You can’t see it from above in an apt effect, even from a low-flying aircraft. They are too thin in breadth, too dull in colour, and often too obscured by trees. Imagine, nonetheless, that every last length of fence on Great Britain was made just a few inches thicker, then painted a bright pink. To the man in the space station our island would suddenly look like a kindergarten was given a box of pink ballpoint pens, an A1 piece of paper, and let loose to scribble all over it for an hour.
The United Kingdom has long been strung together at a molecular level by the fence; more so than the road, the path, the waterway or the railway. For several centuries it has been for the most part like this. A division of land and its ownership, manifested physically by the fence and its notion, courses through the veins of British history and landscape. But as the twentieth century crescendoed, purposes of the land and its divisions proliferated to house unprecedented new objects. With this came new meaning and new form for the fence and what it stood for. Writing in the fifties, landscape historian W.G. Hoskins remarked as he made his way around the United Kingdom upon how the view from the ground was fast mutating into an “England of the electric fence, of the high barbed wire around some unmentionable devilment… Barbaric England of the scientists, the military men, and the politicians”. It is like this: as a nation state develops, mechanises, gathers knowledge, embarks on projects and strives to not be left behind, so the average height of its fences begins to rise.
Today, thanks to poor Julian Assange’s sacrifices, the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Manual of Security Volumes 1, 2 and 3, Issue 2 is available to the Internet surfer. Twenty-four-hundred pages long, the confidential dossier covers every aspect of physical, mental and cyber security as a notional expertise, suggesting sufficient measures to counter a plethora of threats to it from espionage, terrorism, burglary, hacking, insiders, explosive material mishandling, sensitive document disclosure, and, last but not least: trespass. In chapter five, on physical security, the Ministry of Defence lays out a tier list of fence competency of its own:
“A perimeter fence forms a useful barrier and identifies the boundary of a protected or restricted area. The level of protection offered by a fence depends on its height, construction, the material used and any additional security features used to increase its performance or effectiveness such as topping, perimeter intruder detection systems (PIDS), lighting or CCTV. The type of fence used on the perimeter of a site should reflect the type of threat, ie. terrorist, criminal, saboteur, vandals. Fences are graded according to the level of protection they offer, Class 1 offering the lowest security and Class 4 the highest. The Classes of fence are described below.
A Class 1 fence is one which: (1) Is designed with no particular security requirements. (2) Is only intended to mark a boundary and to offer a minimum of deterrence or resistance to anyone other than a determined intruder. (3) Any type of construction material or hedging is used.
A Class 2 fence is an anti-intruder fence which offers a degree of resistance to climbing and breaching by an opportunist intruder not having particular skills and using material and breaching items that are readily to hand.
A Class 3 fence is an intermediate security barrier which: (1) Is designed to deter and delay a resourceful attacker who has access to a limited range of hand tools. (2) Offers resistance to attempts at climbing and breaching.
A Class 4 fence is a high security barrier which: (1) Is designed to offer the maximum deterrent and delay to a skilled and determined intruder who is well equipped and resourced. (2) Is designed and constructed to offer a high degree of resistance to a climbing or breaching attack. (3) Is supported by other perimeter security systems.”
I’ve only the one reservation. Is that it? The amateur observer of sufficiently dedicated time and travel will soon become a connoisseur of fences far above and beyond what has been mentioned here by the Ministry of Defence, and develop a greater consummate awareness that different fences mean different things, send a variety of different messages and allow for numerous different interactions. He will form his own scale, of finer analysis, broader insight. And the syllabus is no War and Peace either. Whilst there has been no formal survey it is a reasonable assertion that, discounting artisanal park fences from Victorian or Edwardian eras, over ninety percent of common fences in Britain that mark a boundary between public and non-residential private land are comprised by only a dozen pieces of equipment: five types of ‘base’, four types of ‘topping’, and three umbrella categories of ‘add-on’.
The five base types are farmer’s, Heras, chainlink, palisade, and weldmesh. It is only for the sake of the foreign reader that a description of a farmer’s fence may be required, as every Briton will be completely familiar with such a fence: a wide metal lattice, topped with barbed wire and supported by wooden posts of a height not exceeding the average pedestrian’s chest. Thousands of miles’ worth are to be found in every valley, moor, field and forest throughout the British countryside, to pen in livestock and mark private land boundaries. All but those with mobility issues are able to overcome a farmer’s fence if inclined to do so.
Next, Heras. Heras is a brand of ubiquitous portable fencing found as staple fare at almost every construction site in Britain. Around seven feet, it offers little challenge for a climber, and whilst it is most commonly used to demarcate safe or unsafe working areas, it can be found acting as a perimeter at premises where work is ongoing or there exists a state of disrepair, like around the side of the Terylene plant. Heras is almost never found with a topping.
The chainlink is a decades-old design, known worldwide. The common British specification is comprised of diagonally woven metal mesh (though it can be laterally welded as well), around nine feet in height and supported by concrete posts. It makes for a somewhat challenging climb without the aid of these posts. The thickness of the mesh can also vary, and therefore provide anywhere between little to absolute resistance to a vandal attempting to cut the fence open with high street boltcutters. It would appear that for much of the latter twentieth century there was merely one manufacturer of this standard issue design in Britain, and the state was their best customer, as cloned examples can be found at an uncorrelated variety of civic and governmental realms ranging from allotments to military bases.
