Lack of Common Ground in capital

NAOMI ISHIGURO thinks London has a public space problem. “There are a lot of places where you feel you have to move on all the time,” the author and daughter of novelist Kazuo Ishiguro told a Southbank London Literature Festival event recently. In central London, she said, not only were there few places to tie up a bike, but “everywhere there are these spikes, so if you’re homeless or just want to sit down you can’t occupy that space”. Ishiguro released her first novel Common Ground earlier this year. She added that elsewhere gentrification is “hugely at work and can be sinister and weird”.