'Anne Huxtable waited here 8th Dec, 1952 for a friend who did not turn up'.

'David Williams watched the rain from here, 7th September 1979'

'Mrs Mary Howard adjusted her hat in the reflection in this window June 3, 1921'

'Nathan Walker walked past here 47 times during 1968 on the May 21, 1968 - he looked up'.

Whenever I return to Newcastle I notice the first of these. It is on a small brass plaque set into the slab-paving outside the Newgate shopping centre. The others are distributed at various well-patronized points around the city. The one about Ms. Huxtable is placed in an obvious place to wait for someone in that area of town, between the Bigg Market, Central Station and the Monument, covered by an awning.

But none of these people ever existed.

Which is a disappointment. These installations were created in 2004 as an 'Art for Streets' project. Here is the article from the Evening Chronicle, which from the age of 13-16 I delivered door to door.

The Newgate shopping centre didn't exist in 1952, and these stories are invented stories - pleasant (and quirky) narratives (with names that are, with the exception of Howard, decidedly uncommon in the North East). Passing somewhere - not a hundred times - but 47 times in a year and only looking up once, on a specific day, is just the sort of thing we might do - a reality effect we can believe in. It is a mobilising fiction, and this is surely its intent - to make us consider our own small unremarked actions. There is an implication that we will appreciate a token specificity that engages with us through an illusion of intimacy, as long as we don't try and discover who these people are; these could ultimately be punched out and placed at random in every city in the land in order to enliven our ground-staring lives. It's okay to be ditched; everyone gets wet; check your make-up; cheer up! What I had at first taken for an honest attempt to overlay and publicly mark a personal history, is rather a facsimile of the same.

Above all, it is the cheapness of the activity, the commissioner-led rather than community-led process that is disappointing. Rather than an opportunity to involve the community, the artist took the opportunity to create an illusion of involving the community. You have to generalize out of the evidence, not out of your own imagination.

I prefer the writing people leave in fresh-concrete.