Thoughts and photographs on a theme of treads, steps and stairs.

The stairwell. That cold, forgotten space at the heart of a tenement building. Invariably a space designed to carry persons to an upper level, to distribute them to further accommodations, and into which little aesthetic consideration is given. An architectural backwater, forgotten and despised, a utilitarian buildscape.

Too often the recipient of those cheapest of floor coverings; the brown, disintegrating rubber-backed carpet or a cracked stretch of linoleum in the jaded colours of a previous generation. The stair treads worn down to bare stone, or to the ribbed patina of pitch pine. A commons that too often is not considered worthy of upkeep, of maintenance, nor regarded as any part of a home. This, despite the stairwell being the first element that any visitor encounters. First impressions… lasting memory.

Climb away up to the top floor of the open stairwell, lean over and feel the tugging grip of the vertigo plunge. The retreating twist of the banister rail and the spiralling, radiating spokes of step treads. Fractal images, pleasingly symmetrical shapes.

Castles, cathedrals and the Scot’s baronial tower-house are often the best places to encounter the turnpike stair, or so I had assumed. Tight, enclosed spaces where the visual aspect is restricted to a single half turn, but the imaginative view knows that a stumble will result in a long dizzying tumble, to be spat like a rat from a pipe at the bottom.

We’ve rented a studio on the third floor of an old French townhouse that has one such turnpike stair. Up which we decide to take our bicycles. There is an unsecured recess at the bottom, the ‘under the stairs’ cubby hole, beloved be interior designers for conversion to wine caves, broom closets and H. Potter bedrooms. The first dilemma is to decide which side to carry the bike on. The turns are tight, so bicycle to the outside where there is space but leaves you teetering on minuscule steps. (Castle tour guides recommend that you imagine each step as a slice of pizza, and walk on the crust). Or on the inside where they scrape the wall and there’s no rope handrail to haul on. To the third floor without anywhere to stop for a breather. I comment to the landlord on the ‘interesting’ access arrangement, whilst silently imaging the average North American visitor. He reads my mind, diplomatically saying how his heart sinks on seeing how they fill out his doorway with their gargantuan…. suitcases.

However all this is but a preamble and an opportunity as an ex-vegetable box delivery operative to observe, I’m well placed to anthropologise . Student-land common entry doors that will barely open due to the paper drift of brochures for a certain pizza chain and the scrap-land of chained up bikes draped in shrouds of cobwebs, keys lost, owners long graduated, still repaying the student loan. Or the ‘wally* close’, a floor and wainscoting of geometrically arranged glazed tiles in the ‘lobby’, the common access that today is guarded by the erroneously termed ‘buzz-entry’ security system. Or the entrance that had a massive gilded mirror on one wall, reflecting on a similarly proportioned painting of Skye’s suitable dark and gloomy Loch Coruisk. I always felt compelled to brush my feet for that delivery.

Once we could have been accused of the kettle calling the pot black. Our own lobby entrance was decorated to a mid 20th century aesthetic: chic brown corded carpet, institutional brown wall paint, a ceiling of generic stuccoed plaster, water-stained by leaking pipes, all weeping an aura of ‘old-house’. Then came a less than complimentary review and I’m stung into action. Weymouth pine to clad the existing plyboard cladding that in itself was a cheap repair for over two centuries wear and tear to the sandstone turnpike stair. The top floor, what once would have been the tobacconist’s store and a maid’s room was serviced with steps in the more economical pitch pine. Renovating these turnpike stairs was a long term project that had a neat degree of challenge and a practical way of learning how this style of stairs were constructed. In essence both stair and wall were constructed as one, no computer aided, machined flight of stairs to be crane winched into position in the Georgian era.

You can probably tell a lot about the ownership status of a tenement block by the state of their close… a pejorative view, pandering to stereotypes, but if I was a short-term student tenant being fleeced of by a rapacious landlord based in another hemisphere, why would I bother to tidy up the pizza delivery fliers? Or were the neighbours collecting their own junk mail and dumping it, in revenge for some perceived misdemeanour? So much to conjugate on as I hauled a veg box to yet another top floor flat.

More truthfully, these witterings are but an excuse for displaying a few of the all too many pictures from an album entitled: ‘Spiral +TheTurnpikes’.

PostScript#1: The vast majority of turnpike stairs scroll clockwise (as viewed from below), because the vast majority of the population are right handed. The reason is perfectly obvious when you consider that historically, turnpikes were conceived in the age of conflict and the sword. The English, your King, those Neighbours have breached the outer walls and are set on gaining entry to your home with murderous intention. As a right handed defender it’s much easier to wield that sword as you have more space than your attacker who you have to hope is similarly fisted. The problem only arises if he has an arquebus or is a sword wielding ‘Ker’ coming up your stairwell. The Scottish eastern marches, once the near-lawless lands of the borders had one family who were predominantly left handed, the Kers, whose castle at Cessford has a turnpike stairs scrolling anti-clockwise. From whenst we get the derogatory phrase to be ‘Kerie’ fisted’, which even into the late fifties in the Scottish education system, was considered deviant and required correction. Deviant: has the same root word as ‘devil’, and he was left-handed.

*PostScript#2: ‘Wally’, a grand Scots word, more applicable to the west of Scotland, meaning pale or white. It gives rise to the word for false teeth and terms like peelie-wally: to be under the weather, ie ,nae weel, or ‘wally-dugs’: those mass produced white figurine china dogs beloved by Victorians that today sell for a fiver in any charity shop.