FUTURE OF WINCHESTER: A STRATEGIC VISION
Appendix:Background
The City of Winchester Trust was founded in the 1950s (as The Winchester Preservation Trust) to defend the City against destruction, insensitive planning policies and inappropriate new architecture. Changes over the last half-century require a reassessment of the Trust's understanding and response to the future of the City. While planning will always aim to negotiate change for the benefit and improvement of the City, there are considerable differences between policies then and now which derive from very different attitudes and understandings about our physical environment and the values placed on its different aspects.
Four issues provide a focus to compare the differences between the 1950s and the present.
- The concept of what makes a good city.
- The values placed on the heritage of the past and confidence in the future.
- attitudes to cultural and architectural quality.
- The possibilities for achieving change.
In the 1950s, the traditional city was considered a failure; the new ideal was a garden city of towers in a landscape, the city of le Corbusier. Now the traditional city of streets and squares is again seen as the best model for the future. Then the past was to be swept away to make room for the new. Now the real need is to understand the best of the past and reinterpret what is relevant, so as to create an enriched future.
Then, quality was ephemeral and throwaway, culture was elitist, exclusive and perceived to be about art, opera and theatre, and architecture was tumbling into a chasm between a lost craft tradition and a clumsy modernity. Now, quality is expected, though not always achieved, and culture permeates every aspect of life from food to art. Architecture, the best of it, has rediscovered quality in well-crafted technology and once again plays a role in making the city. But the worst and the mediocre are still very evident and very likely to predominate if not resisted.
Since those days the pendulum has swung so far in favour of the past that the Winchester Preservation Trust has renamed itself the City of Winchester Trust, in order to remove any impression that preservation is its only aim. In the past the Trust focused mainly on responding to proposals as they arose. Growing pressure for large-scale redevelopment and the unhappy example of the Brooks has prompted the need to set out a policy that demands the highest standards, and encourages the City authorities to take seriously their responsibility for guiding development with real vision and understanding.