On the Street

On the secret life and future of street furniture in both the contemporary imagination and the city streets themselves

There is a layer of the public architecture that has become so familiar that we barely notice it. Street furniture has the capacity to define a city, to locate it and to anchor us within it. Benches, bollards, streetlights, signs, barriers, postboxes and phone booths constitute a network of goods between architecture and the body.

In this book, Edwin Heathcote looks at the cultural impact of street furniture, using photography as a measure of how these things have become indispensable components of the cityscape. Focusing mainly on London but including New York, Paris and Budapest, Heathcote uses history, personal reflection and the lenses of photographers to examine the status of these urban artifacts.

Edwin Heathcote (born 1968) is a writer living and working in London. He has been the architecture and design critic at the Financial Times since 1999 and is the author of over a dozen books, including The Meaning of Home.