A £4.1m redesign and a tent in the market square
Grantham's Market Place is mid-transformation — the kind of local change TEDx Grantham exists to look at closely, because it raises the same question good TED talks keep returning to: who is a shared space actually designed for? The £4.1 million Future High Streets Fund project, under way from 2024, has raised the road level to create a flat, open event space linking existing pedestrian areas, with further works along Station Approach designed to draw visitors from the railway into the commercial centre. The framing throughout is economic: activation, footfall, visitor experience.
The same town centre, the same months. South Kesteven District Council's own committee papers from June 2025 record that rough sleeping had become 'more visible in Grantham more recently, with tents in public areas.' BBC reporting confirmed council officials were simultaneously in talks to reopen a night shelter. By January 2026, SKDC committee papers were still describing rough sleeping as an ongoing district-wide challenge, with seven rough sleepers recorded that month.
No council document connects these two facts. The redesign and the rising tent count sit in separate agenda items, separate budgets, separate conversations. That separation is precisely what this article examines. When a town centre is expensively remade, the design brief carries assumptions about who the space is for — and those assumptions are worth reading carefully. This is not an account of a named scandal; it is a critical reading of where the priorities landed.
What hostile architecture is: an idea TED talks are made for
A 2025 academic study mapped the field with unusual precision, identifying four primary form categories: Dividers (armrests, rails, and mid-bench partitions that break up flat surfaces); Non-Ergonomic Surfaces (benches sloped or shortened so lying down becomes physically impossible); Deterrent Textures (studs, spikes, or rough materials applied to ledges and alcoves); and Spatial Barriers (boulders, dense planters, or fencing that seal off sheltered corners). Each category obstructs a specific behaviour — sleeping, long-term sitting, or gathering in groups — and serves at least one of three social intents: excluding particular groups from public space, asserting spatial control, or reclaiming the space for commercial use.
In cities, the hardware is sometimes blunt enough to generate a backlash: metal anti-homeless spikes bolted outside a London supermarket in 2014 drew national coverage within days of appearing. In UK market towns during 2024–25, the trend shifted toward subtler instruments — traditional benches retrofitted with a central armrest, low brick planters filling sheltered doorways, lean-only structures replacing seated areas in pedestrianised zones. These pass more easily as improvements: tidier, more considered, in keeping with a heritage streetscape.
The camouflage is not incidental — it is the mechanism. A sloped bench reads as a design choice; its function as a deterrent to rough sleeping is invisible to most passers-by. Knowing the typology makes that function legible, and legible in any newly redesigned town centre, including Grantham's. It is the kind of move TED talks are built around: give an overlooked pattern a name, and something that used to blend into the street furniture becomes impossible to walk past without seeing it.
Grantham's response: outreach, cameras, and design silence
SKDC's documented response to rising rough sleeping is a welfare response, not a design one. Change 4 Lincs, the council's outreach partnership, handles casework; CCTV monitors public spaces. When BBC reporting in 2025 made the situation harder to ignore — tents in the market area, rough sleeping described in council papers as 'more visible in Grantham more recently' — officials entered talks to reopen a night shelter. These are recognisable tools, and they address an immediate human emergency.
What the council has not done is publish any design standard for the public realm project that addresses who currently uses Market Place and what they need from it. The £4.1 million Future High Streets Fund works are documented in terms of event hosting, pedestrian flow, and commercial centre access from the railway. Inclusive seating, shelter provision, and the needs of people who rely on the space day-to-day are absent from the published rationale.
No investigative reporting has named specific items of Grantham street furniture as hostile architecture — and that absence should be stated plainly. The critique here is not that SKDC is deploying spikes or removing benches in bad faith. It is that the design brief carries no documented obligation to consider existing users of the space alongside the visitors it hopes to attract. The welfare programme and the design programme run on separate tracks, and on the design track, the people currently sleeping in that square appear nowhere in the brief.
The collateral exclusion: it is not only rough sleepers
Rough sleeping is the most visible flashpoint, but the design features that exclude people sleeping rough do not arrive with a label specifying their target. A bench armrest installed to prevent someone lying down overnight also removes the only supported resting position for an older person with hip pain who cannot manage a long sit without something to lean against. A sloped, non-ergonomic surface that makes lying uncomfortable creates problems for wheelchair users who cannot transfer safely to a tilted seat, and for people with mobility impairments who rely on stable, flat seating to manage a rest between journeys.
