How to Save Our Town Centres
They used to say the story of Sheffield was a tale of two cities. The old city centre was bombed during the Second World War. I can remember travelling by bus as a child into the centre and passing bomb sites. I didn’t know they were bomb sites at the time. A comedian once said the residents of Sheffield quite liked the bombed look and so modelled their city on it!
One day during the 1960s, my parents took me to the Central Library to see a model of the plans for the city centre. This was the famous “Hole in the Road”. I remember being particularly impressed by a ramp built into Cockaynes (which I thought had been there forever). It was to connect to subterranean passageways from the hole in the road (follow the link for archive photoes, scroll down for Castle Square with the hole and as it is now).
Using subways, bridges and pedestrianised streets you could walk from Moorfoot to the Castle Market without crossing a road. Sheffield was the cleanest industrial city in Europe and the greatest shopping centre outside London.
I moved away in the seventies and upon my return in 1989, the hole in the road was a shadow of its former grandeur. Sheffielders were once again enjoying empty spaces. They wrecked the centre by building Meadowhall, the biggest out-of-town shopping centre in the region, a couple of miles away.
A Tale of Three Cities!
Today it is a tale of three cities. The hole is long gone, the Supertram introduced in the early nineties and many sixties monuments replaced by millennium projects. The millennium projects have actually been quite successful and are more popular than many of the buildings they replaced.
However, as a retail centre Sheffield has not done so well. There have been several attempts to build a new shopping centre at Barkers Pool and a new proposal is under consideration at present. The Castle Market has moved to Moorfoot (so there’s no need to do the famous walk) and they’re building a new retail site nearby. But the Moor itself is a shadow of its former glory with most of the retail chains closing or moving to Meadowhall. Fargate, arguably, the main retail street, is a mess. It looks like someone emptied a back catalogue of street furniture onto one street and then paved it with Italianate cobbles that make walking along it an unpleasant experience.
How to Save Our Town Centres
I could write more about Sheffield’s centre (and possibly should) and it will be familiar to Julian Dobson who lives in the same city and is the author of “ How to Save Our Town Centres: A radical agenda for the future of high streets”.
The only thing I would take issue with is the book’s title that hardly does justice to its content. The implications of his argument would stretch far beyond town centres and are relevant to every neighbourhood.
I’ve covered ideas in this book previously in this blog. (He uses the term Agora and writes about the retail co-operative movement’s significance.) The writing is brilliant, a pleasure to read and I’m really jealous he has managed so much I’ve attempted to write about!
The book is not only a pleasure to read but also practical. There are many examples of projects all over the United Kingdom and indeed the world. Experiments are happening all over despite the lack of political support for change. Dobson includes practical suggestions for activists and legislators, should we ever manage to elect politicians who truly share our interests in a thriving national localised economy.
Of all the books I’ve reviewed so far (and I’ve reviewed some very good books) this is the one I most wholeheartedly recommend you read. I’ll write more about it over the next few Fridays.