Railing Against Railings

Railings are an ubiquitous feature of the British urban landscape. Their often ornamental appearance belies their austere function: to delimit and control access to private and public spaces alike. While allowing visual access to the spaces they enclose, their suggestion of openness is at odds with the physical exclusion they enforce.

This walking talk will revisit the contested histories of railings in relation to the development and evolution of a particularly British invention: garden squares. We will begin by tracing the introduction of railings as a means of claiming control over early seventeenth-century piazzas, and their role in consolidating the private nature of eighteenth-century garden squares. We will go on to explore the politicisation of railings in the nineteenth century during times of social reform, and their subsequent removal as part of the 1940s war effort, after which many of these spaces were permanently made public. The histories of garden squares cannot be properly understood without reading the political materiality of their enclosures, whether they had been praised as preservers of rights of property, or the growing body of opinion that rejects them on democratic and aesthetic terms.

Image Caption: Press cutting from The Daily Telegraph, April, 1937, published in Outsider: Public Arts and the Politics of the English Garden Square. Image courtesy of the Camden Local Studies and Archive Centre