Take a drive down one of Canberra's wide boulevards and you'll see parks, trees and distant mountains but not a billboard in sight.

Why aren't there many billboards in Canberra? Curious Canberran Sandi Lees wants to know.

"Coming down the highway, you don't see any as soon as you enter the ACT... it's just beautiful views," she said.

Loading...

Sandi said the lack of large advertisements was part of the city's appeal and she believed politics was behind it.

"I'm thinking it's probably got something to do with it being a political town and it was just designated as being egalitarian, we don't want to be seen as showing any favours to anybody," she said.

Does the city actually ban billboards?

Businesses in Canberra have to rely on smaller signs to advertise their products. ( Supplied: Ian McAuley )

Yes it does - though there is one major exception and a few outliers.

The National Capital Plan, which governs Canberra's main avenues and areas of significance, reads: "Commercial roadside signs are not permitted in road reservations, except on bus shelters."

That exception is fairly new, it came as some of the city's iconic bus shelters were replaced by more modern, ad-laden structures.

The ACT Government restricts signage across the rest of Canberra, preventing most advertisements above the ground floor.

But Canberra's billboard ban stretches back much further, to a federal ordinance from 1937.

Brett Phillips from the ACT Environment and Planning Directorate said the regulation is closely related to Canberra's inception as a planned city.

"Billboards are something that's been seen to not be in keeping with the way that [Canberra's] been planned," he said.

"They're open spaces, and there's nothing that obstructs from that view."

Are there any exceptions?

The Canberra Airport is a notable exception to the billboard ban. ( Supplied: Ian McAuley )

Despite the ban, Canberra isn't completely devoid of billboards - something Ms Lees noted.

"At the Convention Centre [there's] a sneaky billboard," she said.

Mr Phillips said that the electronic sign mounted on the building - and multi-storey signage at the Canberra Centre - are allowed under development applications because they fall on private land.

Mobile billboards and bus wrap-arounds aren't covered by the rules either, because they move around.

But the most prominent exception is at Canberra Airport, which was granted the right to erect billboards by the Federal Government in 2000, a few years after it was privatised..

Will the ban last?

Ian McAuley started his own website to document signs around the city. ( ABC News: James Fettes )

Lots of people want the ban to remain in force - including Ms Lees.

There's even organised support in the form of people like Ian McAuley, who helped form the Committee for the Removal of Advertising Signs (CRAS) back in the 1990s.

At the time, the group protested a rise in small sandwich board signs around the city.

But Mr McAuley said advertising has since become much more corporatised in the capital and he created his own website to showcase examples.

"This has become big business - we're not just dealing with a few Fyshwick traders who decide to flout the law," he said.

"We want to preserve our public space ... [it] belongs to us, not to corporations."

Early this year, Chief Minister Andrew Barr said the ban on billboards could be in need of a shake-up, which led the ACT Parliament to hold an inquiry.

The group is expecting to release a report in October.