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The debacle of Denmark Hill station

Denmarkhill

A few years ago I met the legendary designer John Maeda. "As social media links people and ideas together in unprecedented new ways, and as design tools become accessible to many", I asked him, "are we about to benefit from a world with a thousand times as many active designers?" "Great question!" he replied.

It's fair to say that very little design or engineering talent has been applied to my local station Denmark Hill since Queen Victoria was alive. I use this place a lot. It's the primary mass-transit feed to Kings College Hospital, one of London's most important hospitals, which is five minutes walk away. It's used for 3.1 million passenger journeys each year. So the equivalent of about a twentieth of the entire British population stumble through this little inner London railway station each year.

And stumble they must. Despite a refurbishment in the 1980s, it's been woefully inadequate for as long as most people can remember. All four rail platforms must be reached by steep wooden steps, all of which are in poor condition. Water pours through the roof during rain, directly onto these steps and all passengers are filtered through a narrow inner and outer doorway, via a 19th century booking hall. At peak times during the morning and evening, exacerbated by timetabling that means many of the half hourly train services arrive within minutes of each other, this Victorian grouping of steps gets badly overcrowded. Many of the users of the station are visiting hospital, so the demographic skew of passengers is towards the elderly or the physically impaired.

I wonder what the Victorian engineers who built the place would think about the reconstruction project that started to affect public access to the station this week.

Work is underway to provide much better access to the station - on paper the plans look great, or at least the reporting of them (plans are not easy to find online, nor made available at the station - if you find them let me know).

A lesson in poor design

Work has begun but the implementation hasn't been thought through. I'm particularly surprised by the lack of attention paid to access - the service experience for users - during the transition phase. It can only confuse passengers who use the station (many are occasional visitors, exacerbating this) and it provides even worse accessibility during the construction work, which seems expected to last about a year.

- On Wednesday the existing station access bridges and staircases, which have always channeled passengers through the booking hall, were closed. Now passengers use a temporary scaffolding-based bridge and network of staircases that is if anything more overcrowded than the old (deeply inadequate) arrangement.

- Passengers exit onto a side access road, Windsor Walk. However, this new entrance is very poorly signposted.

- Inexcusably, no Oyster card readers are installed at the new entrance, or on the platforms. London's Oyster card system requires all rail users to "touch in" and "touch out" on arrival and departure, and not doing so will lead to a daily cap fine being imposed of about £5 extra. Last night, in the warren-like confusion of the new exits, I completely forgot to touch out and had to call Oyster today to get my fine reversed. I am absolutely sure I'm not alone here.

- Now users are expected to walk right around the station into the old booking hall, to touch in or out after each journey, far from the new temporary entrance and exit. This imposition seems absolutely at odds with the project's goal, which is, a year from now, to provide dramatically improved accessibility.

- Communication about the changes is poor or non-existent. There are some basic posters but no detailed project plan is available online. Nor are progress updates being posted. I'm working with organisations who do far better updates building toilet blocks in Africa. There's a Wikipedia entry about the station and that would be a great place to link to formal plans and timelines. The lack of status updates reduces my confidence that the project is well-led. Or even led at all. I think the original Victorian designers would be amazed that with the advances in technology, we can't do better.

Some years ago I dipped once before into the planning of Camberwell's local infrastructure. A grim, vicious public meeting about the Camberwell Grove railway bridge (beautifully captured in all its misery by the Guardian's Peter Preston) left me disillusioned by the limited ambitions of those who are employed to improve London's public infrastructure.

As 21st century designers, we can do much better. Designing and redesigning stations is about more than just engineering work. Clearly, little thought has been applied to the interim needs and experience of the unique demographic that uses this station. There's an army of kids out there without jobs, and many have been trained in media, design and communication. With the right support, they could run rings around these efforts. Maybe, it's time we got them involved.

More about Mark Charmer here.

August 11, 2011 in Design, Designers, London, urban design | Permalink | Comments (3)

The trouble with eight-point plans

bikeshark.jpg

As a fair-weather cyclist - the kind that wonders why everyone else is in such a rush - I'm really at a loss with London's "coordinated" attempts to sort itself out as a great cycling city. Here's the latest campaign, to tackle theft:

LCC's eight-point campaign plan:

1. Creation of a police anti-theft squad A dedicated police team must tackle cycle theft, engaging in pro-active ‘stings’ to find persistent offenders and gangs.

2. Tougher action against selling stolen on websites Websites need tough rules on ID, and sellers must be made to provide real photos and frame numbers.

