Transcript — Design series: the hidden meaning in our benches and lampposts

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode — ‘Design series: the hidden meaning in our benches and lampposts’

Lilah Raptopoulos
Hi listeners. Before we start, just a small fun announcement. I’m excited to let you know that this episode is the first in a four part special series about design. It will be spaced out over the next few weeks and will include two bonus Wednesday episodes, so look out for them! OK, hope you enjoy!

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Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

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When we think of the look of a city, most of us probably think of the skyline. But there’s a whole other aesthetic world of a city that you can only see when you zoom in close. It’s the design that exists in everyday objects: lamp posts, phone booths, fire hydrants, drains, things that seem so ephemeral that we barely notice their design. There’s a term for these things. They’re called street furniture, and my colleague Edwin Heathcote has been studying them for a long time. Edwin has been the FT’s architecture and design critic for 25 years. Is that correct?

Edwin Heathcote
That’s right.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. He’s the author of more than a dozen books, and his work just makes the world feel a little clearer. He helps you find poetry in the mundane. Last year, he published a book on this topic called On the Street. And he’s with me in the London studio to talk about how to see your city with fresh eyes. Edwin. Hi. Welcome to the show.

Edwin Heathcote
Thanks so much, Lilah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Hi. Thanks for being here. So maybe we can start with the basics, which is just how would you define street furniture? Like what qualifies?

Edwin Heathcote
Yeah, it’s a fairly simple classification I think. It’s a layer of public amenity. You could say an infrastructure of public goods. When we think of architecture, we think of five storey buildings or skyscrapers or whatever. It’s a big scale. And then we have the body in the city, the human body. And then this stuff is kind of at the scale of the body because it’s in the street and it’s all, it’s all to do with how we move through the city and how we use it. So it’s that kind of mediating layer between us and the buildings.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So the in-between is the in between us and the actual architecture of the city. Cool. So I hear that your book started as a series that you published for the FT that was quite controversial in the newsroom some years ago?

Edwin Heathcote
Yeah, right.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Like, why is Edwin writing about manhole covers?

Edwin Heathcote
I think that’s right. It’s a tough sell, actually, in a way, because it’s boring, you know? In a way. You know, we think of manhole covers and telephone poles and booths and, you know, we, you know, we don’t really think about this stuff as, as culture.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Edwin Heathcote
But there was a time when it was thought of as culture and it was a part of city building. You know, my contention is that that’s faded now and we don’t really see this stuff anymore. We we leave it to engineers to design. So it’s just purely functional. It has no kind of aesthetic integrity to it, no intent to to beautify the city. So really what I was trying to do was highlight this layer and see where it was done well. You know, and how it can impact the city and impact you're your perception of travelling through the city, of moving through the city. And you know, where it wasn’t done well and maybe whether we could do something about it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I’m struck by how successful that series was and how, like exciting, actually, even though it seems boring. How exciting. Readers and people who live in cities find it and found it. Why do you think this appeals to us?

Edwin Heathcote
I think it has a kind of universality. So because it’s at our scale in the city, we encountered these objects as equals. If you think of the phone booth, particularly London phone box, you know, the red one.

Lilah Raptopoulos
The iconic . . . 

Edwin Heathcote
That everyone knows exactly. It’s a beautiful little temple to technology in a way to new technology that was emerging. And it’s designed exactly to fit our shape. You know, it’s vertical like we are. So it’s almost like a century box or a guard standing outside a palace because this little box, the booth is a representation of the state. This was a state-owned entity, the post office at the time. And, you know, it has to embody the values of, of a nation. You know, it’s a lot to do for a small piece of street furniture.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Excellent.

Edwin Heathcote
And it’s the same with, you know, ballards, which used to be cast iron and very carefully thought about in their shape. And whereas now everything is just the it’s basically just a tube of extruded metal.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. That’s true. I was going to ask you about that because, there are a lot of design choices that we don’t think about. And there it seems to be a difference. There’s the difference between the sort of purely functional, modernist, utilitarian designs of things like a lamp post that just promotes light. But then there’s like very ornate lamp posts.

Edwin Heathcote
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Does that sort of trend with architecture trends over time, like can we kind of talk through the ornate versus the functional . . . how do you think about that?

