Stairway

I often pass by this stairway on the way to my office. It is part of a building that is a classic example of '60s Brutalism, squatting in South Edinburgh completely out of sympathy with its surroundings. But my eye has always been caught by this humble fire escape.

The way it stands apart from the building it serves reminds me of Trellick Tower, Goldfinger's masterpiece in West London. This stairway, with its elegant cantilevers, its futuristic angles, its confident lines, calls to mind the forward looking ideals of another era - the 'white heat of technology', the boldness of modernism, the 'shock of the new'.

These times, the 60s, seem impossibly optimistic to me. Of course, I know it wasn't really like that, that I experience this nostalgia because I was born in that extraordinary decade...and yet...when I pass this staircase each day I cannot help but feel inspired by the spirit of the time that created it.