‘Anti-homeless’ spikes from Wexford company, Kent Stainless
“One afternoon in early July, Corinna Gardner, a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London, accepted delivery of a small cardboard box. It was a shipment from Kent Stainless, Ireland’s leading manufacturer of stainless-steel drainage. More recently, the company has got into street furniture: benches, bollards, bike stands, trash cans. Inside the package were several specimens of the Kent Spike Stud, a three-inch-high, bullet-shaped protuberance that, according to the firm’s catalogue, “is used to deter people from unwanted sitting areas such as window sills and wall tops.” Colloquially, they are known as “anti-homeless spikes.”
“In the previous weeks, the presence of a set outside the doorway of a luxury apartment building had been the subject of thousands of outraged tweets and a Change.org petition, by means of which 132,560 people successfully demanded their removal. Gardner opened the box with a pair of scissors and dug through plastic peanuts. The spikes, when they emerged, were heavy, like ripe fruit. The next day, after they were mounted on a slab of acrylic and installed in a glass case, they would become the latest objects to enter the V. & A.’s permanent collection: Spike Stud, 2014, Stainless Steel. “As one of my colleagues says, sinister objects demand our attention just as much as beautiful ones,” Gardner said.”
Very important objects (The New Yorker)
Previously: Roughing It
Related: Remove the anti-homeless spikes (Change.org)
H/T: Ciaran Cuffe
“Good for high traffic pedestrian areas” – until you trip and maybe fall on one – in which case I would think them potentially lethal. Have they not considered the Product Liability aspect of making such a ridiculous claim?
If people are walking on your window sills and wall tops, and then they trip and fall, they would have a harder time trying to apportion blame to the property owner. Use your brain. Just because they are intended for high traffic pedestrian areas doesn’t mean they are to be used on the ground where said pedestrians are walking.
I am using my brain. Its a legal point. Though I’m not a lawyer. I understand If you make a claim about a product which is false, misleading or dangerous, you may be held liable for injuries or damage that your product has caused.
Indeed many companies nowadays carry “Product Liability Insurance” to cover them against any unforeseen claims in Tort, which might be made against them.
High traffic pedestrian means people walking (from the Latin ped for foot). How else do you suppose pedestrians get around?
It’s not about how they get around, it’s where they get around. These are designed for use in these areas. Street lights can be designed for high traffic areas. By your logic it’s the fault of the manufacturer if someone climbs the light and jumps off the top.
You’re a moron
Perhaps we could discuss a more comprehensive solution to homelessness than simply making the street less uncomfortable?
I suppose we could buy a few of those murder vans that the Chinese use.
Meh, homeless people in tourist areas damages jobs and harms the economy. Doesn’t really help the homeless does it?
We could try making the streets less comfortable I suppose.
Butt plug
posh butt plug…
they probably got the idea while using these…
http://www.amazon.com/Stainless-Jewelery-Insert-Stopper-Sex/dp/B00HD1KP72
I was hoping to read some entertaining customer reviews, but none so far :-(
Great idea, wish I’d thought of them. Now if only you could retract them for during the day so customers could use the entrance to your business and extend them at night to prevent people using your property entrance as a house.
Read the description again. They are designed for wall tops and window sills. Not many shops use walls and windows as entrances. At least not here in Dublin.
Hence suggesting the modification for use in doorways there Mensa, where most junkies seen to sleep in out fair cities.
There’s plenty of things that can be modified to be used in doorways to prevent people sleeping in them.
It´s my building!! Even though there is plenty of room to sit and it makes no difference to ANYONE, you can´t sit there. Go away. You smell.
You’re using the wrong button for the apostrophe
That also bothered me an inordinate amount.
ah that’s nice — they’re providing free-to-use buttplugs for all!
Exactly, expect to see hen party members bobbing up and down on these like corks are sea.
I actually think it’s a pretty viable idea. It’s all well and good saying that “oh, our homelessness situation is out of control, we must do something blah blah blah” but the sad reality is that the number of homeless who choose that lifestyle for themselves is rather high. And so what if these spikes are *cough* erected on private property? It’s private property and its owners can do whatever the hell they like as long as it’s within the confines of the law. Get down off yer high horses.
