This week, KentOnline columnist Melissa Todd considers how few places there are to sit nowadays, and the impact this has on those who need public spaces the most…

Nothing like breastfeeding to make you discover how few places there are to sit in public. Holding a screaming child you just need a moment, a space to yourself, to rest the baby against your knee, slip up your bra, stop the racket.

I moved to Margate in 2003 with a breastfed baby. At the time, the town was rather well-served with places to perch: miles of beach where no one much cared what you did, plenty of parks and benches, the odd wall to lean against and linger, watching tourists and locals perambulate. Once I breastfed on a gravestone, imagining the dead would be delighted to support such a life-affirming act. Once in despair I sank to the floor in a supermarket - Somerfield, was it? Before Morrisons? - tucked in a cubby hole by the carbonated beverages, baby’s screams piercing and furious enough to render me indifferent to public opinion. No one seemed to care. Or even notice. What a fine town this is, I thought, where people value quiet babies over inconvenient conventions. How lucky I am to live here. But 10 years later Margate had got too posh for me, less tolerant of public displays of mammary glands, so I moved to Broadstairs.

Driving through Margate with a pal last week I sighed at how it had changed. Of course, that’s what we old codgers do, nostalgia being one of our preferred hobbies. But said pal pointed out that it hadn’t just changed; it had changed in a particular direction. Look, she said, at the clocktower’s newly erected spiked iron gate. Or at Margate’s newly refurbished Nayland Rock shelter, a set of covered seats where, in 1921, T. S. Eliot flopped down to compose part of The Wasteland. Some (not me, as it happens) think it one of the towering achievements of 20th-century literature. “On Margate sands,” said Eliot, “I can connect / Nothing with nothing. / The broken fingernails of dirty hands. / My people humble people who expect / Nothing.”

Well, said my chum, where are Eliot’s humble people now? Not in Margate, that’s for sure. Eliot’s cleaned-up shelter is floodlit like a football pitch, day and night. No place here for breastfeeding or dossing down out of the rain.

The clocktower, the Nayland shelter—both are what’s known as hostile architecture, designed to discourage such antisocial behaviours as congregating, sitting down, feeding your baby, in fact pretty much anything that doesn’t involve spending money. No one would discourage you from gathering in Costa Coffee. Quite the contrary, so long as you can pay. The affluent are welcome everywhere.

But then again, I asked my pal, isn’t there a reason Margate might want to ring the shelter with barbed wire? Wasn’t it closed for years because of vandalism? Yes it was, she answered after a pause; but why was it vandalised?

There’s been a revolution in British town planning over the last few decades, but it hasn’t been about helping the humble people. It’s been about deterring them from entering public spaces. Hostile architecture targets those who most rely on public spaces—young people, breastfeeders, the dispossessed. We define them as nuisances, loitering in places they need not be, while also making it our business to see that they have nowhere else to go.

Hostile architecture goes hand in glove with gentrification. Defensive design turns public spaces into safe spaces for prosperous residents and tourists. It’s a tool of social control, redefining communities to exclude unsightly people without money.

But what happens to those inconvenient dossers and breastfeeders when you tell them they don’t belong? They take you literally. As Eliot said, they can connect nothing with nothing. They certainly can’t connect themselves with the historical monuments that mean so much to poetry lovers. Why not trash the place? When the middle classes make it so clear they’d rather not see you, why not poke them in the eye? And when the people who’ve been pushed out behave so badly, can the middle classes avoid concluding that they need to be pushed out even further?

Humble people with broken fingernails and dirty hands don’t just disappear when we wish them away from one spot. Some slink off quietly, like I did, and when their mewling infants grow up, they stop whipping their nipples out in public. But others, the less lucky, have nowhere else to go. They act up. Hostile architecture sets off a vicious spiral.

We need to break it, but that’s easier said than done. Grand schemes for social improvement always fail. But maybe the answer lies in littler things. A well-placed bench where you can breastfeed or sleep without offending anyone. A council willing to pay to keep public toilets clean and functional. Education that reminds us why poetry and monuments matter. And a town where humble people can expect more than nothing.