Safety and security with taste, please
RETURNING to London at the close of the summer, Athena has been struck afresh by the temporary crash barriers erected between the main carriageways and the pavements of most of London’s bridges. They are a response, of course, to the spate of recent terrorist attacks across Europe that have used vehicles to mow down pedestrians. Several months on from the London Bridge attack on June 3, they extend up the Thames as far as Lutyens’s bridge at Hampton Court.
In the light of recent events, Athena entirely accepts that these barriers are a necessity. Also, that in the crisis of the moment, something had to be improvised and implemented at speed on the bridges. Certainly, that was the opinion of the Metropolitan Police, which installed the first of them overnight on June 4–5. The unsightly patchwork of steel and concrete that constitutes the barriers is probably inevitable, but what is interesting, however, is what will happen next to these self-evidently temporary creations.
It seems very unlikely that anyone will have the courage to authorise—and, more particularly, take responsibility for—their removal; given the nature of the threat they respond to, it’s impossible to quantify the value of the barriers. As a result, rather than risk a disaster, a politician will soon decree, in the name of public reassurance and safety, that they need to be made permanent. This decision will, in turn, demand that the barriers are remade in some more aesthetically pleasing form.
To date, the precedents for such changes are not encouraging. It’s not 10 years since Whitehall was encircled over Christmas by an unannounced and temporary ring of security. This was then gradually replaced by permanent security protection, including battalions of bollards and massively engineered barriers clumsily detailed in the form of Classical balustrades. However, these fixtures are elegance itself in comparison to the featureless black-steel barriers that line Old Palace Yard at the Houses of Parliament.
London’s bridges are the main viewpoints from which workers and visitors can enjoy this great city. Many of them were also structural wonders at the moment of their erection and, as architectural creations, are objects of great individual beauty and interest. If for the future, as seems probable, permanent security barriers must be fitted to them, let’s make sure the work is done properly and with a degree of sensitivity. After all, the threat is not going to go away, so the sooner we confront the problem of designing security barriers appropriate for a monumental setting, the better.
It should be a spur to our care and invention that, if London’s bridges are aesthetically butchered in the fight against terrorism, the terrorists will have won a small victory. Why should we give them that satisfaction?