Deja Bayview

Q Why is our evening paper called The Echo?

A. Because we’ve heard it all before

In tonight’s South Wales Echo is the revelation of a masterplan which will connect the city centre with its waterfront. Given that this was a primary objective of the Cardiff Bay Development Corporation (CBDC) which received £500m in grant aid from the Welsh Office and Assembly someone may perhaps need to revisit the Auditor General for Wales’ report of June 2001. "Securing the Future of Cardiff Bay"? Both Lloyd George Avenue and Callaghan Square, constructed by CBDC under a Private Sector Initiative scheme are identified as areas for development in the new masterplan. The Western Mail reported on 7 September 2011 the Welsh Government revelation that the full cost of the PFI scheme, including its 25 year payback period, would be £188.8 million.

The default setting of the present Welsh Government is, if course, that everything is someone else’s fault but it is understood that they may have become stakeholders in part of this proposed new development. That will be worth investigating further.

It is also interesting to note that the new proposals include a light rail transport system connecting the city centre and Bay. That was an integral part of the original proposal for the, then, Bute Avenue project proposed by CBDC and designed by MBM Architects of Barcelona fame but that element failed to secure funding. The ‘Great Wall of Butetown’ presented by the existing railway embankment thus remained to separate the indigenous residents from new development. Critiques of the much diluted outcomes may be found in several editions of the Royal Society of Architects in Wales journal ,Touchstone, and Capital Cardiff edited by John Punter and Alan Hooper published in 2006.

There is probably consensus that both Callaghan Square and Lloyd George Avenue are nowhere near as good as was originally intended they should be. The question we now face is whether they will be any better? Both these and the several other key areas identified in Cardiff Councils green paper Rebuilding Momentum must be the subject of close scrutiny and wide debate if we are to avoid a repetition of past mistakes. We must also avoid the assumption that such mistakes may be attributed to the long defunct Development Corporation.  Some of us clearly have longer memories than others and will recall the Atlantic Wharf development, a predecessor of the larger Cardiff Bay redevelopment. As I recall, credit for that was claimed by an individual now associated with its proposed redevelopment.  That may allay any suggestion that the almost explicit criticism of CBDCs developments in the green paper evidences some personal score settling on a grand scale

The green paper may of course be just another piece of wishful thinking on the part of the City Council, a bit of optimistic flag waving in the depths of a serious recession in the property market. I have so far successfully avoided the use of the dread word ‘regeneration’ but at first blush their green paper has some of the thumbprints – or all- pervading smell of bullshit- that marks it as the cliché ridden output of ‘regeneration experts’.  Instead of ‘continental style boulevards lined with restaurants and cafes’ we now have ‘significant public squares’ and ‘high density Scandinavian-style living’. Should we assume that the latter will happen if and when the current low density occupation of unoccupied apartments in Cardiff Bay has been absorbed by a much improved property market?

Within the proposals is another interesting suggestion which is to extend the pedestrianisation of St Mary Street to Callaghan Square. Students at the Welsh School of Architecture proposed this as an outcome of a design charrette held there to look at an alternative to the traffic hub that Bute/ Callaghan Square would inevitably become. Their solution was perhaps even more radical than that now proposed in treating Mill Lane (the Café Quarter, remember?) and what is now Callaghan Square as a whole - a large urban square with an elevated railway running across it and some buildings in it. Despite the dreadful Marriott Hotel building there were, then, a number of interesting buildings which had not yet been the subject of compulsory purchase and demolition or arson. It would have been an altogether more interesting place than the central business district now proposed.

Again, we have heard it all before but back then no-one was listening. Their ears were clogged up with the bullshit of ‘urban regeneration’ and we should not let that happen again. We need to make urbanism an electoral issue in Wales.

More will follow as these plans are revealed further………

 

The paper is open for a six week public consultation from Friday. Views can be submitted from Friday at www.cardiff.gov.uk/rebuildingmomentum