'Bollocks to Brexit': the geographies of Brexit protest stickers, 2015-21

Protest stickers are a ubiquitous form of resistance within the urban landscape. Small pieces of self-adhesive paper, vinyl, or plastic which express a political opinion or statement, protest stickers adorn lamp posts, rubbish bins, bollards, and walls in towns and cities all over the world. Ranging from the hand drawn to the professionally printed, protest stickers are used to express opinions on a whole range of topics including electoral politics, immigration, animal rights, vegetarianism and veganism, gender, sexuality, healthcare, worker’s rights, anarchism and (anti-)fascism. Despite their pervasiveness, they have been largely ignored by scholars of resistance, both within geography and other disciplines (although Vigsø, 2010 and Ritchie, 2019 are exceptions to this). Protest stickers deserve scholarly attention however, not least because they serve a broad range of purposes, including advertising events or groups, expressing solidarity and support, covering up other stickers, persuading the viewer, and constructing collective identities (Awcock, forthcoming). Over the last five years, I have collected a database of more than 3000 images of protest stickers from forty four locations. Using visual, textual, and material approaches this database can be analysed to consider questions of how protest stickers function as an act of resistance and how they relate to concepts such as public space, urban subversion, and the right to the city. In this chapter, I shall be using Brexit as a case study. One of the most significant and controversial political issues in Britain of recent years, the debate over Brexit has prompted fierce arguments and strong reactions, from both sides. In this chapter, I shall trace how this debate played out through protest stickers, starting with the referendum campaign in 2016, right through to Brexit Day and its aftermath in 2020. From the famous florescent yellow “Bollocks to Brexit” sticker, to less common pro-Brexit stickers, Brexit has inspired multiple sticker designs that reflect all sides of the debate as it evolved over the course of half a decade. This chapter will explore the ways in which these stickers use symbolism, emotive language, humour, and other techniques to politicise the streets, drawing them in to public debate. As such, protest stickers are acts of resistance on two levels: the first and most obvious is in terms of Brexit itself. The second level is common to all protest stickers, regardless of their topic. By subverting the functionality of objects in the urban landscape and turning them into political noticeboards, protest stickers reveal possible alternatives in cities which are increasingly limited and restricted (Mould, 2019). In this chapter, I will explore how these two levels of resistance overlap and interact.