Dick Turpin was undoubtedly a bad man who was punished for his crimes.

But like the Krays in this century, he seems to have won a popularity his grisly deeds do not truly merit.

A brief trawl of the Internet reveals everything from museums to public houses using the Turpin name to attract the punters. Now the good people of Barnet can do the same with a sculpture to mark a site which may or may not have been used by Dick himself.

Perhaps it is fanciful to speculate whether in 200 years time, the authorities in Manchester's Moss Side will be erecting little monuments to gun-toting crack dealers.

But we can only welcome Barnet Council's decision to commemorate highway robbery by restoring the Beehive tree to something approximating its original site.

We have to wait a fortnight to see what the students at Barnet College actually come up with. But they promise that the sculpture will be in relief, so that tree will still be recognisable to those who have grown to love it.

Perhaps the students would not list the North Circular Road too highly in their list of ideal exhibition spaces. But the next time you are stuck in a traffic jam in Finchley, at least their work might remind you that it could be worse.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000.Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.