Wed Nov 23, 2016 11:42 am
To be frank, quite a few of those houses are in a right old state. Architecturally, they're pretty good - and on a nice quiet street in Roath, Canton (Pontcanna?), Grangetown even (sorry Paul), they might be des res. However, on busy Penarth Road, and next to a brewery which can be a bit noisy, they aren't so desirable. They also do not have the scale or grandeur of the houses on Park Place or Cathedral Road, say, to stand up against large scale developments behind them. They would look less like a nice touch of heritage, and more like a forgotten afterthought.
I think the current plans look too dense a development with buildings too close together. Indeed, it would probably be preferably to go a few extra floors on a few buildings in order to shrink their footprints to open up wider 'roads' and perhaps a secondary open space or square. Even so I think 3 million square feet would be ambitious on that site if they want to go mostly mid-rise and don't want it to appear too crowded.
I'm still worried about permeability of the site and connection to the city centre. I'vehad a look on Google Streetview to see if there would be any change of a river walkway connecting to the existing one by the Stadium and it looks pretty difficult given the really quite low railway bridge. Without such a link though, the only access would be from the bottom of St Mary's via Penarth Road (and that would rely on the Network Rail land / car park being made available). Or possibly some through route via an upgraded Cardiff Central. OK, most of the pedestrian traffic might want to go that way, but if part of this is about making more use of river frontage (which talk of a moorings suggests), it will be quite hard to get any "passing traffic" to that part of the site.