Sinister street furniture

My grandparents have always loved that old joke:  “When is a door not a door?”  (“I don’t know  - when is a door not a door...?”)  “When it’s ajar!”

So, when is a public bench not a public bench?  When it’s secretly a reinforced anti-terrorist bulkhead, designed to withstand the onslaught of a 7.5 tonne articulated lorry ploughing into it at 30 mph, being exhibited at the 'Counter Terror Expo 2011'. 

Marshalls (‘Creating better landscapes’), the creator of this dubious piece of kit, also charmingly boast that their ‘Giome’ planter “Provides an elegant solution for introducing planting to the public realm, coupled with exceptional levels of security”. 

At a time when street furniture is continuously being removed in a bid to purge undesirables from town centres, (notwithstanding the odd exception), we are once more reminded of our irrelevance in our own neighbourhoods.  The only remaining justification to install civic amenities is now unrelated to public benefit, which has become merely a serendipitous bonus.  The primary function of these objects is instead to prepare for Mad Max street-battles, waged between Transformers trucks and hapless Godzilla pagodas.

This visceral vision of future security-risks, re-imagining our cities as battle-fields, is not a response to experience of any previous terrorist modus operandi, but is conceived in the realm of Hollywood blockbusters. 

It is an escalation of a trend that follows New Labour’s ‘Secured by Design’ policy, whereby since 1998, plans for new building developments must receive approval from specialist police units, which encourage the inclusion of ‘security’ features – fences, CCTV, roller grilles, barbed wire, machine gun nests, that sort of thing.   

It also chimes with the Olympic plan to militarise London policing, using unmanned drones developed for use as spy-planes in Afghanistan, to patrol the skies in 2012 – and probably beyond. 

Marshalls’ grand vision of not just putting up benches, but ‘Creating better landscapes’ and the wholesale reconfiguration of public space, also fits perfectly with the mindset of the megalomaniac authors of urban regeneration, who feel the hand of history weighing heavy on their shoulders as their Olympic legacy is forged.

It’s not a big deal that people make benches that are hard.  But the logic behind their conception is indicative of serious underlying problems in the way that planners perceive cities, and the way that they intend to shape the places we live in the future.