City centre shopping precincts

Many thanks indeed, my friend. Excellent photo. My partner moved down here abour a year ago, and as we were walking through between Cosmo and the old Allied Carpets, I mentioned to her about the former chess game...and said I'd try to find an old photo of it. You are a star, sir. Thanks again! I also seem to remember, more or less opposite Davies' (or just up a bit) was the shop Barnby's Toys, where my mother used to take me occasionally to get my Airfix models and soldiers to play with

I can't remember if we've discussed this before (it didn't show up on a search) but does anyone know what eventually happened to the chess peices?

27th June 1988

Interesting, a year before I first came here. Since then the place seems to have been a perpetual building site.

Thanks to Alan Denyer - here's a scarce shot of Lower Precinct minus Mercia House.

You can clearly see from the side-on view of the pub just how far the line of the precinct differs from the line of Fleet Street and Smithford Street.

Apparently this is a delegation from Stalingrad in 1955. Our lot should have taken more notes from them! Note - that's one big pile of bricks!

This shows why I wished they'd made the precinct connect better with the old street pattern using Smithford Street rather than insisting on the precise east-west alignment for no practical reason I can ascertain. You'd have had the view of the cathedral at one end and the view of St Johns at the other. Not to mention the route would've continued outside of the precinct and make it integrate much better into the city centre as a whole. Considering it takes so long to learn to be planners/architects, how on earth do they manage to get such fundamentally obvious stuff so wrong all the time?

The picture of the delegation (Neils Yard posting) confuses me. The building behind must surely be Marks and Spencer but the sign above the shop does not appear to say that

Hi Greg, I think one says 'Smithford Way' and the other 'The Precinct' AD, when planners and architects are given the brief that we are designing a NEW city centre and there is so little left of the old then they create a new plan. Wasn't it planned to give the view of the cathedral spire from what would now be TJ Hughes balcony entrance. To give Broadgate symmetry then the current alignment would be the result.

Architecturally sickening how they wiped out Smithford Street for an idea, then ruined that idea with Cathedral Lanes!

Couldn`t agree more! It seems clear to me that Mr. Hitler merely did the work that the bulldozers were lined up to do anyway.

Sorry, Pixrobin, what I meant was the shop name. It doesn`t look anything like Marks & Spencer.

A slightly earlier view here of the same location from the library collection

Greg, if you mean the cabin behind the rubble, it wasn't part of M&S, it had various uses over the years, I remember it as a display case for City Prams, later it was a police station.