CONTENTS DIARY OF EVENTS - The Urban Design Group

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CASE STUDY Ox Pens to the West End Alex Cochrane describes the context to the latest proposals for this area of Oxford A new spatial framework for West Central Oxford signals an opportunity for a case history of the long quest for the ‘lost soul of the Oxford’, and Alex Cochrane of REAL is your guide. A legend tells of the foundation of the Christian city of Oxford. The fair Frideswide, chased by the Mercian King Algar, had fled to the pagan city of Oxenford in defence of her honour. Just as he was poised to ravish her, he was stuck down and blinded by a thunderbolt, leaving St Frideswide to remain chaste and in prayer in her priory on the site of modern day Christ Church. The area known as Oxpens is Oxford’s most historic urban quarter, and was for many centuries the very soul of the city. Named after the cattle pens that once flanked the River Thames, this ancient urban quarter has spent much of its long life stubbornly evading Oxford University’s insatiable hunger for land and property, and remains Oxford’s original city quarter. Long before the first university halls and colleges began to spring up on the high ground along today’s High Street, the city, with its churches and abbeys, was pitched determinedly toward the River Thames and its potential for commerce and trade. Around the time that young Frideswide was evading the keen attentions of King Algar, settlement was beginning to occur in the riverside parishes that came to be known as St Frideswide, Oseney, St Thomas’ and St Ebbes. As a hive of industrial activity from the Saxon period, the area survived fierce Danish river raids, a suffocating Norman occupation, and several long sieges during the Civil War in order to be primed for the Industrial Revolution. The river and its many creeks and streams were rapidly becoming built up into a shambling concoction of living streets. The forging of the Oxford Canal and London-Birmingham railway along the Thames corridor in the 19th century fortified the area’s role as Oxford’s foremost industrial district. By the start of the 20th century, the area was the oldest of many industrial quarters in inner city Oxford. Still dominated by industries that capitalised on the waterways and largely unassociated with the publishing and car manufacturing centres of Jericho and Cowley, the area had become home to a collection of working class communities gathered around the parish churches of St Thomas’ and St Ebbes. 34 | Urban Design | Spring 2005 | Issue 94 Photographs of the period show rows of Victorian By-Law housing, peppered with factories, churches, shopping streets, medieval churches, mills and inns. PHYSICAL RECONSTRUCTION Post war social reform brought with it proposals for comprehensive physical reconstruction and ‘slum clearance’ in the inner city. The peripheral estates of Blackbird Leys and Barton were planned as rehousing projects, and ambitious plans for the area were put forward. Thomas Sharp’s 1948 Oxford Replanned envisaged a modernist complex of austere seeming avenues across the west central area, and the Scott Wilson designs of 1968 proposed a comprehensive inner ring road that encircled the city centre, and in doing so both proposals laid low most of Oxpens and a healthy portion of Christ Church Meadow. Amongst other factors, it was fierce opposition by the university’s colleges, by now the city’s most powerful landowners, which meant many of the proposals for reconstruction in the north and east of the city never came to fruition. It was the Oxpens area, still largely independent of university influence that was singled out as the city’s ‘soft spot’ for change. Wholesale clearance of St Thomas’ and St Ebbes wove a blank canvas for the first section of the proposed inner ring road, which arrived in the form of Oxpens Road. The other flagship project of the period was the Westgate Centre; an austere, hulking internalised complex of multistorey car parks, shopping precincts and civic functions that effectively replaced the ancient and shambling high streets of St Thomas’ Street and St Ebbes Street. Coupled with this were pockets of low and mediumrise, estate-style housing projects on the sites of the old terraced streets. By the late 1980s the Oxpens area had undergone a profound and fundamental change, characterised by the tarmac swathe of the Oxpens corridor. As an urban motorway flanked by a loose collection of lowslung modernist pavilion buildings and multi-storey and surface car parks, the area bore scant resemblance to the tight, medieval streets that had been there for hundreds of years.
VISIONS... As the modernist dream of free flowing traffic and systems architecture revealed its drawbacks, new urbanism was beginning to influence the vision of the city planners. An approach to re-planning the area that favoured cars and delivery vehicles brought a substantial amount of land used for hard infrastructure, so that the whole area effectively became a barren service yard for the Westgate Centre. Pedestrian and cycle movement had become difficult, frustrating and wholly unpleasant. The city had recognised that a gravitational shift of activity toward the west was required to provide both a catalyst for regeneration, as well as a much needed boost to the city’s retail offer. The first bid for a design-led regeneration proposal was prepared by Oxford based Roger Evans Associates (REA) in 1999 which attempted to heal the scars. In studying the ancient quarter that lay underneath the area, REA proposed a dramatic change in built form and movement patterns to reflect the historic density, activity and grain of the lost parishes of St Thomas’ and St Ebbes, in a contemporary urban form. The ‘boulevarding’ of Oxpens Road was balanced by re-establishing linkages across the entire west of the city, creating a network of streets and squares, and revealing a web of hidden waterways. These proposals have formed the basis of the latest Area Development Framework prepared in 2004 by David Lock Associates (DLA). Building on fundamentals set out by REA, the masterplan proposes revealing the ancient and historic spine of the area as a key structuring element, taking in the Castle Mill Stream, Oxford Castle and Gaol. Coupled with this are strong street linkages through the area and blocks of high density mixed use development. DLA’s framework is met simultaneously with the significant and much chattered-about extension proposals put forward for the Westgate Centre. After a rocky time with a previous planning application, which met with fierce resistance on the grounds that it was perpetuating the problem the Westgate development had caused from day one, Allies & Morrison were employed to prepare a remodelling and expansion masterplan - to respond to both the requirement for an expansion in modern retail premises in the city, as well as to the growing dossier of Opposite page left Loggan’s map of Oxford, 1675 Opposite page right Proposals by Scott Wilson Kirkpatrick,1968 Above left The Westgate master plan; an attempt to begin a healing process in the urban form of Oxpens, Allies & Morrison Above right New framework for Oxpens, David Lock Associates Below Environmental contrasts in modern day Oxpens strategic urban design studies for Oxpens. Taking the opportunity to set the tone for change by remodelling and redesigning a few clangers left by the original Westgate designers, Allies & Morrison have coupled principles of robust urbanism with a contemporary architectural response, thereby matching glossy shopping mall style with real streets, strong links and a splash of city living. It should weigh heavy on the minds of Allies & Morrison that theirs is a role central to healing the scars of the past, and to giving some life and respect back to Oxford’s lost heartland. The possibility that the opportunity will be missed is an unsettling one. Once again, and with devastating irony, the Westgate Centre finds itself the ‘flagship for change’. ...AND DREAMS As plans for West Oxford come to a crescendo, Oxford Inspires has responded with a fascinating series of events to stimulate debate and awareness of the opportunities for change. ‘Oxford 2015’ will take place this summer and will include exhibitions and installations, conferences and seminars on visions for change in the city. See www.oxfordinspires. org. Alex Cochrane is a senior designer with REAL and a citizen of West Central Oxford. Urban Design | Spring 2005 | Issue 94 | 35 CASE STUDY
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