Tue May 28, 2019 10:56 am
That sounds promising. This area of town certainly has a great deal of potential for improvement.
Having just looked at some of the other work showcased on The Urbanists web page, I have to say that I'm not very impressed though. Hopefully they will raise their game.
Some of my thoughts / ideas for this area would be:
- listing and restoring the Guildford Crescent frontages.
- Demolishing the Ibis hotel. The current building is awful and the location would be an excellent one for an elegant high rise - imagine the view down Churchill Way from Queen Street. There is also potential here to significantly improve Guildford Crescent by creating a building that engages with the street and creates a proper two sided street.
- Improving the route through to the Atrium (and to a potential future redeveloped Prison site), including installing some cool colourful lighting under the railway bridge.
- Radical changes to Station Terrace, much of which is currently a lifeless environment due to poor urban design. The area of the street south of the station is particularly dead, as there is basically just a stone wall and some parking on one side of the road and on the other side the lower levels of Helmont House completely fail to engage with the street. The plaza between Helmont House and Landmark Place could also be improved to make it more open as a public thoroughfare.
- North of the station it would be great to see the car park for The Aspect radically redesigned, preferably by putting it underground. This would create space for further development and eliminate another ugly and lifeless section of street frontage.
- Before long further investment in Queen Street Station will also be required. Even though it was only extended five years ago it is already struggling to handle the number of passengers that pass through at peak times. The architecture is also appalling. Aesthetically it is the worst sort of soulless PFI crap(ita). What is perhaps worse than this though is that it also performs poorly from a practical point of view. Anybody who has tried to use the barriers to leave the station, had to queue for a ticket on the way out or has changed trains to reach Platform 5 during rush hour will have seen that the current design just doesn't work. TfW should begin to plan an ambitious and comprehensive redevelopment of the station and surrounding area (including re-opening the rear entrance) to be delivered over the next 10-20 years.
- This has been well covered elsewhere on this message board but a complete redevelopment of the Capitol Centre is long overdue. Ideally the current hotch-potch of 80s post modernism, Victoriana and more recent steel and glass bits would be raised to the ground, allowing a complete rethink. I'd love to see a mix a leisure, housing, retail and public open space and a strong focus on providing the easiest possible link to Queen Street Station.
- I really like the idea of opening up the canal on Churchill Way and giving the area a bit of an Amsterdam type of feel. However, this concept is threatened by the current use of the area as a bus thoroughfare (especially on event days). Careful thought will be required as to whether it is possible to realise the vision for this area without diverting the buses. If not, where else could the buses be moved to? On a linked point - is it really necessary to shut off quite so much of the city centre to cars and buses on event days? It sometimes feels to me that it creates a bit of a "closed for business" feel around Castle Street and Kingsway.
- Charles Street would benefit from major changes to the northern end of the street, which is currently blighted by the lifeless walls of Next and Marks and Spencer. Further down the street, I'd also like to see a new cut through from Charles Street to Churchill Way (somewhere around the two churches) which would bring more people into the area and create and new east-west pedestrian route across the city centre.
- The motorpoint site / Rapport building / surface NCP car park is perhaps the most interesting part of the site as it really is a blank canvass. Hopefully this will be a high quality development and the idea of a public square being incorporated into it is promising. Creating a development that properly engages with the streets on all sides - potentially reviving the lower section of Churchill Way and Bute Terrace - should also be a key objective.
- While we're comprehensively redesigning this area of town, let's also raise the dreadful Park Inn building to the ground as redeveloping that site could also massively improve the quality of the pedestrian link through to the Hayes and help revive Bute Terrace.