Edwin Heathcote
Yeah, yeah. It does so very much. If we think of Victorian architecture, you know, the Gothic, the kind of wildly overblown stuff. And then we think of the Victorian lamp post gaslights, they’re very much part of the same world of things. They’re ornate. They’re trying to express, some kind of identity and trying to add a kind of dignity to the street. If we look at Paris in the 1860s, when it was being redesigned by Baron Haussmann, the same architects who designed the buildings designed a range of street furniture. Street lights, kiosks for selling newspapers. Public fountains and so on. And there was a whole layer of things that the column Morris, you know, these cylindrical columns that had theatre posters on and so on, and that was all conceived as a unified layer of urban identity. This was a kind of deliberate, city branding gesture, in effect.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Which worked quite well. Right. Like.

Edwin Heathcote
Very well.

Lilah Raptopoulos
We see Paris still as the most romantic city.

Edwin Heathcote
Very well. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And these small things, even though we might not notice them that much, they’re a very influential part of that identity.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. And then when we think about, street furniture that’s meant to sort of impose control, it would be an example of that.

Edwin Heathcote
You know, I’ve suggested that these items are an infrastructure of public amenity.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Edwin Heathcote
But you could reverse that and say these things always have an element of control. They’re erected by the state to regulate city life in some way.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Edwin Heathcote
Sometimes that’s to our benefit, like clean drinking water from fountains in the Victorian era. But sometimes, like street lighting, it’s not necessarily, always, so popular with the residents. So in Georgian London, when they started putting gas lights up, the sex workers, you know, for instance. Well, they depended on a level of darkness for their anonymity.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Edwin Heathcote
You know, the conduct of their trade. And the patrons of the sex workers who work across, you know, all layers of society, from the bottom to the top. You know, there was there is a kind of a need in the city for a level of anonymity. But, you know, you might argue that street lights were to do with control, police phone boxes was to do with control.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Edwin Heathcote
So these things have, have slightly sometimes authoritarian connotations.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. The other kind of category about this is the street furniture that is sort of utilitarian and purely functional. And you’re saying there’s a lot more of that now and you wish there was. Yeah.

Edwin Heathcote
Yeah. Well when I was reading the book there was a really fascinating instance. It was it was the pandemic at the time, and they were putting up the infrastructure for 5G. And there are these you’ll have noticed them probably. They’re these very blank looking poles with a kind of a vessel on top.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Edwin Heathcote
Which is the transmitter.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Edwin Heathcote
And, people around Britain were, setting fire to these homes, which is very hard. Still cold. They were trying to they were trying to set fire to these, you know, these solid steel poles because they thought that, the 5G was spreading Covid.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh, God.

Edwin Heathcote
And it was a completely kind of medieval, superstitious moment in which you see that these things stuck on the street can have intense symbolic value.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Edwin Heathcote
Even now, symbolic and superstitious value, something that you think would have disappeared, you know, along with the witch burning or whatever. But, you know, here it is. So we do attach meaning to these objects that suddenly appear in our streetscape.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah.

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OK, so, I’m curious if you could tell me a little how you notice, you know, in general as you’re walking around cities, like, how annoying are you as you’re walking down the street? Are you stopping all the time to take photos?

Edwin Heathcote
I suppose a little. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I’m probably not great to walk with, but I do. I don’t really have a hobby. So my hobby is wandering around cities, either my city, London, or other cities if I happen to be somewhere else.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Edwin Heathcote
And I spend, you know, hours walking around looking at the way people use the city.

Lilah Raptopoulos
What are you sort of looking for? How are you looking? Are you . . . 

Edwin Heathcote
I think I am just looking.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Edwin Heathcote
I think that’s all it is. So it’s not really. It’s not a specialism.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Edwin Heathcote
I suppose you know, we all spend a lot of time looking through cities, either looking at their phone screens or with headphones on or in an Uber or, you know, a metro. So we’re maybe not necessarily walking through the city as much as we should.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Edwin Heathcote
And it’s when we walk through the city at different times of the day that you begin to understand how the city is used in different ways at different times. I was amazed at the last time I went to Hong Kong, when I was there on a Sunday, and the Filipino nannies had taken over the kind of elevated walkways, and they were all having picnics, Sunday is their day off. They set themselves up cardboard box sort of booths, almost.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Edwin Heathcote
And, they’re completely appropriating the public realm in a way that doesn’t get in anyone’s way, and the authorities tolerates it. And, I find that very attractive. I think we have a tendency now, perhaps, to not use the city enough. We use the city for consumption.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Edwin Heathcote
You know, so we go out to restaurants, we go out to bars and hotels and theatres and cinemas and stuff. But we’re not somehow appropriating the public space enough, with the exception maybe of parks.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, totally.