Then came the chainlink’s natural successor, and came it did in spades. One cannot travel far in Britain without laying eyes on a palisade; usually silver-coloured, closely-aligned vertical metal slats with spiked tops, again around nine foot high. A palisade can be found around absolutely everything on this island; from supermarket car parks and alongside public footpaths in suburban areas, to highly strung industrial sites and airports. They are challenging for the average climber to scale completely freely without any other object(s) to place a foot or hand on, but possible to modify with the correct tools; in areas of wasteland or if the palisade is not guarding anything in particular, it is common to observe the odd missing slat, allowing the wayfarer of average build to pass through.
Lastly is something called weldmesh. It is the most modern yet sporadic type of the five, hallmarked by a very tightly-knit lattice of metal, more often than not in a grey or dark green colour. Whilst a struggle to vandalise with only hand tools, weldmesh can wildly range in height from anywhere between four and fourteen feet, which proves the main factor in its scaling difficulty. Sometimes called a ‘yard fence’ colloquially, shorter examples can on occasion be found in the public domain; in parks, around small business premises and such, but it is most likely at prisons, certain industrial sites, or in vicinities of the railways where one can encounter taller specimens.
Toppings to a fence or lack thereof can greatly influence the challenge they pose to physically scale. Four toppings to know are barb, flat razor, concertina and electricity. A default component of farmer’s fences and the classical pairing to a chainlink base (yet also able to be found in three or four-layered arrangements atop of palisades and in isolated cases weldmesh), barbed wire is not an overtly hazardous feature of a fence and sees scope to handle with satisfactorily low risk of injury. The effectiveness of barb to a fence’s scalability can be better influenced by the acuteness of the angle at which the wire extends, as is common with chainlink fences.
Flat razor is a similar sight to barb, rather with slits of razor-sharp metal instead of spiked barbs. This nullifies all acceptable risk of handling without specialist gloves. Flat razor is not necessarily a show stopper for the aspiring scaler, but ushers in a new dimension of consideration in light of its high potential to cause flesh wound injury. Further still, there is strong legal advice in British Health and Safety paperwork for its installation to only occur on fences in excess of six feet in height. The message therefore is clear: there is no agricultural or civic purpose to razor wire. It is a mitigating retaliation to determined ill intent.
If such a retaliation is required to be berserk, one may encounter concertina. Concertina is in all but isolated cases a show stopper for the aspiring scaler; dense coils of razor wire, originating in the military and prison systems, found not always atop of fences but also at ground level around them. Without a tailored, well-planned and well-equipped operation it is impermeable unless there is a ‘pause’ in its spread at something like a gatepost, and is seldom seen outside of domains where physical security is considered paramount. It pairs with weldmesh, palisade and chainlink in equal measure.
The comparable alternative in terms of effective impermeability is the electric fence. Horizontal, stacked wires with an electric current flowing through them either behind or protruding above an existing fence base, the electric fence has become more commonplace in Britain since the turn of the century. Usually paired with weldmesh or palisade, it is the most expensive physical security measure in discussion here, and is often reactionary, commonly found at hydrocarbon facilities liable to environmental activism with the financial backdrop to install it or smaller businesses who have suffered repeated trouble with burglary. Most small power and gas grid sites in Britain are protected by an electric fence, for instance, but one may also observe premises such as car dealerships employing them at the other end of the spectrum. It would be an oversight to comment that all electric fences are ‘on’ at all times, but if they are, they can be considered unscalable without bespoke equipment.
Add-ons are features to a fence which pose no physical barrier, but give it an interactive quality, and crucially influence the aspiring scaler’s decisions about it. They endow the fence with sentience. The three umbrella categories of add-ons are cameras, visual sensors and rumblers. There is one surveillance camera in the United Kingdom for every thirteen citizens, by the way, coming in all shapes, capabilities and modernities, and their consequences when watching a fence line are fairly universal. They immediately inform the aspiring climber that his scheme is no secret, that it is also the business of the realm beyond the fence. Be the camera watched, recorded or not is not information he can always validate simply by studying the fence alone. Visual sensors work in much the same way, detecting and alerting to movement in the vicinity of the fence, and can play as much or more of an involved role in the permeability of the fence depending on their technical specifications or positioning. There is a whole sub-study of cameras and sensors in a trespassing context that enough time in the field will cultivate. Lastly, a rumbler, also known as a vibration sensor, is a wire running horizontally along the fence which has the ability to detect and alert to movement of the fence in reaction to a climber making contact with it. It does not see, rather it feels, but the outcome is much the same: it knows the climber is there.
Whilst some combinations are more standard than others, any base can technically be mixed with any topping and endowed with any add-on. Imagine, for example, a fence was a palisade, void of topping, cameras not spaced as frequently enough to allow cameras to watch cameras, with a severed rumbler. The Ministry of Defence would probably call it a Class 2 or 3. We would call it ‘doable’. If it were topped with concertina, or electrified, or covered in sensors and cameras with full visibility of the entire fence line, we might not. But it isn’t. And so reaching the wrong side of it ought not be rocket science.
razorwire.rip 