I was looking at another planning application that, yet again replaces a not-particularly inspiring building with one that’s even worse
It’s on Castle Hill at the Histon Road Junction by Mount [not so] Pleasant.
Before
Proposed
****Oooooooh!!!! Ugly Sh****te!!!****
At this rate I’m gonna be rockin’ up to a future planning committee and playing this old number from the Millennium – only because I’m getting bored at the sound of my own voice complaining about rubbish building design. And it’s not just me.
The Place Alliance published their over-looked report during the second lockdown in 2020
You can read the full report and the summary https://placealliance.org.uk/research/national-housing-audit/
Inevitably its impact was lost in the winter lockdown of December 2020. Two of the conclusions that should be of interest to Cambridgeshire residents due to the volume of development past, present and future, include:
- “New housing design is overwhelmingly ‘mediocre’ or ‘poor’ – Because the improvement is from a low base, today the design of new housing developments are still overwhelmingly ‘mediocre’ or ‘poor’ (three quarters of the audited projects).
- “Many schemes should have been refused – One in five of the audited schemes should have been refused planning permission outright. The design of many others should have been improved before relevant permissions were granted.”
Above – from my recent blogpost on child-friendly communities
The southern end of Histon Road of which the above-development is on, is such a wasted opportunity.
Imagine driving into Cambridge having turned off at the Histon Road junction of the A14, and find yourself greeted with either one or the other of the Mount Pleasant buildings.
Above – by Jasmin Watkiss for the Cambridge News – St Edmund’s College making the Cambridge end of Histon Road look even worse than its predecessor. (I opposed this planning application too!)
Yet when Cambridge City Councillors assessed the proposal at planning committee, despite criticising the proposals they felt compelled to approve it.
Above – Cambridge City Council planning committee members slamming an application at Mount Pleasant House.
As I mentioned in this blogpost on planning and place-making from 2020, too many of the buildings at the southern end of Histon represent so much of what is bad about Cambridge, and little about what is good.
Meanwhile, down Milton Road…
Above – Milton Road looking south, from G-Maps here
The building in the foreground is an aparthotel, which brings its own issues on antisocial behaviour as well as undermining the businesses of the small hotel and guesthouse industries – as does Air BnB. It remains to be seen how successful the Government’s new policy is on the latter. Inevitably it feels all the more frustrating given the existing housing crisis and the shortage of affordable and social/council housing in Cambridge. In the meantime, the large red building complex in the background – Westbrook, is in the process of being demolished and turned into…you guessed it, a Sci-tech space. “The Platform” – hardly the most creative name in the world.
Whether I’ll get my way with turning the Milton Road Garage site into a new municipal swimming pool remains to be seen. [I won’t – and even if I do, I’ll be plant food by the time it opens]. If it is turned into a pool, I hope it can be as wonderful as the new Parkside Pool was in the late 1990s when it opened. That pool is in need of serious TLC because it has been functioning way over capacity for decades. (Hence my moan about the lack of an additional full-size municipal pool given both the population growth and tourism/language school growth).
Now…where’s next on the ugly list? Ah – the Eastern Gate!
“Well at least it’s an improvement on what was there before!”
Above – the SPD from 2011 by Cambridge City Council – you can see how ‘orrible Newmarket Road used to be in the approaches towards Elizabeth Way Roundabout.
The original landing page is here. There are a number of historic images in that SPD including of the old gas works before much of it got torn down following the discovery of North Sea Gas. Prior to that, coal was ‘cracked’ in a large industrial unit to create coke, and the coal gas was stored in those big gasometers. I think it was a missed opportunity to do something wonderfully imaginative with those buildings – but then the contamination of the land would probably have been a big stumbling block.
Above – the old Cambridge Town Gas Works (p16)
“Did Cambridge get what was proposed in the SPD 2011?”
There’s an extended project for any college student looking for something to work on!
Cherry Hinton Road and Hills Road.
I wrote about this one on my old blog here back in 2016. Someone in The Guardian picked up on it and the next thing you know the post got 4,000+ hits after the troubles of Cambridge Railway Station were picked up in Olly Wainwright’s article of 2017.
“The following year, [the original site owners] went into administration… The “pre-pack” nature of the administration allowed two directors to form a new, debt-free company, [to buy back the] profitable assets, including the Cambridge scheme.”
“As local blogger Richard Taylor noted: “Both members of the public and councillors expressed concern at this scurrilous, albeit legal, behaviour.”
The Guardian, 13 June 2017
Said company is now a very profitable one – and yet again they have shown a drive for profits that involves ploughing through local government with their development by Cambridge North Station, behaviour that while perfectly legal, does nothing but infuriate local residents and local politicians. But because of the over-centralised structure of governance in England, there is nothing that local councils can do. The buck stops with the ministers responsible for the planning system.
“And for Madingley Road, Barton Road, and Trumpington Road?”
Can you avoid the noise and pollution of the traffic jams?
The trees are what make those routes in pleasant – when there’s no traffic, although the first of those roads has felt like a building site every time I’ve been down it during the 2010s – which was fairly frequently when I was filming council and planning inquiry meetings pre-Covid.
With the continued housing growth alongside the fact that the country is still in the midst of an economic downturn, now should be the time to be building the light rail spine – the Isaac Newton Line as proposed by Cambridge Connect.
Above – a conceptual diagram (2023 revision) by Cambridge Connect
The above first phase (in light purple) should significantly alleviate the motor traffic congestion on the Babraham Road into Cambridge as well as the motor traffic coming in from Cambourne and the western villages. My very strong preference is to have out-of-town coach stops and freight exchanges at edge-of-town sites to enable coaches to drop passengers off – onto the light rail services (thus acting as a tourist tax too), and requiring petrol/diesel powered freight vehicles carrying small packets to transfer their packets to smaller cycling/e-bike couriers for ‘last mile’ delivery. That would significantly reduce the wear and tear on the roads due to the much, much lighter vehicles being used.
I tried to make the case many times over the past decade for the above but the GCP and others have insisted on their continued proposals. So far, no work has commenced on the proposed busways. It will be interesting to see what the public say at general election debates.
Food for thought?
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