The Architecture of Rest

Where can you sit in a city without buying something? I started asking it last winter, walking between appointments with a bad knee, when the only seats in a mile of high street turned out to belong to two cafés and a bus shelter whose bench was angled so steeply it was really a leaning post. The question led us, eventually, to a reading room built in 1964 and still open, free, every day of the year.

This is episode 111. My guests are Ruth Kessane, an architect whose small practice has spent fifteen years designing public seating (mostly benches, a few bus stops and one very argued-about library foyer), and Wendell Pryce, who has worked as a librarian at the Corran Street Reading Room for twenty-six years and knows, as far as I can tell, every chair in it by the noise it makes.

Fig. 2. A reading-room lamp on Corran Street, still on its 1964 flex. Drawing by Almanac.

A conversation in a library

We recorded on a Tuesday morning in late February, at one of the long oak tables in the main reading room. The building is a low concrete box with a copper roof that went green decades ago. We were allowed to record on the condition that we kept our voices down, which is why you can occasionally hear a page turning, and once someone sneezing three times in a row.

RUTH: These are the original chairs. You can tell because the arms are wide enough to rest a book on. Nobody specifies an arm that wide any more. A wide arm is somewhere to put a coffee, and a coffee is a liability.

WENDELL: We’ve lost four of them in twenty-six years. One to woodworm, three to people leaning back. The council offered to replace the whole set in 2011 with something stackable. I said no, very politely, about nine times.

While he talked, Ruth turned one of the chairs over, which I am fairly sure you are not supposed to do in a library. Underneath, burnt into the frame, was a maker’s mark and a date in pencil: March 1964. The joints were pegged rather than screwed.

A room built in 1964

Wendell keeps a grey box file in the staff room labelled, in his own handwriting, “History (incomplete)”. In it is a letter from a resident of Corran Street complaining that the new copper roof was “dazzling and vulgar” and asking when it would calm down. It took about eight years.

The building cost, according to a council minute Wendell has photocopied, a little under forty-one thousand pounds, and the same minute records one councillor objecting to the number of chairs, on the grounds that a library was for borrowing books and not for sitting.

AMARA: He lost that argument.

WENDELL: He lost it for about twenty years. Then it came back. In 1987 the council proposed closing this room and moving the books into a new leisure centre, in a corner by the vending machines. There was a petition, three thousand one hundred signatures. And the regulars held what they called a sit-in, which was just sitting. They did exactly what they always did, except that it was in the newspaper.

RUTH: Whoever designed it walked around this room in their head in winter. Look where the radiators are. Under every window, exactly where the cold falls off the glass. That’s somebody who had sat in a draughty room and been annoyed about it. Most of good design is just remembering being annoyed.

Most of good design is just remembering being annoyed.

The regulars

Wendell describes the people who use the room on an ordinary weekday. There is a retired engineer, Mr Halvorsen, who arrives at ten past nine, does the crossword in pen and leaves at eleven exactly. There are students who come for the quiet. And there are people who have nowhere else warm to go, who arrive when the doors open and stay until they close.

AMARA: Is that a problem for the library?

WENDELL: It’s the job. People talk about it as if it’s a side effect of having a library, like pigeons on a statue. It isn’t. A room where you can sit for eight hours without anyone asking what you want is the point. The books are almost the excuse.

Mr Halvorsen, it turns out, once missed three days in a row, in the winter of 2019. On the third day Wendell rang the number on his library card, which he admits was not strictly within the rules. Mr Halvorsen was in hospital with a chest infection and was, Wendell says, both touched and slightly embarrassed to have been noticed. When he came back he brought a tin of shortbread for the staff and never mentioned it again.

Benches that push you away

From there we get onto hostile architecture, which is Ruth’s subject, though she prefers to call it defensive design, because that is what the people who commission it call it in meetings. The sloped benches. The armrests bolted every sixty centimetres so nobody can lie down. The perches at bus stops that let you lean but not sit.

RUTH: Most of it isn’t designed to stop you sitting. It’s designed to stop you staying. That’s nearly always the brief: we want people to pass through. And once it’s in the catalogues it turns up everywhere, including places where nobody actually asked for it, because it has become the default item.

She tells a story about a council tender in 2019 where the seating schedule specified, in a single line:

Anti-loitering bench, 1800mm, galvanised.

