Redevelopment of Cambridge Airport to start from scratch

Posted byCambridge Town OwlPosted inUncategorized

TL/DR? That’s what they told me at the consultation event on 11 July. There are a few more dates here.

And that’s not the only consultation happening for new developments

There’s Westbrook off of Milton Road by Mitcham’s Corner

Above: ***It’s Cr*p!***

You’ve got until Friday to tell them what you think of their proposals (see here) which look little different to similar sci-tech-bubble proposals in and around our city.

It’s still at pre-consultation phase but being on the other side of the river and being brain-fogged out I’ve lost the will to shout too loudly at this one, other than to ask them to be far more proactive in engaging with local schools and Cambridge Regional College.

The Beehive Centre is back with their events this week.

You can view their revamped proposals here, noting their consultation events over the next few days.

Cambridge East – a legacy for Sir Michael Marshall?

I was acquainted with Sir Michael as a result of his membership of the Greater Cambridge Partnership Assembly in its early days about a decade ago. The last time I saw him alive was at the memorial for the late Mayor Nigel Gawthrope. That got me thinking about what a joint memorial for two civic titans from different social groups of our city might be like – such as a new local history institute named after the two of them.

In one sense the airport site is a developer’s dream: A large flat piece of brownfield site in one of the biggest property bubbles in the country – one that doesn’t look like it’s going to collapse anytime soon. (Famous last words – the climate emergency and the water supply crisis are two major environmental risks).

This site however has a few notable differences:

  1. The Marshall Group own the land (so no expensive land acquisition costs)
  2. The firm (and the city) want to commemorate the business and civic legacy in a manner befitting of the late Sir Michael Marshall
  3. The site is large enough to host a new facility large enough to serve not just city and district, but the region too.

Above – the core aims of the redevelopment.

“Why not cover the site in concrete, build lots of high towers crammed with executive apartments and provide the bare minimum the law requires for social housing in order to maximise the financial return on the site?”

They could do – although I expect more than a few very eminent people who knew Sir Michael far better than I did during his lifetime would probably call them out if they did that.

Previous proposals zapped

I wrote about them here – the one below dating from 2008

Above – Ugly stuff

Above – More ugly stuff – comparing King’s College with a brutalist prison-style design the sort that the present Home Office Ministers might endorse

One of the firm’s representatives told me that all of these have been scrapped, and that what they have is a listed building, some garages and showrooms, and a large expanse of flat land. No building designs or anything like that have even been looked at. They also said the same goes for an regional-sized facilities – indicating no preference, just noting what local residents had told them. Eg concert hall, swimming pool, new ground for Cambridge United (men and women), and so on.

This is where Rob Cowan’s book on essential urban design comes in – a book I showed to the team there. If they wanted to, the firm could apply the book to their redevelopment programme and potentially come up with something that is genuinely inspiring.

Above – Essential Urban Design by Cowan, R. (2021) RIBA

How to avoid “Modern Cambridge Vernacular [ie sci-tech-bland]” – what alternatives are there?”

A couple of the team mentioned they had been going through my Lost Cambridge local history blog https://lostcambridge.com/ which started a conversation about the designs of buildings in pre-WWI and interwar Cambridge. I pointed out there were a series of retail and public buildings proposed in that era that for a variety of reasons (including the outbreak of war) never got built. One of them was what would have been a wonderful garage and sales room on Jesus Lane.

Above – from the Cambridge Daily News 15 Oct 1938, wonderfully preserved in the Cambridgeshire Collection (Now to locate the original painting if it still exists!)

Another unbuilt example – also from the Cambridgeshire Collection’s archive is the unbuilt Parkside Pool which I wrote about here.

Above – the proposed Cambridge Swimming Stadium, Cambridge Daily News, 15 April 1935

Above – the old Cambridge Co-operative Society buildings – the left side dating from 1895, and the right hand side (as you look at the image) dating from the inter-war era.

The building was later sold as the society imploded in the 1980s in the face of high interest rates, and was demolished to make way for John Lewis in the early 2000s during the Lion Yard redevelopment as a temporary store before Primark took over the least.

This does not mean take the existing plans and replicate them brick-for-brick

Not least because the building regulations and planning laws mean that the dimensions alone would have to change for accessibility. Amongst other things. This is more about choosing a vernacular/style that is both different to what is being put up by many developers, and also hints at the civic and commerce interests of the family in an age of expansion and huge technological opportunity.

The other thing the design theme could also reflect is the social progress in the interwar era, reflected by the women who became the earliest elected councillors on Cambridge City Council and Cambridgeshire County Council.

Above-left, Dorothy Enright, the first woman to become principal of a technical college in England (CCAT in Cambridge – incorporated into what is now Anglia Ruskin in the late 1980s), and Lella Secor Florence who co-founded the first municipal birth control centre in the country in Cambridge in The Kite – and then researched and wrote a study interviewing the first 300 service users, published in 1930 and digitised here. (I acquired an original copy which I donated to the Cambridgeshire Collection if you’d like to see the original)

Furthermore, there are a host of reports that could inform the future plans

Above – commissioned by the Greater Cambridge Planning Service which I wrote about and linked to in this blogpost.

Above – the tables from p57 of the Community and Cultural Facilities Provision Audit

That was completed in 2019. What’s changed over the past 4-5 years?

I’ll leave this one for now – other than to encourage you to make your views known. Think in particular what would be good for older children, teenagers, and young adults that don’t go onto university. For they are the ones who have been particularly under-provided for over the decades, and Sir Michael was known for his long-term support for the air cadets. Therefore children and young people should be at the heart of the plans. That goes for their environment too – the site needs to keep open that green lung and have enough playing field space and open green space.

Food for thought?

If you are interested in the longer term future of Cambridge, and on what happens at the local democracy meetings where decisions are made, feel free to: