary art, made the creature themselves out of wire and fabric and erected it, without planning permission, a year ago. Unlike the Camden fantasia, the mammoth breaks Rule One for winning with the wacky: none of Collins's neighbours have followed suit. And, more seriously, it breaks Rule Two: don't go wild in a conservation area.

"He should have permission because it's changing the outside of his building," says an Islington Council spokesman. "He'd need to apply and we'd need to look at it." Collins is philosophical about falling foul of the planners-"I never intended it to be a permanent fixture. It was really only to draw attention to the gallery." But the mammoth does win on Rule Three: Islington confirms that it has attracted no complaints.

The key, it seems, is getting everyone to fall in love with your wild idea. What better example than the London Eye? It only has planning permission for five years, but it's been such a massive hit that there's talk of making it a permanent fixture. Neither Lambeth Council nor London Eye owners, British Airways, will commit themselves. But a council spokeswoman says: "We use it in our own promotional literature as a symbol of Lambeth."