Life

Nuala McCann: I’m not totally against hostile architecture, I just don’t think it should be hostile to people

Our son explains about benches designed in precisely a manner to make them impossible for homeless people to kip on. I’m not totally against hostile architecture. I just don’t think it should be hostile to people

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann is an Irish News columnist and writes a weekly radio review.

Homeless Jesus, a bronze sculpture by Canadian sculptor Timothy Schmalz. Picture from BBC via Pinterest
Homeless Jesus, a bronze sculpture by Canadian sculptor Timothy Schmalz. Picture from BBC via Pinterest Homeless Jesus, a bronze sculpture by Canadian sculptor Timothy Schmalz. Picture from BBC via Pinterest

THERE is a new toilet on the market that aims to cut the time that workers spend away from their desks. Apparently comfort breaks take a huge 10-minute chunk out of the working day.

But if you get your staff to sit at a 13-degree angle then you remove the comfort from said comfort station and they’re up and back at work in double quick time. At least, that’s the theory.

An article in the Guardian suggests that the developers of said toilet have calculated that a 13 degrees tilt is just right to make your workers feel utterly miserable on the throne and force them back to the computer slog.

The article says that the toilet manufacturers claim that £4 billion is lost yearly in people answering nature’s call.

We are not amused. This is Big Brother a step too far.

“Hostile architecture, Mum,” sighs our son, who is across these kind of things.

It sounds very hostile. He explains about benches designed in precisely a manner to make them impossible for homeless people to kip on.

Suddenly I see them everywhere. In Belfast city centre on Arthur Street there are divides on the benches or they’re curved in such a way that nobody in a sleeping bag could get a half decent kip. It keeps the poverty hidden, out of the way of the shiny shops.

But shouldn’t we just tackle the problem?

I once interviewed a sculptor from Canada who has designed a statue of the Homeless Christ. At first glance, you see a slumped figure covered in an old blanket on a park bench, but go closer and you see the wounds of the nails on his feet.

There were plans to bring this statue to Belfast. I’m not sure what happened.

Not that there are not the best of people in this city working to help those on the streets. I watched three of them lift a man from a doorway on a busy Saturday. He looked bruised and bleeding and broken. They were kind and gentle.

But spare a thought for the homeless of California. According to the aforementioned article, a new paint has been developed that sprays urine back at whoever pees in the street. And if you consider that a huge number of America’s homeless population live there, then where else are they going to pee?

I’m not totally against hostile architecture. I just don’t think it should be hostile to people.

Hostile to pigeons and rats is a different story. You can get spikes and whirring windmills to put on your rooftops to stop the pigeons roosting.

Seagulls are a law onto themselves. Once in a long ago car park in Rhyll, which is like the Portrush of Wales, we must have wandered a little too close to a seagull’s nest – it was like being dive bombed by the Luftwaffe.

I have a friend who swears that being bald is an open invitation for an angry seagull to target your noggin with a sharp beak. Nesting season is a torture.

Our son thinks I’m a nature Nazi because I welcome blackbirds and robins and coal tits to the garden but I’d shoot a thieving murdering ba***rd of a magpie on sight.

All animals are equal but some are more equal than others. Magpies are at the bottom of my pecking order.

“If I had a gun,” I whisper, looking out at the black-and-white boyo on our grass.

“It’s nature, Ma,” sighs our boy.

“Don’t give me the ‘red in tooth and claw’. It’s after the baby birds for supper,” I tell him.

We agree to differ on that.

But one woman’s meat is another woman’s poison. Years ago, when our children were small, we’d go visit my sister in Manchester. I remember looking out of her window and spotting a grey squirrel spring with such grace on to her washing line, nipping delicately along it at lightning speed.

“Wow!” I cried. For, at that time, 20 years ago, squirrels were exotic in Belfast.

“Huh,” she snorted.

To her, they were vermin. She once got a thick metal cage constructed to protect the birds’ seeds from the thieving squirrels.

But the cheeky boyos – doubtless singing a rousing chorus of The Boys are Back in Town – made an overnight foray and chewed right through every steel wire between them and their nuts.

There’s always a way around hostile architecture – it’s a point to ponder on the work loo... at a 13 degree tilt lest you get too comfy.