Waiting for quality
I’m relieved that Mr Young does not share the manic optimism of Mr Bluh when talking about plans for Swindon town centre. Even so, it’s difficult to feel anything but weary when the subject of redeveloping the site occupied — still — by the old college building gets a mention.
We have been there before on the college site. It’s cautious optimism at the moment. For the first time in a long time there is cause for optimism. It’s a case of the last points for negotiation.Um, really? That seems painfully familiar.
We want quality for our town centre. We’re not just just going to sign away that quality just to get things moving in the recession. The breakthrough came about a month or two ago and they have gone away to do more detailed work.So that’s why the town centre has so many vacant and derelict sites is it? They’re just ‘waiting for quality’. Recent experience suggests they’re proabably waiting for yet another hotel proposal.
Let’s not forget that when Swindon town centre was redeveloped in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that was regarded as a ‘quality’ development. We can only hope that the current generation of councillors are better at seeing through the developers’ fantasies than their predecessors were.
2 warblings:
"Waiting for quality" is a fool's game. They'd do better to just clear the area and turn it into a car park. Businesses looking at an area will just see how derelict it is and assume there's no money in people's pockets (which isn't true about Swindon - they just go shopping in places like Bristol and Reading).
I often worry that people running Swindon always end up looking to Oxford and Bath as templates. The assumption that somehow we can have a gentrified, somewhat arty place with lots of marvellous little cafes. It's just not going to happen. They'd be better to try to accept that it's a modern, quite industrious town and to work around that and make an excellent, modern town centre instead.
I think Oxford and Bath are used as comparisons just because they are close, but I agree that it’d be far better if the planners and policy makers accepted that Swindon is still primarily an industrial town, and with that comes a certain culture and shopper. Gentrification is best kept to Old Town (where I think it could work).
At a meeting a year ago a reason was given for the college building not being demolished. Namely that, once demolished it makes it harder to get planning permission for a tall building on the site. With the building gone, residents in the steeply rising streets behind could object to the loss of a view north across the town.
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