Post-war redevelopment

Just dropped on another interesting site

What a fascinating page Annewiggy, some super stuff there. Some of those old ideas were not that bad really, but I suspect the usual lack of funding meant that many of them never quite achieved what they hoped.

Some of those ideas came from La Corbusier's work on urban design, and a lot of it has been held responsible in some quarters for creating problems in cities and been discredited somewhat. Some of it was also based on Lewis Mumford's classic work, The Culture of Cities, which was popular in the 1930s as well: Mumford himself also criticised La Corbusier's ideas later. Donald Gibson wanted to demolish old Coventry before the war - and drew up plans for a new city that would have seen a lot of old streets around the Cathedral demolished. The blitz merely helped him along. As a young architect without experience, he probably saw La Corbusier's work as the 'silver bullet' and Coventry, with is small, old streets and mix of residential and workplaces mixed up was wrong. Even after the blitz, he argued against preserving anything of the old city. What they did, which was good, was put into place the construction of new civic buildings and facilities (Such as Art Galleries) that a city needed, and they thankfully decided to use red brick for many buildings to keep up the local style. However, the creation of a 'inward looking' precinct has caused problems, and the precinct itself was quite badly linked to the existing street pattern. This has created issues, as parts of the precinct suffer from lack of flow of people and the retail units are pretty much unviable. The addition of towers in weird locations hasn't helped, and much of the elegant post-war style has been torn out and endless projects involving sticking plastic and metal on the precinct buildings have failed. Coventry's reconstruction was basically a shopping precinct and a ring road. There was no real ideas about what to do with the land between the precinct and the ring road (Which was originally going to be a surface level road lined with trees.) and this area still suffers today and has been subjected to some awful developments with poor street frontages & problems with access and strange shaped pockets of land. Broadgate is pretty much the same - there was never any real plan for it, other than as an 'open space' (La Corbusier thought cities should be made up of tower blocks and empty spaces) leading to the Cathedral, but there were buildings in the way and this was never addressed. A lot of bits of Coventry are just spaces left over after they planned a few chunks of the city and no one really knows what to do with them - they still don't, even now. These areas were full of businesses and some of them were busy arterial roads lined with shops. Apart from the area that Coventry University occupies (Another series of poor buildings that form a fairly large area of poorly defined streets and spaces) these areas are now pretty empty - what should be our city's thriving 'ring' outside the main CBD is a wasteland of flyovers and dual carriageways. (It's interesting to compare somewhere like Chester with Coventry.) Unfortunately, the trend at the times was very much against an old city like Coventry that had suddenly experienced massive population growth. Gibson wanted to destroy the old city purely because he didn't like it, because he'd been sucked into the La Corbusier ideology of how to make a modern city. As we've seen since then, though, old industrial buildings can be converted to new industries inside city centres and help city centres thrive. Old narrow streets become pedestrianised shopping lanes, and having people working and living in a city centre is very important for its economy, and having people living alongside employers is also good. Whilst Coventry did have its problems in the 1930s and post war years (Mainly due to car ownership!) there was actually very need to destroy so much of it - especially when a lot of what was destroyed was on land that was never really developed. This isn't a rant against Gibson - he was wrong to want to destroy a whole city for no reason, in my opinion, but we all get caught up with ideas at the time that seem to solve problems - but an attempt to try to understand why one of the major cities in the UK has a poorly performing city centre. I suggest that the path it started down, by removing residents & businesses and focussing on a shopping precinct (that was inward looking and poorly connected) and nothing else is one reason. Creating an urban motorway around it all is another. (I suspect the lopsided local economy might have also had something to do with it.)

In response to flapdoodle's post: I worked in a School of Architecture for almost 15 years and found that most commercial buildings have an ECONOMIC lifespan of less than 50 years. And just look at the innovations that have happened over he past 50 years. How many times have you looked around a centuries-old church and thought "Pity that electrical trunking has to run down that ancient wall." The precincts in Coventry were designed to give long vistas with a tower at the end as a focal point. (In the case of Market Way it had to be in the middle because the building line curves towards Shelton Square.) It's a plan of containment so that nothing seems too far away to the pedestrian. The 'tower' at the eastern end of the lower and upper precincts is, of course, the spire of the old cathedral. The precincts don't work today because our life-styles have changed. And, so have our modern shopping precinct is enclosed into a multi-outlet mall where the only time you get to see the sky is looking up in the atrium. On a personal note: I can wander round the precincts of Coventry taking as many pictures as I wish, but when I try taking pics in West Orchard I get stopped by the security guards. So I have to plan which pictures I want before going in: snap, snap, snap; and then quickly leave by the other exit

I converse regularly with flapdoodle on another forum regarding redevelopment and there is talk of vistas, focal points, nodes, view cones, sightlines etc. We understand the 'framing' of the precinct and how the towers do this, but it was completely unnecessary to also put them in a place whereby they completely cover the route and therefore the flow of people. For example did the tower at the base of the Lower Precinct have to be there? No, it could have been placed on the opposite side of Corporation St and it would have still been the focal point, only a short distance further away but not disrupting the flow. Or you could have kept the original road and just used St Johns as the focal point and opened it out at the top end for views of the spire(s) Similarly with that on Smithford Way - that could've been part of the Telegraph building - and I'm sure a solution could've been reached for Market Way. For instance connecting Croft Road to New Union St and placing the tower around where the stupid Bull Yard/Shelton Square is. Similarly Broadgate completely cut itself off from the rest of the grid with Primark and Broadgate House quite unnecessarily. And the upper level of the upper precinct has never worked and has been unpopular from the start, with numerous ways tried to generate interest in it, resulting in the carbuncles of escalators, ramps etc. Had they just had two levels for the entire precinct (one level with Broadgate, one with Corporation St) it could've worked, but the planners tried to force people to bend to their will, and pigheadedly blamed the people for not embracing their ideas rather than admitting their entire concept was wrong. These are not things that have been created by changes in habits or technological advancement. They were fundamentally flawed ideas from the beginning and which have been almost wholly discredited. As most modernist architecture and planning has done, it completely ignored the area around it and how it fitted into it. They were right, what was already there was wrong and that was that.

