Towards a Plan for Winchester - Trust Annual Report 1996
In 1994 John Gummer launched a discussions document called "Quality in Town and Country" promoting the idea that quality in urban design was a wise investment. This was followed in 1995 by the Urban Design Initiatives from DOE which invited local partnership groups to apply for funding to prepare proposals for specific sites which would later be exhibited. Winchester was unsuccessful, but wishing to build on the interest of the Central Hampshire branch of the RIBA and the Trust, Simon Birch, Chief Planning Officer, formed a steering group to consider ways forward. The outcome was to organise a wide range of individuals from various community groups to participate in a study of the area bounded by Friarsgate and The Broadway. Some forty people were actively involved in two well organised workshop days held on 30th March and 22nd June. The Trust was represented by ten members on both occasions.
On the first day, small groups developed broad ideas for specific sites or strategic approaches to the area and on the second the intention was to focus on more tangible proposals but quite detailed schemes produced on the first day were not progressed on the second, when discussion tended to go over the same problem - traffic. It dominated discussion, with many warnings about responding only in a negative way by removing traffic, without also planning positively for all the still necessary forms of movement into the centre and its consequences on the form of the centre itself.
Public participation in the making and continuing development of the City is fundamentally important but it is no substitute for an informed and carefully considered plan setting out criteria and guidelines for development before it happens.
The Local Plan speaks in general terms of limiting offices, encouraging housing, conserving the historic parts of the City and with other policies aiming to reduce traffic and increase bus use. There is, however, no description of the physical plan, no hint about change being grasped as a positive aim, no idea of what the city should aim to become. During the workshops, the absence of a tangible plan or frame of reference for traffic and transport for city streets and public places made it very difficult to progress an idea about particular sites, such as the bus station or Broadway, without always coming back to ask very basic questions about policies which do not exist.
These workshops did not provide answers. Some ideas will provoke thought, but more importantly the workshops created a meeting ground where public and planner, professionals and politicians, sat round a table on more or less equal terms. This is a form of public participation which could be more productive and useful for consideration of some of the more crucial decisions which are facing the City providing the necessary policy thinking can be made available.
A door was opened to possibilities but it also revealed, to a very public forum, the desper¬ate need for the City to develop a plan based on defined aims and backed by policy.