Edwin Heathcote
In the evening, when there’s no one in the City of London, wouldn’t it be great if the city filled up with skateboarders, you know, grinding along the ledges?

Lilah Raptopoulos
I know I actually think skateboarders are some of the best. They’re the best examples of people who know how to use their city in a different way.

Edwin Heathcote
Absolutely.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Edwin Heathcote
Yeah, absolutely.

Lilah Raptopoulos
With their city . . . 

Edwin Heathcote
Yeah. It’s a ludic approach to the city. Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

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You wrote in your book that the image of cities change as they try to become more like a particular idea of themselves. Which I find really interesting. But I wanted to ask you about what that means to you.

Edwin Heathcote
Yeah, that’s something that I say particularly applies, recently to Paris, where they had this infrastructure of public goods, the, the newsstands and the and the Morris column advertising columns and the public toilets.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Edwin Heathcote
Which had all been designed as a coherent layer of things with a very specific urban branded identity you might call it. And they’ve, some of those things had reached the ends of their public lives. So they needed to be changed. And they formulated a kind of pastiche of those things with the modern amenities.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Edwin Heathcote
Tech built in. And it’s an interesting thing because, you know, it’s halfway between a kind of homage to a history. But then you also wonder, well, shouldn’t really we be thinking about what are the new things we need in the city? What does that mean in this country, for instance? But I know in the States to the the infrastructure of public toilets has been decimated. There’s almost none left. And that is, you know, you would think, an absolutely critical part of an accessible city of, of, for women with small children, for older people. We’re trying to get people to walk and exercise more. How do we allow them to stay in the public space?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, that’s really true. OK. So public toilets are one example of something that’s really not working. Are there others?

Edwin Heathcote
Yeah. There’s a lot of, you know, what’s known as hostile, street furniture, you know, which is deterring people from, for argument’s sake, sitting on a particular window ledge, making a, seat at a bus shelter kind of uncomfortable. So you can’t be, you can’t lie down on it. And I think there is an opportunity for street furniture to be a layer of public luxury. So a park bench is the most incredible thing.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. What about things that no one notices but actually have quite interesting designs? Like I think of the drains.

Edwin Heathcote
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
In the city as an example.

Edwin Heathcote
Yeah. Well, I mean, manhole covers, coalhole covers, all these kinds of things which are sort of flush with the paving. There’s a whole language and there’s a whole kind of nerdy, obsessive world. Which is . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s true.

Edwin Heathcote
Which is completely concerned with these, people, you know, collect them effectively, photograph and collect them. In Japan, they’re people actually collect the the manhole covers themselves, right? Some of them have been enamelled and painted and extremely ornate and designed to celebrate events by the Tokyo Olympics or, Expo or whatever they might be. And those pieces of public infrastructure, I find are kind of lost opportunities when they don’t celebrate something.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Edwin Heathcote
You know, I noticed that in New York, the the new, sewer covers say NYC sewer made in India. And it’s kind of interesting, you know, because it’s a story of globalisation and the loss of American industry, but it’s also slightly depressing.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Edwin Heathcote
That no one thought, you know, maybe we could cast the pattern to this and we could do the same pattern for the whole cities. Once you do it once and then you just use the mould for all the manhole covers. But no one thought, wouldn’t it be great to commission a graphic artist to do something really celebratory?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. Right. It really does take a level of creativity.

Edwin Heathcote
Yeah. And I think maybe we’ve just lost the capacity, the cities have lost the capacity to be imaginative about these.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Edwin Heathcote
They’re so stressed and stretched. And you know, they’re just trying to provide the basic minimum of social services and so on that they haven’t got time for this stuff, which actually matters.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Edwin Heathcote
Because it’s very much about the pride we have in our cities. It’s very much about our identity and engaging with how we live in the city.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. And why do you think? I mean, I’m sure cities have always felt stretched, but why do you think it mattered more in, say, the 1800s to these cities than it does now?

