Passing by, or going in?

In his book Humanise: a maker’s guide to building our world, Thomas Heatherwick sketched out his gut feeling that “hundreds or even thousands more” people experience a building from the outside compared to those who experience it from the inside. This matters because, as Heatherwick puts it, “the outside of that building will affect every single one of those people. It will contribute to how they feel.” Yet despite that, most of the care – and the money – still gets spent on the inside. Which means we’re at risk of seriously short-changing the passer-by.

Last year we commissioned Space Syntax to carry out a series of pedestrian observations and building-based surveys across three varied cities in the UK, in order to get a robust measure. Their report, published here, shows that between 58% and 74% of people on an average high street are passers-by. Over the course of a year, this means there are substantial numbers of people only experiencing buildings from the outside. On Church Street in Blackpool, 3 million more people pass-by than go inside buildings; on Briggate in Leeds the number is 11.6 million; rising to a whopping 25.7 million on London’s Oxford Street.

So in a way, it’s even worse than Heatherwick sensed. Developers and designers have not one but two sets of customers. One on the inside of buildings, the other on the outside. And a lot of new development is serving one and largely ignoring the other.

These findings underscore the Humanise campaign’s call for buildings which are generous to the passers-by, providing visual interest, encouraging them to linger, making them feel safe, and helping to make them feel connected to each other.