On my latest London trip on 4th February I visited the new spiral staircase at Somerset House the Miles Stair, located in the West Wing and designed by the internationally renowned architect Eva Jiricna. The Staircase was opened in 2014. The treads and landings are made from a new material called Fibre Reinforced Ductal concrete which is many times stronger than normal concrete. The well of the staircase is lined with steel rods. The stairs are in a private part of Somerset House and the usual way to see them is to take part in a free hour long historical Tour. However only a few minutes are allocated to the stairs. When collecting my ticket I mentioned the stairs to the main reception and they told me it should be no problem to take a look at the stairs. They are located by the reception for the West Wing and I asked there to see the stairs and they said yes. I ended up photographing the 5 storey stairs from every angle and spent 40 minutes there. Moral of the story if you don’t ask you don’t get.

Unusually there are lights in the middle of the stairwell at the bottom. There are some nice compositions online looking down inside the mesh. Be aware though that there is no way to work a normal sized DSLR through even the larger holes. I did take a compact with me as well just in case and got some shots with that.

The picture was taken handheld with a Sony A700 with a Sigma 10-20 wide angle zoom at 10 mm. I I took 3 shots for HDR but in the end used just the one with RAW editing. I used Topaz DeNoise and Topaz Clarity and did not need any other editing apart from a slight crop to remove some distracting bits of metal on the top edge.