Edwin Heathcote
I suppose the cities were built in a different era. So they were built, let’s say, between 1800 and 1950. And it was a moment of industrial explosion and industry itself and manufacturing were celebrated.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Edwin Heathcote
So the fact that you could cast an iron coalhole cover was a kind of a slightly extraordinary thing, you know, it would have been wood. So this was a brand new material, and there was an experimentation in what you could do with this new material and how you could ornament it, how you could make it special. Maybe now that has been lost a little, you know. So if we look at contemporary lampposts, there’s not much to celebrate in a modern lamppost generally, you know, and it’s not the lack of ornamentation, it’s the lack of thought. It’s just, you know, people haven’t thought about what these things could look like, what they could do, what they could do for the city. You know, it’s just a it’s the kind of cheapest possible solution that’s, you know, it’s a symptom of globalisation, but it’s also a symptom of kind of stupidification, actually.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right, right, right. For listeners who want to start to notice their city differently or want to start to notice cities, they go to it just, you know, see things that maybe they’re not used to seeing: how would you recommend we start to notice this in between architecture, the things around us, better?

Edwin Heathcote
It’s a good question. I think probably the place to start at any city is the street market. You know, if you think of a furniture store, you know, outside a store in a Turkish part of London. You know, it’s a it’s a kind of wonder. These things come out every day and they, you know, they make a colourful streetscape. They’re enticing, but they’re beautiful and they’re colourful and then they’re gone again.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Edwin Heathcote
There’s a kind of temporary layer which I find very seductive, actually, in all cities. And it’s different in every city. Every city has its own traditions. And then immigrants arrive in the cities, bring their own traditions, hybridise the then take, I would say, always sit on a bench and sit on a bench and see how people use the city, a bench in a park or a bench in the city and just watch people watch in a it’s the most kind of underrated entertainment I think we have in the contemporary city, is just watching how people move through the city and use it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

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OK. I’m going to ask you, as we close out to do one quick lightning round game with me, which is that I am going to name a city and I would love to hear just off the top of your head, just something that, like, you think we should notice in that city or something that you think is pretty special in that city. The first one is the city that you probably know best, so I’m sure there’s many. Let’s start with London.

Edwin Heathcote
I think in London we could start with the embankment, which was made as a byproduct of the underground being built underneath it. So here’s a piece of brand new urban thoroughfare with the kind of grand view of the Thames.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Edwin Heathcote
And incredible street lights cast in iron and with beautiful modelling, sea monsters and dolphins and so on.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Edwin Heathcote
The benches with camels and kind of symbols of empire. That’s a very coherent piece of streetscape in London, I think. And it’s something it’s very much about empire and about power and about creating a public amenity, something to be, something to be proud of.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. OK. Singapore.

Edwin Heathcote
Singapore has a colonial legacy, and it has British street furniture, a lot of which is preserved, which is fascinating, but I think it might be the kind of hawker markets, actually.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Edwin Heathcote
Which is so bad. And in between world in the, in between world of street furniture. But it’s a public infrastructure. It’s a roofed open air infrastructure of public commerce, but incredibly lively, you know, and there’s this very kind of irregular but very interesting network of tables and chairs and the kind of slightly chaotic arrangement of furnitures.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. What about Rio?

Edwin Heathcote
Rio, you’d have to go to the to the beachfronts, to Copacabana and Ipanema. Look at the paving, which is this incredible mosaic of Portuguese influence to actually a black and white wavy pattern.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Edwin Heathcote
So you sometimes when you’re on it, you don’t notice it to its best effect. But when you see an aerial shot or you look down from one of the skyscrapers, on the, on the waterfront, you really notice. And it’s an incredible kind of undulating series of patterns which feel free and exotic and modern. The surface that we work on is something that’s ignored.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Edwin Heathcote
Broadly. And in cities all over the world, it’s ripped apart and then badly repaired. And it’s just it’s not given due consideration but where it’s done well, it’s spectacular.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Amazing. Edwin this was, just blew my mind. Was just such a pleasure and so interesting. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Edwin Heathcote
Thanks so much for your time. Was great to chat.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. Take a read through the show notes, we have linked to some of our favourite pieces of Edwin’s on street furniture, and we have linked to where you can find his book. All of our links that take you to the FT will get you past the paywall. Also in the show notes is a discount to a subscription to the Financial Times and ways that you can stay in touch with me on email and on Instagram. I love hearing from you.

I am Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my brilliant team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer, Lulu Smyth is our producer. Zach St Louis is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is the great Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely week and we’ll find each other again on Friday.

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