‘Rather high’. Can you provide any kind of percentage or hard numbers for that, or is it indeed you that is ‘rather high’?
when it’s a business they’d be better spending the money on providing food and improving local shelters to be safer and cleaner rather then pricey spikes. The long-term effect would be far better — actually help the homeless not to be homeless anymore rather than just moving them on to the another area.
Have you a cost benefit analysis for that?
The spikes are a once off, feeding the homeless isn’t.
A pity they can’t live on do gooder hand-wringing
Oh, sorry, I forgot that capitalism is king.
The benefit is for society and humanity in general, Hosanna. Company profit isn’t everything. However, a bit of charitable do-gooding goes a long way towards giving a company positive marketing, if you want to look at it that way.
“the number of homeless who choose that lifestyle for themselves is rather high”
Ha! Data please. Saying it doesn’t make it so.
That really was one of the more spectacularly deranged comments I’ve read on here. Bravo, Michelle!
I wouldn’t say it was deranged. Maybe slightly inaccurate. But there is no doubt that many people choose the street for various reasons. The problem is primarily drugs, homelessness is the symptom.
You’re right they all brought it on themselves, fupp ’em if they can stand up straight 24 hours a day or float in the river as long as we don’t have to look at them.
Keyboard warriors assemble! Let’s attack any right of centre viewpoint. Please, spare me. The point I’m making is that if someone wants to put these spikes on their own property, then that’s their decision to make and, I believe, their right to do so. As for my saying that it is choice for a good number (high relative to the number most would consider), I stick by that. That man murdered in Phoenix Park last year had €130K in a bank account. You think homelessness wasn’t a choice for him? No, you’re right, he probably was forced onto the streets.
You are. So. Stupid.
Seriously.
I can only hope very house you move into is child proofed. Other wise it’s the domestos express for you.
Why – am { I ? so , stupid? Is it because I punctuate a sentence unnecessarily with full stops? Oh, wait…
Where does the child-proofing come into it? Your reply made zero sense to me. Then, again, I am. So. Stupid.
Acceptance is the first step, they say. However that’s for grief not stupidity so you’re pretty much as dumb as you were before you admitted it.
So, you’re somehow not a “keyboard warrior”?
You’re right though that single example you just gave there is definitive proof that homelessness is just a lifestyle choice.
I wouldn’t attack your viewpoint, more the complete lack of any evidence to support your viewpoint apart from a questionable anecdote and a commitment to stand by your ‘good number’ relative to some other number. Pre-school debating team stuff there.
Anecdotal evidence it ain’t: http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/homeless-man-found-dead-in-phoenix-park-had-130k-in-bank-account-29803429.html
It literally is.
Nobody is denying that happened, but you say the “number of homeless who choose that lifestyle for themselves is rather high” and justify with a single story about one person.
It’s depressingly amazing that technology is now so user friendly that someone with the intelligence of an irradiated turnip, such as you, can use it.
Homelessness is modern natural selection in a visual form.
Ciaran Cuffe could spend some of his unearned millions on the homeless instead of haranguing legitimate businesses. Wealth tax on trust fund babies anyone?
BTW how are the Skakels, Ciaran?
Primark cargo pants too, made in Rana Plaza Bangladesh. Some good Irish representation in the V&A these days.
“The Kent Spike Stud is used to deter people from unwanted sitting areas such as window sills and wall tops”
I didn’t realise homeless people slept on Window Sills and Wall tops.
Slowly they morph into pigeons. Nature will always find a way.
The solution to homelessness is sleepwalking.
I believe the homeless should be rounded up and reduced into a thick paste that we can used as a fertilizer for growing our crops and feeding our livestock.
Ironically enough if they were any other species they would be feed stock.
they should do the entire Custom House river front with these, it’s like Calcutta, highly entertaining though.
People in Calcutta wouldn’t know what to do with 188€ a week
Entertaining?
You know that the problem is not going away when the spikes are made from marine grade stainless.