C O N T E X T 1 7 1 : M A R C H 2 0 2 2 21 CHANGE ON THE HIGH STREET CLIVE FLETCHER From the ruins of Nottingham Broadmarsh When the pandemic drove the city council’s development partner into administration, the city was left with a vast wreck – and an opportunity. The ruins of Nottingham’s Broadmarsh Shopping Centre resemble a film set for a post-apocalyptic world. The sight of it is truly shocking, but its history reflects the tragedy of so much urban redevelopment during the post-war period. The themes it encompasses are all too familiar: the replacement of treasured townscape with characterless, poor modern buildings and multi-lane highways; the subsequent realisation of what has been lost; and the failure of that townscape to provide for the needs of the present.What makes the Broadmarsh saga different is that Nottingham is now in the unique position of (potentially) being able to undo the damage. This can be put down to the coincidence of several factors. The crisis in the high street had weakened the resilience of retail operators, but a massive programme of capital works to modify the Broadmarsh Centre was nevertheless under way. It was just finishing its limited demolition phase when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, halting works and driving Intu, the city council’s development partner, into administration. The council was left as the sole owner of a vast wreck. In these days of urban living and cafe culture, it is easy to forget the parlous state that UK towns and cities had fallen into in the post-war years, and to regard the modern-day crisis in the high street as an existential threat to city life without modern precedent. Our cities are, however, about more than retail. As many will recall, when the Urban Task Force published Towards an Urban Renaissance in 1999, city centres were struggling across an array of measures – the most marked of which was that people had increasingly chosen not to live in them. Since that time most UK cities have enjoyed a rebirth, with vacant historic buildings converted to offices and flats, roads tamed with pedestrianoriented public realm and vacant sites redeveloped for mixed uses. What has proven more difficult to tackle are the larger rents in the fabric: the shopping malls and urban motorways that were meant to herald a new way of living, illustrated so starkly in Sir Colin Buchanan’s 1963 report Traffic in Towns. The Broadmarsh Shopping Centre was constructed by the city council with Town and City Properties. Designed by Turner Lansdown Holt and Partners, it covered around 30,000 square metres. It has been a drag on the city’s aspirations almost since it was opened in 1972. Replacing a dense pattern of streets that straddled the famous Lace Market Cliff, it reduced the dramatic change in levels to an anodyne escalator ride. Regarded as poor even at the time of its opening, it was flanked on three sides by new multi-lane roads. Perhaps themost remarkable of its shortcomings was the face it presented to the south (the main A view south from inside the ruined shopping centre (Photo: Historic England)
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