Can Cambridge City Council ask the other applicants for permission to publish their bids and/or invite the applicants to publish their competing alternative bids?
You can see 5th Studio’s thread here
Above – 5th Studio Cambridge, Nov 2024 – vision for Cambridge Market Square outside The Guildhall
***Crikey that’s an improvement***
But that’s hardly a stretch target. It’s just slabs – not a grand civic square with a Graz-Style wedding cake of a city hall sheltering it from the hot sun.
Above – what I want for Market Square in time for Florence Ada Keynes’ mayoral centenary for 2032
The broad principles
The toughest part for me has been trying to think how the three sites can be greater than the sum of their parts. Ditto bringing in other parts of the area into that vision. This is something that 5th Studio looked at.
Above – 5th Studio November 2024
A shared entrance for the Guildhall’s large hall and Corn Exchange
It was one of those: “Why didn’t anyone think of this before?” moments – and one that also shows just how limited the selected vision from the consultants actually is.
Above – ‘I want that one!’ – by 5th Studio, November 2024
How you make the whole thing work in practice is one for the interior designers. There is a wider urban design issue as The Arts Theatre would need an alternative route for theatre supply lorries to get in and out. (One option might involve extending the underground basement area for deliveries to the Grand Arcade and Lion Yard out towards the Arts Cinema – but the costs would be prohibitive).
That is unless people wanted to go the whole way and bring in the Cambridge Connect Light Rail Underground and have a city centre terminus that would result in the demolition of the Lion Yard Car Park. Which is do-able. A replacement hotel for ‘Barbie’s Hotel’ on Downing Street could fill the void above it, and the existing hotel demolished to make way for an open square looking onto the Sedgwick Museum buildings
Above – a detail of a photo I took of the Edwardian museums’ building that King Edward VII & Queen Alexandra opened on a visit to Cambridge. (I’m assuming the now long lost buildings/sites of Alexandra Street, House, and Hall – demolished in the 1970s revamp, were named after her when she was Princess of Wales).
The Corn Exchange with trendy bar included
Works for me – especially if it could generate far more revenue than the existing site as a venue.
Above – 5th Studio November 2024
As things are, the existing foyer and facilities are wasted spaces that could be made far better use of during the day. Between 9am-6pm unless the bar is being used for conferencing events, it’s effectively closed. During gigs there are only short windows when it is jam-packed – i.e. the hour before the event, the interval, and maybe half an hour after it. For a large redevelopment project, I would incorporate into the project acquiring a couple of the buildings on the other side of Parson’s Court to expand the additional changing room, back office, storage, and additional entrance space.
Let 5th Studio know what you think!
They’ve invited you. See also their website at https://www.5thstudio.co.uk/
The proposals inevitably do not deal with the need for a second urban centre in the face of the Housing Minister’s ambition for our city.
Back in Sept 2024 I wrote that Cambridge needed a second urban centre, and concluded that a new City Hall (for a grand municipal council with far greater powers and responsibilities), a lifelong learning college, new railway station, and new large concert hall would be needed to anchor it. (See my blogpost here). Six weeks later, the Minister for Housing Matthew Pennycook posed what I called ‘The John Parry Lewis Question‘ to Peter Freeman, the Chair of the Cambridge Growth Company. The question was where to locate a second urban centre just as JPL had proposed with his idea to double Cambridge’s population in the early 1970s from around 100,000 to 200,000 by the Millennium. (Councillors threw it out and we’ve been squabbling ever since!)
The Devolution White Paper is looming – maybe we’ll get more updates on Cambridge’s future in the next few weeks.
Food for thought?
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Below: Opening this next month (there have been a few delays) : The Cambridge Room. Let’s talk about the future of our city – design and built environment included
The Cambridge Town Owl 