Fleet, Hampshire and Charleston, South Carolina, USA

What have these two places got in common, you may ask?

One is a good example  of a street which acts as a people orientated space; in the other such spaces are all too rare. However, moves are being made to create that sort of space.

The centre of Fleet is dominated by its vast “High Street,” Fleet Road, which  stretches approximately 1 km from Fleet Railway Station towards Church Crookham. Along that entire distance, buildings are brought up to back of pavement. No one has to walk from the pavement, across a vast  car park to get to a building. 

 When car-based urban design began to take hold, many developers began to demand enormous car-parking spaces at the front of their buildings. These might have attracted passing motorists but essentially destroyed the street as an urban space. The plan below  showing  the centre of Fleet is instructive. The space of Fleet Road is defined by shopping. Car parks are provided but they are set back from the shopping street. Passageways connect the shopping to the car parks, ensuring the latter are visually repressed.

In recent decades, urban design has seemed focused on creating spaces entirely for cars not people. This is as true of Britain as it is in the USA. My last two images are from the City of Charleston, South Carolina where car based urbanism has produced what can only be described as wastelands, spaces devoid of any human or aesthetic quality.

 

This is what is  proposed as a replacement. Streets, framed by the architecture which surrounds them. As the plan in this example seems to indicate, the car parks, an inevitable accompaniment to any retail development , are tucked away to avoid visual  disruption. There also seems to be some housing, in walking distance of the shops. It  is implied that the site of the second series of photos is show in the first set  i.e. they are remodelling the spaces.

If the British Public demanded from their retailers high quality urban design instead of simply convenient car parking, then the quality of British urban design might improve.

Ask yourself what British spaces resemble the first  set of example from  Charleston, South Carolina. Then ask yourself why more spaces cannot be remodelled to resemble the second.

Two Business Parks in Frimley, Surrey

It is instructive to compare these two business parks in Frimley. One difference that is immediately apparent is that one is accessible by foot and that the other is not. In one it is possible to walk into the centre of Frimley, in the other it is not. One can be accessed by public transport. In the other, this does not seem possible.

The first is owned by Siemens Electronics. The road outside has footpaths allowing someone to walk into Frimley in about ten minutes.

 

 

The second business park is by the M3 exit.

The site is surrounded by motorway slip roads. This means they have no footpaths and hence no pedestrian access is possible to anywhere.

It might have been possible to arrange access via the side of the site which is not dominated by the Motorway. This side faces onto Hawley, which is a highly residential area and, in truth, contains few facilities office workers would wish to walk to.

Some of the buildings here are actually architecturally better looking than those at the first business park.

But here we have a group of buildings with no real mixture of uses, inaccessible by pedestrians and which seems to have no connection to public transport. All this is highly unsustainable. Ideally the office workers ought to be able to walk to Frimley, with all it’s facilities such as restaurants, sandwich shops and railway station.

The final irony is the pedestrian bridge connecting two of the buildings. It’s a beautiful bridge but unfortunately in the wrong place. The road it crosses has a negligible traffic. It would have been so much better if it had crossed one of the busy roads surrounding this site, allowing access to local neighbourhoods.

A case of non-joined up thinking.