‘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)

Kent Stainless

Previously: Roughing It

Related: Remove the anti-homeless spikes (Change.org)

H/T: Ciaran Cuffe