London to become ping pong paradise

Story by Mat Osman

Photo by Libertinus

Last weekend I wandered along the canalside by Paris’ Place de la République and had a little smirk to myself that it wasn’t a patch on London’s - no wildlife, no shady little paths and definitely no section running between the zoo’s giraffe enclosure and aviary.

But, amid all this London boosting there was one area in which the Parisian canals won out. Every 500 meters or so, set away from the road, stood a concrete table-tennis table. And they were, without exception, packed. Parisians, tourists, kids, old people – they were all out playing in the sunshine.

So when I came home, my was mind spinning with the idea that that’s what I could do for this city – I’d be the man to introduce street table-tennis – in one fell swoop eradicating obesity, promoting the 2012 Olympics and getting Londoners to mix more.

So I’m a bit miffed to come home and find Boris has beaten me to it. He’s getting Colette Hiller – the woman behind those pianos that were dotted around the city last year – to do the same with ping-pong tables.

Over 100 tables will be erected across London from the obvious places (parks, squares, shopping centres) to the less likely (Heathrow Terminal Five, St Pancras International, the Albert Memorial) with balls and bats labelled with the hopeful but almost certainly ineffectual sign ‘Please put me back’. There’s all kinds of promotional guff – celebrity matches and all that - but the nub of the matter is simple. From this summer it will be every Londoners god-given right to indulge in a little drunken ping-ponging on the walk home for central London’s clubs. And hooray for that.

WARNING – it might seem that the aforementioned fitness, Olympics-promoting and sociability might be reason enough for this table-tennis infestation but Boris has another, slightly madder justification. He s become convinced that ping pong, far from being the Asian invention that everyone assumed, was actually based on a Victorian parlour game called whiff-whaff. We don’t want the whole thing to be cancelled in a fit of pique so it’s probably worth just nodding and keeping quiet if he mentions the idea in public again.

Read more about Colette Hiller’s last project - www.singlondon.org

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