Bournemouth artist Stuart Semple is launching a campaign to name and shame towns using ‘hostile design’ to deter the homeless.

Daily Echo reporter Faith Eckersall took a tour with him of Bournemouth.

To illustrate what he means, Stuart took me on a ‘hostile design’ walking tour of the town, starting right outside the Echo’s Richmond Hill offices where two of the four minuscule ‘perching’ seats – which cost £1,100 each - remain.

“They look ludicrous, you may as well not put a seat there,” he declares. “It’s the worst design of seating perch you could ever come up with. For the same money you could make something else that was much nicer.”

A quick trot round to McDonalds and Stuart is deriding the spikes or nobbles that have sprung up on the ledge outside the restaurant. “If you look at the colour it’s quite well camouflaged but they are there for one reason only and that’s to stop people sitting. They are a harsh, brutal-looking statement.”

We both sit down but rise after a few seconds. It’s very uncomfortable.

On Gervis Place Stuart shows me two designs of bus-shelter seating, neither of which appears to have been designed with human comfort in mind.

Both designs are shiny, angled plastic which means that to stay on them you have to dig your feet into the ground and one is the same width as a starving snake. “They are a huge disappointment,” he says. “Who designs stuff like this?”

We cross the square, with Stuart slating the brass ridges attached to the retaining walls to deter skaters, and the plethora of Victorian-style benches with the now-notorious metal bars, and pause at yet another bus shelter.

At first glance it’s more comfortable than the others with cheery red plastic benching, back rests and what seems like an arm rest. But don’t be deceived, says Stuart.

“This is the stealthy one,” he says. “You’d think these are arm rests but look what happens when you try and use it,” he says, slumping badly to his right because they are too low. “They’ll say it’s for privacy, to keep people apart but it’s to stop people lying down.”

Outside M&S Stuart points out the ‘arm rests’ which appear to have spring up on the curved bench seating and then we return to the bench opposite Zara that started it all, and which has now been seen more than 1 million times on Facebook.

“The whole thing of the campaign is to open people’s eyes to spotting what is actually going on where we live,” he says. “You walk past it a million times and don’t see. Then it’s everywhere.”