Participatory research with older disabled adults experiencing houselessness has documented this overlap directly: interventions designed to deter rough sleeping produced lived experiences of confinement and loss of autonomy across people with broader physical vulnerabilities. The 2025 hostile architecture typology reinforces the mechanism — Non-Ergonomic Surfaces and Spatial Barriers obstruct functions, not identities, and a function blocked for one group is typically blocked for several.
Spaces redesigned for events rather than everyday dwelling carry a related risk. Public squares optimised for visitor footfall and commercial activation rather than informal lingering may narrow the low-cost social life of a town centre for people on low incomes, older residents, and families who cannot access paid alternatives. That narrowing does not require a deliberate policy decision. It follows from a design brief that simply never made ordinary daily use a stated priority.
What defensive design actually achieves
The evidence on what defensive architecture actually delivers is precise and consistent. Crisis's 2016 survey of more than 450 people using homelessness services across England and Wales found that six in ten reported an increase in defensive architecture over the previous year — spikes, segregated benches, gated doorways — and that 35% had been unable to find anywhere to sleep or rest as a direct result. A further 21% reported 'wetting down': having makeshift sleeping areas hosed down while they were still in them. The survey is now a decade old, but a 2025 health review corroborates its central finding — hostile design does not reduce need, it relocates it. People displaced from town-centre spaces move into riskier, less supervised locations, compounding existing health inequalities rather than addressing them.
A separate 2025 study in political theory frames the same dynamic in terms of rights: all forms of anti-homeless hostile design, it argues, constitute discrimination — direct in the case of spikes and armrest benches designed specifically to prevent sleeping, indirect where CCTV regimes regulate behaviour without naming a target group. Both categories, the paper concludes, are wrongful under any major philosophical account of what makes discrimination harmful.
The finding that runs across the literature is clear enough to state plainly: defensive design manages the visibility of poverty within commercial zones rather than reducing poverty itself. Grantham's own figures make the point without embellishment. Seven rough sleepers were recorded in the district in January 2026, unchanged in character from the 'tents in public areas' described in council papers the previous summer — the investment in Market Place proceeding alongside that reality, not in response to it.
What a genuinely inclusive Market Place would ask
The £4.1 million invested in Grantham's Market Place comes with no published record of co-design with the full range of people who currently use the space. Not the older resident who needs to sit between errands. Not the family who needs somewhere to stop that does not require a purchase. Not the seven people recorded sleeping rough across the South Kesteven district in January 2026 — whose presence in the town centre the project has been developed alongside, without any stated attempt to work from their experience of it.
Practical alternatives to exclusionary design exist and are neither novel nor expensive relative to the overall budget: mixed seating that includes surfaces without armrests alongside those with them, weather cover, accessible and stable ground surfaces, and defined areas where dwell time is not contingent on spending. None of these require a political commitment to ending homelessness before they can be installed. They require only that the design brief ask who the space is for before it asks what the space should look like.
That question — whose presence, in that public square, the design has decided is legitimate — is one Grantham's current investment moment has not yet publicly answered.
- [1] The Anatomy of Hostile Architecture: A Form-Function-Intent Typology for Urban Furniture and Urban Interior Space. (2025). https://doi.org/10.65262/k5g6je87 https://doi.org/10.65262/k5g6je87
- [2] Skateparks as hybrid elements of the city. (2019). https://doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2019.1568189 https://doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2019.1568189
- [3] Hostile architecture. https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=45486742 https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=45486742
- [4] Hostility in the city: the implications of hostile architecture on the health of the homeless. (2025). https://doi.org/10.1080/23748834.2025.2479206 https://doi.org/10.1080/23748834.2025.2479206
- [5] Anti-homeless Hostile Design as Wrongful Discrimination. (2025). https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123424000796 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123424000796
- [6] Characterizing the Effects of Hostile Architecture on the Health Goals of Houseless Elders. (2019). https://doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igz038.2077 https://doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igz038.2077