![A brick wall in Rochester (Boley Hill, near the castle, in case you want to seek it out sometime)](https://lukemckernan.com/wp-content/uploads/wall.jpg)
Here’s a curious anecdote. I live in a town rich in brick walls of every age and description. I like photographing them (I wrote a post about this a while ago). I put several of these photographs on my Flickr site, should anyone want to look at photographs of brick walls for themselves.
Time moved on, and a web designer got in touch with me. He had been looking on Flickr for photographs of walls and just happened to like one of the ones that I had taken. Would it be possible to use it? Sure, I said, what for? For the website of a taxi firm, it turns out. His commission was to come up witha website for a taxi company that wanted to promote booking its vehicles through a phone app. I wondered to myself how a photograph of an ancient brick wall and pavement could be used to denote taxis, but I’m not a designer. I’m not a photographer either, but I said he was free to use the photograph and he promised to get back to me.
![www.scanclickgo.co.uk](https://lukemckernan.com/wp-content/uploads/scanclickgo.jpg)
Time moved on again, and the website is ready. It’s for Streamline taxis of Headcorn in mid-Kent, and their booking site is called Scan, Click & Go (smart move to have secured that web address, certainly). And sure enough, there’s my photograph, greyed out, with coloured lines to demonstrate travel, a pink car, and a QR code for you to scan with your phone. I’m still not quite sure why you need to show a brick wall, when cars travel along roads, but what the heck. It certainly is different, and I think gets its point across.
![A Streamline taxi](https://lukemckernan.com/wp-content/uploads/streamline_taxi.jpg)
But there’s more, because I hadn’t realised the full extent of the design plans. The photo, design and QR code appear not only on the website but on the taxis themselves. All across mid-Kent, Streamline taxis are heading out to deliver passengers with my photograph splashed across the side of the vehicles. It’s the oddest thing. I’ve been racking my brain for a moral to the tale, but maybe it’s just a case where curiosity is the story in itself. I took a photograph of a brick wall. I put it on the Internet. Now it’s on a taxi. Rum world.
Links:
- The web designer is Clever Little Fishes
- My photographs of walls and pavements are a set on my Flickr site