RailPen propose a bland block on Newmarket Road

Posted byCambridge Town OwlPosted inUncategorized

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised with what has been put forward given my blogpost back on 09 November 2022 – which is nearly two years ago.

“Does the revamped building look any better?”

You be the judge.

Above – from the Design & Access Statement in the application now out for public consultation

Whenever someone tries to make the case about how wonderful such designs are (remember the greenery is a distraction from poor design – a standard designer trick on the eye), my reaction is similar to Elise Ecklund here. You can try and make me smile with stuff like this, but it will be awkward as hell. Which is why I tend to sound-off about how ‘orrible such designs are at public consultations. Far better to be honest up front rather than bottling up the ADHD-amplified rage that is generated whenever I see such proposals.

“Where can we see the plans?”

You can view the documents via https://applications.greatercambridgeplanning.org/online-applications/ typing in: 24/03088/FUL into the ‘Search -> Planning -> Simple Search’ dropdown options. You are looking for:

  • The Design & Access Statements (1-4)
  • The Heritage Statement
  • The Transport Assessment documents
  • Statement of community involvement
  • Ecological Assessment (if only to see the limitations of such assessments on sites like this)

To be fair to the local councillors – 3x Green and 1x Labour, they’ve carried out a significant amount of work scrutinising these and other planning applications in Abbey Ward. It hasn’t been easy. For those of you who want to find out more on what scrutinising developers is like on behalf of constituents, feel free to contact them. Only we need more people involved in the scrutiny process. If you want to stay outside of party politics, go via Cambridge Past, Present, and Future – which has a planning committee. The initial response from CambridgePPF to the development proposed is here. You can also browse through their responses to other planning applications.

“Is this the best the architects can do?”

You’d have to ask them.

Re the trees, CambridgePPF had this to say:

“To create high quality public realm next to tall buildings requires a significant amount of public space to allow for large trees and wide pedestrian boulevards. We do not believe there is sufficient set-back from Newmarket Road to achieve this and the proposal risks perpetuating the poor-quality public realm on Newmarket Road. As an example, a mature Plane Tree requires a radius of 20m, whereas the proposal is only 10m.”

Cambridge PPF to RAILPen – 25 Nov 2022

Remember that thing about trees? They can be used to hide all sorts of things

Scale with the western side of Newmarket Road? D&A Statement Pt2

Above: Now you see it, now you don’t! D&A Statement Pt3

As for ‘community’ and ‘character’ – not seeing much in their plans either.

Above – from the D&A statement Pt2

I’d much rather developers were more straight forward and said they were only going to go for the bare minimum that central government required them to do – and try and lobby their way out of such commitments on appeal anyway.

We need to educate our city about town planning as part of wider movement to get more people involved in the future of, and the running of our city

I was moaning at a couple of councillors earlier this morning at a community event about the continued shambles of the Romsey Labour Club site, trying to see if we can find out what can be done about it with the new government in place.

In the meantime, a few old booklets arrived that reminds us of times when previous governments tried to educate the public about how the state functions – and for what purposes.

Ideally a team of us could get together and create much more accessible 21st Century versions of those, both in paper form and online. But I don’t have the competence to lead such a project. It would have to be someone of far higher calibre (and health) than me.

Anyway, I’ll leave this one here as it’s just getting my blood pressure up otherwise.

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:

Above – from Sept 2023 – a plea from me!