This is quite simply not true. When the precinct was designed there were restrictions on tall buildings and Donald Gibson was not in favour of tall buildings as they would detract from the cathedral. His plan was for a low rise precincts linked to the surrounding streets. The towers were added in the 1960s, and located very badly - yes, I get that they were trying to make a focal point similar to the Cathedral, but what they did was make the isolation of the precinct worse and created poor connections to the surrounding city centre. It really misses the point of both the precinct and why the Cathedral was a focal point. IMHO, the precinct has been something of series of failures and problems - so much so that since the 1950s it's been constantly fiddled with in order to fix issues, whether that's the upper levels not working, the lack of residents, and the fact it's dead due to the poor mix of uses. Even in the 25 years I've been here there's been constant fiddling with it, mainly involving adding clutter and removing the 'squares' and turning it into what is an odd looking 'street' with unused balconies and links between blocks set back (for no apparent reason now the concept of squares has been lost.)

The sites that subsequently became Hillman House and Coventry Point [and also St Georges House in Corporation Street] were marketed on an 'open' brief - ie developers were allowed to submit schemes and bids for the sites. Consequently we finished up with over-large buildings which represented the highest offers and which became hard to refuse - not a unique problem! I think that Coventry Point's protrusion into Market Way is possibly the worst of these. Mercia House of course was built by the Council to meet two demands - getting C&A into the City and getting more housing into the Centre. The flats were let on individual leases to applicants [ not necessarily waiting list tenants] but eventually the block was transferred to the Housing stock and eventually to Whitefriars. In addition the Council acquired Hillman House and that followed the same route. St Georges House was eventually consumed by the AXA HQ. Without being drawn again into the whole planning debate it does show how rapidly the world has changed over the last 40 years or so - C&A gone, AXA gone , Whitefriars in the place of the local authority but still little in the City Centre in the way of private [non-student] housing.

Yes, this is true. By the 1960s many post-war cities that had been extensively redeveloped were experiencing similar problems due to the mainly single use nature of large redevelopments. In Coventry they apparently attempted to fix this by building residential blocks & also clubs and pubs in the precinct. These have now mainly all gone, and the city centre still has a reputation for being 'dead' at night. Change is always going to happen, but I wonder if Coventry is too dominated by pedestrianised precincts and a clumsy ring road to adapt easily to change? Plymouth is undergoing big changes, which are almost the opposite of Coventry: http://www.plymouth.gov.uk/vision The redevelopment is based on bringing back the 'street' and using squares (No traffic) as urban 'oases' near important and busy buildings. The thinking is that the obsession with separating cars (Modernist approach) and people is actually to the detriment of the city as it robs of it of its natural marketplaces and social areas and creates vast areas with poor access. Coventry, on the other hand, has been making more pedestrianised areas, most of which have ended up lifeless and unable to attract any sort of commerce. One aspect of Plymouth is that there will always be a street visible from public spaces, to create a sense of safety.

Thanks for the link flapdoodle: very interesting. So, do I see a proposal for scrapping the Market Way - Smithford Way axis and Hertford Street - Broadgate - Trinity Street to return to vehicle routes. And that is not meant sarcastically.

I've always found the redevelopment of Plymouth after the war far more appealing than Coventry's rebuild. Can't really explain why, probably a dislike for too much pedestrianisation. I always enjoyed a visit to Devonport Dockyard when working for Rolls Royce, especially if there was a chance to see the chain ferries across the Tamar.

I don't think there are any plans to do this, but in 2009 a report for English Heritage did actually recommend that it should be considered that Market Way should be opened up to traffic, and that the clutter that had been added to the precinct be removed to open up the views to the Cathedral. This includes the lower precinct, which the report considered to have been ruined by the addition of a clumsy roof that was totally at odds with the original style. I wonder if this would also allow the upper and lower precinct to be turned back into 'squares' as they were originally intended (Hence why the larger blocks are linked by 'set back' blocks.) with traffic access and hence the possibility to bring some mixed use to the areas, and provide large pedestrianised areas amongst roads and create the feeling of safety that they bring? Personally, I think Broadgate's pedestrianisation was a huge, huge mistake, and has a created a large area that's quite simply dead after 5:30 - and the lack of any sort of traffic nearby makes it very intimidating and unappealing and there's little chance of anyone wanting to go there in the evening. A terrible idea, and the square hasn't attracted a single new businesses, and plans to turn Cathedral Lanes into a 'food' based area have not come to anything. It seems to have been done on a whim.

I actually prefer Coventry's, as it's a bit more built up and doesn't conform to a grid pattern, but I don't like the excessive pedestrianisation. I found Plymouth to be somewhat flat and characterless, although the Hoe and Barbican are fantastic. It suffers from a lot of the same problems as Coventry, though. Back to front developments, underpasses, flyovers, etc.

Here is an interesting little snippet about Donald Gibson from Jane Vaughan - visual artist at Coventry based Talking Birds Art Project group.

Gibson writes: "We have the opportunity in front of us that has never occurred before, born it is true, out of a catastrophe of colossal magnitude, but an opportunity to be grasped with both hands. Let it not be said by future generations that the people of Coventry failed them, when the ideal was in their reach." I wonder what that 'ideal' was? It certainly isn't ideal now. (Not that it's really Donald Gibson's fault, as endless tinkering and bodging as ruined his original precinct anyway.)