Cambridge City Council will be debating the future of the civic quarter at The Guildhall on 21 November 2024 from 5.30pm (See the papers here). Looking at the proposals, surely Mr Pennycook knows this is no way to govern a city with a globally-recognised name
See Phil Rodgers’ Thread here.
Also, for your in-depth scrutiny, see the detailed documents here that were inserted as a hyperlink at the end. (Note to council officers, please put a hyperlink to such things at the very start of your reports. It helps people find the info that they need which means you get informed questions that in the longer term reduces your workload.)
“First thoughts on the proposals?”
What an utterly miserable and soul-destroyingly depressing pack of proposals – ones that reflect the devastation wrought on local government in England by the Conservatives
We are in a farcical situation where Cambridge City Council is being told it has to make significant budget cuts on top of 14 years of austerity while at the same time told by the Minister for Housing that he wants Cambridge to increase significantly in population and geographical area. These two policies are utterly incompatible.
Note that the disposal of Shire Hall is still ticking away.
The fact we cannot as a city hold onto it in public hands (due to the decision of the county Tories to move it to Alconbury into a not-fit-for-purpose grey featureless slab) speaks volumes
***Oi!!!! Who stole the town owl?!?!***
Below – architectural drawings that steal Dawn the Cockerel and Dusk the Owl from the Guildhall clock.
Above – from Schedule 1 Architectural Drawings in the list of papers
***Give us back our civic fauna damn you!!!111***
(Actually, I think they’ve sort of tried to make it look like the two stone-feathered rapscallions will remain, but they’ve gone to all that effort to make the dull bits stay while leaving out the fun bits!)
Actually at the time, the proposed design of the guildhall was highly controversial. Everyone other than Florence Ada Keynes seemed to hate the design…but they could not come up with an agreed alternative. So Florence got on and got the thing built in time for the UK to enter WWII.
With the city council so utterly hollowed out, the changes to the internal use of the guildhall reflect the lack of funding available and the lack of imagination from the designers. In my opinion. But then I’m only saying that because they ignored my major calls for the overhaul that I wrote about here. And if I were in their position on the receiving end of my blogging wrath, I’d say ‘Come back to us when you’ve got the money to pay for those fantasy designs’. Which is why the buck actually stops at the current Minister for Housing – Matthew Pennycook MP, and the Chancellor Rachel Reeves. Because at present the force that is driving this is not civic pride or a grand future for Cambridge as a city, but old-fashioned salami-slicing of council budgets.
Above – from Stage 2 design report (part 3) Page 6
The ‘Total Net Saving’ row at the bottom speaks volumes. As does the concept of an ‘Apart Hotel’ which I find to be utterly miserable because it reduces the number of jobs available for working class Cambridge residents – and for young adults looking for p/t work to complement their studies, and reduces the interaction between residents working and visitors staying over. But that requires central government to develop a sound policy that equalises the playing field/market between family/independent hotels, AirBnB, and apart-hotels. My preference is to support the first of the three, have aparthotels away from the immediate city centre, and put in place massive restrictions on AirBnB so that it returns to the vision of residents letting out their homes for a few weeks a year to get additional income, rather than as a means for the asset rich to get richer at the expense of stable residential communities. (The number of people pulling wheelie suitcases around my neighbourhood and along main roads is a relatively recent phenomenon – in a part of town that previously had only a handful of family run hotels and guesthouses).
“What are the councillors likely to do?”
As things stand, vote the recommendations through. They have to. Also it’s very, very rare for such big reports to go through to committee and be rejected when the ruling party has got such a large majority. There may be amendments or caveats attached to it, or minuted commitments, but in the grand scheme of things their political hands are tied.
“Tied by…?”
Decisions by central government and legislation enacted by previous Parliaments that prevent local councils in economically overheating areas from raising revenues by taxing the bubbles and the wealth being generated here to pay for the essentials. Like properly resourced and functioning local public services.
Unless the finances are sorted out by central government and soon, the council will have to act because even if ministers approved an overhaul of local government nationally (as suggested by the MJ), that would take ***ages*** to implement
And mindful of the need to have an empowered and functional municipal government, given that we can’t have nice things in the historic centre, let’s build a new urban centre with new anchor institutions (I’ve suggested a new large concert hall, a new lifelong learning college, and a new city hall fed by a grand new railway station by the Airport)
Above – Hanover New Town Hall (circa 1913) – something similar to this would work for me – imagine stepping out of a railway station onto the equivalent of Parker’s Piece with a building like this on the opposite side, and with a lifelong learning college on the left side and a new large concert hall on the right hand side.
As I suggested in my earlier blogpost on a second urban centre, one architectural theme (to sort of match the ‘dreaming spires’ would take inspiration from Peck and Stephens’ unexecuted Guildhall proposal and have twin towers for each of the four buildings so as to break the boxes that are destroying the historical skyline.
Above – Peck and Stephens’ unexecuted masterpiece. While I have ***huge reservations*** on the ‘build beautiful’ campaigns which I wrote about here, I would like to see architects and developers *making the effort* to take inspiration from past designs from our local history.
I’ve made the point to every single architectural consultant at every public consultation I have been to over this – not on a ‘hard sell’ or a demanding way, but more as an introduction to our local history because almost all of the ones I have spoken to were not local, so the images I was showing them from books and printouts I have brought with me were new to them. (I wrote recently about designing out bland buildings here – not that I’d want wall-to-wall wedding cake baroque buildings surrounding such a new civic piece, but rather having the public buildings at the centre of each side in between more reserved rows of medium-density buildings)
An evolving vision for a growing city, adjusting for changing government policies
Back in 2021 I wrote about the case for a Great Cambridge Unitary Council underpinned by a light rail public transport network to link that council to the surrounding villages and towns – with devolution to those towns and villages set out here a couple of years later.
It can be done.
My hope is that this set of papers might be a spark to kick start the political conversations needed, and also a catalyst to speed up the rate at which more of the general public choose to get involved in shaping the future of our city, our county, and region.
Food for thought?
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The Cambridge Town Owl 