Robin May wrote:
Dave Newt wrote the following in:


Why is a spiral staircase so hard to walk up anyway? I don't
remmeber LSE's being particularly tricky?


The steps on the stairs are set at a distance which is about 1.5 times
that of a normal person's stride. This seems to be true for people of
all heights and leg lengths. No matter who you are there is no way you
can get into a comfortable stride for walking down the stairs, you
always have to do a funny lopsided walk and you have to adjust every
few steps. You end up walking normal step, normal step, short step,
long step, normal step etc. It seems alright at first, but after a
while it becomes incredibly annoying.

Ah yes, though aren't the steps "wedge"-shaped? So you can find which
part of the step fits your stride. I'm thinking of the Tube spirals
where the outside is often too big a step, the inside too small, but the
middle is about right. (It's all getting a bit three bears' porridge
now, innit?)

(Though I do know from experience at York that having the main
staircase in the middle of the open building is utter crap for
noise levels if you are trying to work.)


Surprisingly, that's not much of an issue. Bookshelves surround the
central staircase and the work areas are behind the bookshelves. The
books seem to do an impressive job of absorbing the noise and the
experience of walking from one end of the shelves to the other and
hearing the noise disappear is very interesting.

Yes, I noticed that they had more or less managed to avoid that - it was
the first thing I wondered about when I walked in. (Once one of the
Directors had managed to persuade the staff to actually let me go in,
that is!)