Seating schedule, council tender, 2019

She priced an ordinary bench of the same length alongside it. The ordinary one was eighty pounds cheaper. They bought the other one anyway. It is still there, outside a health centre.

AMARA: Some people would say they’re asking for this, though. Residents, I mean. Not just councils.

RUTH: They are. I’ve sat in those meetings. The people asking aren’t monsters. They’re tired, and someone has been sleeping in the doorway of the shop under their flat. But a bench with a bar in the middle doesn’t house anybody. It moves the problem forty metres down the road, and it makes things worse for everyone else who sits on it: the pregnant woman, the man with the bad hip, the kid waiting for a lift. You’ve designed against one person and sent the bill to all of them.

What a good bench needs

The opposite, a place that lets people stay, has its own checklist, and Ruth recites it without looking at notes:

• A back, because older people need something to push against to get up again.

• Arms at the ends but never in the middle.

• Timber rather than metal, because metal is cold for seven months of the year.

• Shelter on at least one side, because most of us want to sit with our backs to something.

RUTH: A bench is a small act of trust. It says: you are allowed to be here, even if you are not doing anything useful. That’s the whole idea, really. Everything else is detailing.

She has one more rule. Before a design is signed off, she sits on the prototype for an hour with a flask of tea, outdoors, whatever the weather. Most of the changes to her benches have come out of that hour: a seat lowered by twenty millimetres, a back tilted two degrees further, a slat taken out because it caught the backs of her knees.

Closing time

I went back on a weekday evening in March to record the end of the day, because Wendell had said that closing time is when you find out what the room is really for. The reading room shuts at eight. At ten to, he rings a brass handbell that has lived in the issue desk drawer since at least 1970. Then the lights go off in sections, starting at the far end, so that nobody is plunged into darkness halfway through a sentence.

That night there were fourteen people left at ten to eight. A student packed up immediately, with the speed of someone who has a bus to catch. Two older men finished their game of draughts (they keep a board under the periodicals rack, which Wendell pretends not to know about). A woman with two carrier bags sat until the very last bank of lights went off, and then asked, quietly, where else was open.

The list on the desk

WENDELL: We keep a list for that. It’s printed and laminated and it lives on the desk. The bus station waiting room is open until eleven. St Aidan’s hall does soup on a Thursday. There’s a launderette on Gilmore Road where the owner doesn’t mind if you sit. I update it every autumn and every autumn it gets shorter.

AMARA: Shorter why?

WENDELL: Places close. Or they put a code on the toilet door, and then a sign about time limits, and then they’re not really places any more. They’re just shops with chairs in.

We walked out together at ten past eight. He locked the front doors with a key the length of a teaspoon, checked them twice, and then stood on the step for a moment looking across the road at the bus shelter, where the woman with the carrier bags had sat down.

Why rest is public infrastructure

The last third of the episode is a friendly argument about money. Ruth’s position is that places like this are infrastructure, as important to a city as bridges or drains, and far cheaper to maintain. By her rough sums the reading room costs the council about what it spends resurfacing a mile and a half of road each year.

WENDELL: I can tell you what happens when we close for a bank holiday. The bus shelter outside fills up.

I put Ruth’s numbers to someone in the council’s finance office afterwards, off the record, and he said they were “not wrong, roughly”. He also pointed out, fairly, that roads come with a legal duty attached and reading rooms do not. If a road isn’t resurfaced, somebody can sue.

RUTH: That’s my point, though. The cost of not having somewhere to sit doesn’t land on anyone’s spreadsheet. It lands on somebody’s knees, or in a doctor’s waiting room, or it turns up as someone not leaving their flat on a Tuesday because the walk to the shops has nowhere to stop on it. It’s still a cost. It has just been moved somewhere nobody is counting.

The cost of not having somewhere to sit doesn’t land on anyone’s spreadsheet.

I don’t think we settle it. But I did spend the walk home counting benches. There were three in a mile and a quarter. Two of them had armrests in the middle.

Episode notes

• The episode runs fifty-six minutes.

• It was recorded on one handheld recorder and two lapel microphones, and we have left in most of the room, including the sneezing and a radiator that knocks every few minutes.

• The closing-time section was recorded separately, and you can hear rain on the copper roof for most of it.

• The music was played by our producer, Tom Ewart, on the reading room’s upright piano, which has been slightly out of tune in the top octave since about 1998.

If you can, listen to it somewhere you are allowed to sit for free.