Bytes: Fence Week, continued: More Unique Fences

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We are coming near to the end of Fence Week, readers, the last instalment will be tomorrow. As far as Fence Week goes, it will be the last post (ha ha).

Hopefully you will have found the various posts interesting and informative,

Today’s fence post (ha ha) is another visual one, a look at some notable and distinctive fences around the world . . .

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The Buckingham Palace Fence:

Buck Palace has an impressive security fence designed to keep the uninvited out. Nonetheless at least 12 people have gained unauthorised entry into the palace or its grounds since 1914, The most famous of these entries was by Michael Fagan, who broke into the palace twice in 1982, entering the Queen's bedroom on the second occasion. At the time, news media reported that he had a long conversation with the Queen while she waited for security officers to arrive, but in a 2012 interview, Fagan said the Queen ran out of the room, and no conversation took place. It was only in 2007 that trespassing on the palace grounds became a specific criminal offence.

Meghan Markle, aged 15, photographed on a fence outside Buckingham Palace when visiting London in 1996. The security fence is further back.

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The Aquarium Fence:

Millionaire topographical engineer Mehmet Ali Gökçeoğlu bought a luxurious villa in Çeşme, Turkey, then In 2005, built a 50 metre aquarium fence filled with fish and octopuses that has become a tourist attraction in its own right. Located on the shores of the Aegean Sea, it is linked to the Aegean through a 400 metre-long buried pipeline so that the water is changed continuously. There is also a surveillance system to prevent damage by members of the public and tourists.

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The Lovelock Fences:

Love lock fences have existed for over 100 years but became popular and spread in the early 2000s. The practice involves locking a padlock onto a fence, bridge or other structure as a symbol of the love of the persons placing it, often with engravings of initials, names or comments.

Notwithstanding the sentiments and symbolism, many authorities have taken the view that it amounts to vandalism, as well as raising safety concerns by reason of the considerable weights involved.

By way of example, the locks on the Pont Des Arts bridge in Paris caused parts of it to collapse, causing the locks to be removed in 2015 and be replaced by a special type of glass.

Lovelocks on the Pont Des Arts

Another pic of the Pont Des Arts

I wrote about love locks in 2014, here is the link to that post and to some amazing photographs:

http://bytesdaily.blogspot.com/search?q=love+locks

Two years later I wrote about the removal in Paris, at:

http://bytesdaily.blogspot.com/2016/12/locks.html

Worth a look.

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The Bra Fence:

In 1999 people living in Central Otago, New Zraland, found four bras mysteriously hanging on a nearby fence along the Cardrona Valley Road in Otago. More people kept adding bras to the fence and the place became a major tourist attraction. For some it was just a quirky thing to do, for others it was a personal statement, sometimes of female empowerment.

The fence was a cause of controversy. Some local residents objected to its decency, some that it would upset Asian students at a nearby college, some that it presented the wrong image for the area and some that it was a traffic hazard with people slowing to view. However, local sheep farmer John Lee, who had become the unofficial guardian of the site, refused to remove the bras from the fence, claiming that 90% of letters received about the fence were positive, and that the bras were the most photographed attraction in the area.

The fence became so popular that eventually the traffic hazard argument held way and the fence was moved from the main highway to the driveway entrance of Kelly Spaans and Sean Colbourne's horse trekking and quad biking business "The Cardrona", where it can still be seen in all its glory, with more being added regularly.

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The Licence Plate Fence:

Remember the truck in the Speilberg film Duel, with the vehicle licence plates of the victims fixed to the front of the truck? Various places have licence plate fences and walls, not as souvenirs as victims but because the owners conduct scrap and salvage yards and because more get donated.

The one above is in Missouri

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The UXO Fences:

UXO stands for unexploded ordnance, ie unexploded bombs, mines etc. It is estimated that up to 30% of bombs dropped on Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam during the Vietnam War failed to explode, either through defects or from being dropped too low. The UXO causes fatalities and injuries, as well as making land unsafe to farm. There are ongoing removal and disarmament programs. Once retrieved and disarmed, such ordnance has been utilised in construction of fences and gates, as seen in these photographs from Laos: