A rudegirl with dark geometric bob sits on concrete stairs in a tower block stairwell late at night, between floors, claiming this marginal space for solitary time. She wears all black—Harrington jacket, jeans, Dr. Martens 8-hole boots—and sits with her back against the concrete wall, legs stretched across the stairs, blocking passage though no one comes. Her tattooed arms rest on her thighs—traditional swallows and roses visible in the harsh stairwell light. Behind and above her, the stairwell extends—concrete stairs and landings repeating upward, metal handrails painted institutional colors, graffiti marking walls. A single bulb in a wire cage provides harsh fluorescent light. The stairwell smells of concrete, cleaning products, and sometimes urine. It's cold and echoey, sounds carrying up and down the shaft. Her face shows neutral expression, perhaps tired, perhaps contemplative, occupying this ugly functional space because it provides solitude without being inside her flat or fully outside in the estate. The photograph captures the claiming of stairwells as private space—the liminal areas between floors serving as temporary refuge, neither truly inside nor outside, providing solitude in buildings where privacy was rare. Harsh fluorescent light creates stark shadows and unflattering illumination. Shot in the documentary tradition that treats estate architecture seriously, the composition emphasizes the geometric repetition of stairs and the institutional brutality of the space with her small figure claiming it, understanding that tower block stairwells served multiple unofficial purposes beyond enabling vertical movement, that residents sat in stairwells when they needed to be neither inside flats nor outside building, that these concrete shafts provided acoustic and visual privacy despite being technically public spaces within the building, that late at night stairwells were mostly empty allowing occupation without blocking passage, that the hardness and coldness and ugliness of stairwells somehow suited certain moods better than the domesticity of flats or the exposure of outside, that working-class youth in tower blocks knew every marginal space in their buildings and claimed them all at various times for various purposes, that stairwell sitting represented legitimate claiming of semi-private space for thinking or hiding or simply existing somewhere between destinations, that these concrete staircases witnessed countless private moments of residents seeking solitude in architecture that provided precious little privacy anywhere else.
