Planters can provide an aesthetically pleasing alternative to bollards

Within months of the incidents, former sea Admiral Lord West had been given the task of setting out the country’s approach.

These would be wide-ranging, including giving training to security guards on how to recognise suspect packages and ensuring premises have secure emergency exits. Also within the plans would be a pledge to include safety measures as an in-built part of the urban environment, with barriers and street furniture designed to repel terrorist attacks.

These safety measures would be installed right across the UK’s strategic infrastructure, including stations, ports and airports, and any other place where people gather, plus more than 100 sensitive installations.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown told Parliament: “The report proposes the installation of robust physical barriers as protection against vehicle bomb attacks, the nomination of vehicle exclusion zones to keep all but authorised vehicles at a safe distance, and making buildings blast resistant.”

Taken at face value, this is a mindboggling undertaking and, if we are as vulnerable to attack as we are being told we are, it is only sensible to take what precautions we can.

Yet it is highly important that those who take responsibility for the security measures pay heed to the people who have to live alongside and work within the buildings being protected, and elsewhere in his address to Parliament, the Prime Minister talked of winning hearts and minds, so care should be taken with the effect on the British public.

In the days following 9/11, the Houses of Parliament encircled itself with concrete security barriers. More concrete barriers appeared at Glasgow Airport last year, placed a safe distance from the entrance to stop explosivepacked cars. These have since been removed, while Parliament has replaced its blocks with a waist-high steel perimeter wall.

Neither solution is attractive, yet while it may seem frivolous to be talking of aesthetics at a time of national emergency, a wholesale unthinking influx of concrete blocks, steel barriers and other robust physical barriers into the street scene should be avoided.

Anecdotal evidence and research show that working to improve an area’s appearance has a beneficial effect on the local residents.

Civic floral displays, decorative benches and elaborate bollards are seen as important amenities, both as permanent elements of the street scene and as products to complete costly regeneration projects, because attractive environs make residents and shoppers feel at ease, reduce the fear of crime and create a good impression.

Ugly, utilitarian barriers, on the other hand, would not only look unsightly, they communicate fear and reinforce an uncomfortable feeling of entrenchment.

They would be telling those who spread a message of terror that they have won.

One of the best examples of this is the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, which is heavily protected by metal work and concrete fitted as years have gone by.

This, say local residents, makes them feel like they are living in a war-zone.

Repeat such measures all across the country and all the money spent on sympathetic landscaping and street furniture will be wasted.

Ironically, it is in America where the effect security measures introduced in the wake of 9/11 had on local residents has been well documented and now, where once they had bollards and highway barriers, urban planners have developed alternatives.

In Chicago, they have put low walls and flowerbeds outside the 100-story John Hancock Building, while Seattle’s federal courthouse is surrounded by a lily pond acting as a moat. In Sacramento they have hidden bollards linked by steel cables inside hedges outside the State Capitol Building.

Until 2006, concrete barriers surrounded the Washington Monument.

These were replaced by terraced, walled embankments that a truck can't drive over but which pedestrians can wander between without knowing their true purpose – the modern day equivalent of the ha-ha’s used by English landed gentry to stop livestock wandering onto their lawns.

Last year, Lord West addressed the media from one of the UK’s best known examples of a new-build project with integral, disguised, security features.

It was Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium, where tall concrete blocks spell out the club’s name and two cannons stand side by side to mirror the team’s crest.

Both are security measures but few of the fans who admire them or pose for photographs next to them are likely to realise this.

In this sense, integrating security in new buildings is the easy part, although there is a danger that security experts will act as associate architects on every development and buildings designed with safety in mind will project our present day fears on subsequent generations.

Protecting existing buildings will be more of a challenge, and brings us back to concrete blocks, an instant solution for tight spaces which, it seems, have been endorsed by the Prime Minister and could be coming to a street near you.

It is only to be hoped that companies and authorities work hard to strike a balance and they might wish to follow the lead of oil giants Shell.

Four years ago, Shell wanted to increase its security at its UK headquarters, the Shell Centre in London, in case it suffered an attack from a car driven into its entrance.

Its short-term response was to order 20 large planters and place them outside the entrance. The planters were made of tough polyethylene and were enclosed in a stainless steel outer layer.

Their secret was their weight – fully laden with compost and water, they weigh one and a half tons. Although not officially tested to industry standard, common sense dictates that, if hit by a speeding car, it will be enough to knock it off course or stop it in its tracks.

This was not the end of it, however.

Their positioning, in the tight environs outside the building on the south bank of the River Thames, close to the Millennium Wheel, mean that it would be hard to find a suitable route on which to build up speed.

Either placed tactically or close together without space for a vehicle to pass between them, planters can play their part in foiling attacks, or at least minimizing their effects.

It is not impossible to see how, even without the necessary certificate stating they have reached the industry standard, they can perform a vital function to dictate the movement of traffic outside.

The same also applies to benches, rugged litter bins and bollards.

In essence, this is an extension of current common practice. Many councils order planters as much for the effect their presence will have as for the decoration they afford. If a council wants to deter visitors or shoppers from parking their cars on the pavement, a row of planters will suffice instead of a row of bollards.

Running alongside this tactic is current work we are seeing in the street furniture industry to see how their products can be toughened to play their own part in the fight against terror.

Even planters can now be supplied with integral anti-ram steel-core bollards.

To the outside world, the feature looks nothing more ominous than a planter of flowers, but, hidden away, the bollard is sunk 785mm into solid concrete.

The next step is to develop these ideas further and to subject them to the rigorous testing that regular security barriers have been put under – and have withstood – for years.

No-one would ever suggest that the key to the country’s security lies with the horticulture industry or manufacturers and suppliers of benches and bollards.

But nor should the UK ignore the fact that while modern security barriers are designed to withstand the most astonishing forces – reducing the cabs of 7.5 ton trucks to mangled ruins – their looks are as rugged as their performance.

What is needed is imagination and understanding that strong doesn’t have to mean ugly, even if the process of making security arrangements more palatable involves nothing more than a lick of paint or shrouding concrete barriers in steel and topping them with flowers.

It is not perfect, but since nobody knows how long this period of uncertainty will last, we should develop products we are happy in our hearts and minds to live alongside for what could turn into many years ahead.

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