The “Welcome to Blantyre” sign at the north western end of Glasgow Road was refurbished in April 2013 for the bi-centenary of David Livingstone’s birth.
Unfortunately the designers made a mistake in the sign (although not many people notice it). The picture of David Livingstone is meant to be superimposed on a map of Africa as seen in the “Livingstone 200” logo in the bottom left corner of the sign.
But they missed out the orange coloured portion of the African map around David Livingstone’s head, so it just looks like there is a chunk of his right cheek missing.
According to Brian Charlton, the designers excuse is that the “200” would have made the sign look “dated” after the 2013 bi-centenary so they removed it. Unfortunately, they also removed the section of the African map along with the orange writing of the “200” in the logo.
Featuring Blantyre Project Social Media with permission. Strictly not for use by others on or offline, our visitors said:
Jan Ritchie Well thinking people would say miss out the 200 and still put in the map!! Common sense???
I did contact the “Powers that be” about the mistake at the time, but the only comment that I got in return was an e-mail saying they removed the “200” part so the sign would not look dated. They never admitted to leaving out the map of Africa along with it 🙁