The hospitable bollard

A Culture Mile bollardAll images © Cathy Ross

When it comes to contributing to a city’s history, bollards have a clear role to play, acting as reminders of an ever-present past.

Bollards: you can’t sit on them; they don’t help with litter and they bar your way. Some even carry self-important branding telling you who’s in charge. In many situations, bollards can be positively hostile: hard lines of metal, clearly intended to prevent movement.

So, compared to other pieces of street furniture, can bollards be described as ‘hospitable’?

The City of London is a good place to contemplate this question. With a long history of installing ‘posts’ in its streets, today the City is a bollard hotspot. Wherever you stand in the Square Mile, you will probably spot a bollard or two. All types and sizes are here from modern, impact-tested, steel cylinders to ancient cast-iron boundary posts marking parish land.

By far the most distinctive designs are the two bollards associated with the Corporation of the City of London, the Square Mile’s governing body. What’s now termed ‘the D3 type’ first appeared in the 1820s, when it was a ‘flat post’. More showy is ‘the C3 type’, formerly known as a ‘guard post’, and dating from the 1860s. With its black-and-red livery, octagonal body, lemon squeezer top and star collar, the C3 is a slightly pompous presence. The basic design has been much tweaked over the years. Variations on the theme include the thin, dainty B5 which arrived in the 1980s to fill the holes in the ground left by parking meters; and a modern streamlined, high-security C3 whose heritage exterior hides an inner core of crash-proof steel.

The D3 bollard

These hard-core C3s are the latest addition to the City’s bollard population and they arrived along with growing anxiety about terrorism. Over the last 20 years or so, bollards have become ‘hostile vehicle mitigation’ measures in ever-increasing numbers. The new arrivals no longer carry the coat of arms of the City of London, so have a more forbiddingly anonymous look. Standing in long lines around significant buildings, these are the grey squirrels of the bollard population: invasive displacers, now the dominant species.

Over the last 20 years or so, bollards have become ‘hostile vehicle mitigation’ measures in ever-increasing numbers.

So, are City-branded bollards hostile or hospitable? Despite the association with terrorism, I’d come down on the side of hospitable – with the proviso that bollards elsewhere may have different stories to tell. Here, however, I’d suggest that what makes bollards hospitable is their potential to be playful. Maybe it’s something about their scale and appearance, but City bollards do seem to have a rather silly side. They can easily be given a personality by placing a hat on their head; and the tendency of odd singletons to move around the City, popping up in the pavements or disappearing, seemingly at random, gives them a kind of agency. This playfulness encourages interaction. Stray hats aren’t the only things that bollards attract. City bollards bear all sorts of gifts – scarfs, gloves, the inevitable drink cans. Their hospitable qualities extend to hosting stickers: a few summers ago, many City bollards evidently joined Extinction Rebellion.

The hard core revealed

On its website, the World Bollard Association underlines the ability of bollards to add imagination and humour to the public realm. In the City, the Corporation requires its public realm to have a certain gravitas (‘safe, high quality and inclusive’), which mitigates against the wacky end of playfulness. However, the one aspect of bollards that seems to be tweakable is colour. Bollards in Leadenhall Market are painted in rich shades of plum, while those in the City of London Cemetery are green. In 2016, the City promoted its ‘Culture Mile’ strategy by wrapping some bollards in a colourful vinyl sleeve designed by Richard Wolfstrom. Does the future promise more colour for official City bollards? Given that the Corporation regularly repaints its bollards to freshen them up, this is at least a possibility. On the seafront at Margate is a rogue Corporation bollard, a seaside day tripper painted a rather stylish bright yellow. Apart from playfulness, the oldfashioned design of the C3 may also add a hospitable note. As the City’s new office blocks become bulkier, taller and more hard-edged in mood, so the faintly ridiculous 1860s items at ground level acquire a new allure, indeed a new softness.

To 1960s modernists, faux-Victorian street furniture was shamefully backward-facing. Today’s planners seem to hold more nuanced ideas about the contribution historic character makes to a sense of place. And bollards have a clear role to play here. Small reminders of the ever-present past, they perhaps also add some sense of reassurance about the future for people who brush past daily – residents, workers and visitors alike.

Hostile bollards?

© Cathy Ross

As the City’s new office blocks become bulkier, taller and more hard-edged in mood, so the faintly ridiculous 1860s items at ground level acquire a new allure, indeed a new softness.

‘The City bollard is an indisputable symbol of the City of London,’ said the Corporation’s Annual Report in 2005. Nearly 20 years later the City has changed, as has the detail and role of the bollard. But they remain familiar and, to my mind, friendly parts of this particular urban landscape.

Bollardology: observing the City of London, by Cathy Ross. Quickfry Books, 2022. ISBN 978-1-39992123-7. £12.99. Available from the Guildhall Art Gallery shop and online.