Fly-Posting & Sticker Removal

Fly-posting looks like the least serious thing we remove and it's frequently the fiddliest. A single fresh poster peels off in seconds. Eight layers of gig posters that have been rained on, dried, bleached and re-covered across two years behave more like a laminate bonded to the wall, and getting them off without damaging what's underneath takes real time.

Stickers are worse per square centimetre. Modern vinyl stickers use aggressive permanent adhesives designed to survive weather, and the ones deliberately used for tagging — courier labels, blank vinyls, printed campaign stickers — are chosen precisely because they're difficult to remove.

The adhesive is the actual job

Whatever the material on the surface, removal splits into two stages, and the second one is the work.

Getting the paper or vinyl off is stage one. Done cold, it shreds — the top layer tears away and leaves the backing bonded to the wall, and you're picking at fragments. Done with heat, the adhesive softens and the material lifts away in one piece, which is why steam is the standard approach.

Stage two is the residue, and this is what separates a proper job from a rushed one. Cured adhesive left on a shutter or a lamp column collects dirt within days and ends up more visible than the sticker was — a grey-black rectangle that reads as neglect. It needs an adhesive remover appropriate to the surface, then a rinse, and it takes longer than lifting the poster did.

Surface matters as much as here as anywhere

Metal — shutters, cabinets, lamp columns and bins are the classic targets. Removal is usually complete, with the care being not to soften the powder coating with a strong solvent or scratch it with a scraper.

Glass — good results, though care is needed around any applied film or manifestation, and around the frame mastic which some removers attack.

Brick and concrete — the difficult ones. Both are porous, so adhesive soaks in and paste-applied posters bond into the texture. Expect a good result rather than a perfect one, and occasionally a faint patch where the poster was.

Plastic — straightforward, but only with plastic-safe products, since many standard adhesive removers craze polycarbonate and acrylic on contact.

Why speed matters more than with most contaminants

Fly-posting has an unusually strong self-reinforcing effect. A poster left up is free advertising that worked, so the same promoter uses the same spot again — and other promoters read the surface as available. A cabinet with one sticker gathers a cluster within a month.

It also gets harder with time. Paper posters go through wet and dry cycles that laminate them onto the surface, UV bleaches and hardens the adhesive, and vinyl stickers become brittle so they break up rather than peel. A poster removed in week one is a minute's work; the same poster after a winter is ten.

So for town centres, transport operators and managing agents the economics favour a regular sweep over an occasional blitz. Our BID and transport clients typically build fly-posting into the same visit as graffiti, which costs very little on top and stops the problem compounding.

What we don't do

Two honest limits. Where a poster has been pasted directly onto unsealed brick or porous concrete, some staining from the paste and the printing ink can remain even after the paper is gone. We can usually reduce it substantially, but on a textured surface a faint rectangle sometimes stays visible.

And where a sticker has been on painted metal in full sun for years, removal can reveal a colour difference — the paint around it has faded and the paint under it hasn't. Cleaning can't fix that; it's simply the fading becoming visible. On a shutter that's often a cue to consider repainting, or an anti-graffiti coating that makes future removals trivial and protects the paint underneath.