Street furniture isn’t something I’ve ever paid a great deal of attention to.
Public seating, park benches and the like are just things that are there.
Recently at Preston train station I sat on one while I waited for the 0600 to London Euston. It was good. It was just a bench on the platform. Nothing more. Except for the fact that the maker of the bench had considerately given me an arm rest on either side so I had a clearly defined seat and somewhere to rest my arms.
In a newsletter I received this morning there was a link to an ad campaign. It made me realise something that until now had been invisible to me.
What I see as just a bench with a considerate arm rest for people to use…
…is actually something far more sinister and I feel the clunk as the penny drops.
We put measures in place like this to prevent pigeons landing.
And I get that people don’t want pigeons sitting on their window ledges and shitting everywhere. But humans are not pigeons. And we can’t treat them as vermin.
Leave a Reply