3. Code of practice for bike shops Bike shops must make proper checks on seller ID and bike provenance. A new code of practice will enable those that sign up to it to demonstrate their good standards.

4. Tougher action against street markets Well-known locations for selling stolen bikes such as Brick Lane market must be policed much more aggressively.

5. A central repository for recovered bikes A central location where people could recover stolen bikes would make it easier to unite owners with the large number of bikes that are recovered.

6. Regular stakeholder meetings Cyclists, police and politicians must meet regularly to ensure that cycle theft is given sufficiently high priority.

7. Increasing secure parking provision Thousands more secure cycle parking spaces need to be built for homes, estates, shops, educational institutions, workplaces and transport hubs.

8. Better education for cyclists Cyclists must be given sensible information to help them protect their bikes, such as registering the frame number online, buying insurance, and using strong locks. They also need tips on avoiding buying stolen bikes.

Why is secure parking for bikes item number 7? An eight-point plan is useless, unless it's set in order of priority. And right now secure infrastructure is item 7. First will come police squads, dealing with cyber crime, canvassing shops with codes of conduct, chasing market holders, building a database, meetings. Unless of course, this list isn't prioritised.

In the Netherlands the reality is that cycle theft is rampant, but most people ride cheap bikes and are used to it, albeit irritated. London's bike boom is a consumer boom as much as it's about getting around - people buying smart bikes and worrying about where to put them. There isn't really any good storage - in Dutch cities there are manned parking stations, there are safe places to park at work and there's plenty of places to hook your bike outside where you need to be. It's not perfect, but it's probably (quite seriously) a five million times better situation than we have in London.

The list, indeed the London Cycling Campaign site, smacks of lots of time spent in brainstorms, or on "advocacy", and no role to play in building infrastructure. The absolutely most important thing that matters if London is to be a great city to cycle in is that infrastructure is reprioritised towards bikes. Most crucially bikes must take priority over pedestrians and cars (which is basically the way it works in Holland - get out of my way, I'm on a bike).

Almost all the lessons we need are close by, in countries like Holland and Denmark. Indeed a study two weeks ago argued that Dutch children were the happiest in Europe - it's not measured, but I have no doubt that a contributing factor is that most cycle to school. Or ride to school with their parents.

Trying to define this stuff ourselves, how London should work as a cycling city, as some kind of exercise in original thought, is a bit like making your own nails to build a fence. Or building your own web browser to display web pages.

We need to gather the best practice lessons fast but step forward, onwards. We don't have the right infrastructure - pathways and storage - and if we're going to build it quickly, when there's no money around, we need to be smart. The London Cycling Campaign website could be about infrastructure and every decision should be visible. Every junction, pavement, post, ramp. Where are improvements planned? What do people want? Which companies are helping co-fund secure storage (in, for example, each office lobby)? Which council budgets, and which taxpayers, are paying for what? Instead we have people trying to change behaviour. In what sounds to me like meetings that will have intangible outcomes. Seven, in fact.

Related reading: If Lincoln Cathedral is architecture, what is a bicycle shed (by Joe Simpson) A lesson in business from the French (by Mark Charmer)

Mark Charmer is founder of The Movement Design Bureau, a think tank.

May 05, 2010 in Boris Johnson, Cities, Cycling, Design, London, Parking, Sustainability, urban design | Permalink | Comments (4)

Poundbury - an essay in how not to design a new town

Poundbury is Prince Charles' 'exemplar' urban environment, built on the edge of Dorset's county town, Dorchester - in the UK. It is held up in some planning and design circles as a template for how we should design future towns, and in other circles it is ridiculed. As some of our contacts have been discussing it online in the last few days, I thought it would be appropriate to publish my perspective, in the form of a re-worked extract from my 2008 Royal College of Art Thesis - "The future of the car in the city". The short essay follows:

Poundbury panorama1 3Above: Pounbury streetscape - as seen from the green

Introduction

“It resembled an ancient relative to whom one was very close as a child, but who lacked any understanding of the adult whom circumstances had in the interim formed, whether for better or worse.”

Alain De Botton’s withering description of Poundbury village – a recent extension to the town of Dorchester in Dorset, is typical of those made by both mainstream and architectural media following the opening of Prince Charles’s ‘model’ town.

For many it is purely the architectural form that proves to be Poundbury’s undoing, but the most interesting aspect of this place – and what makes it a worthwhile study, is its urban design principles and attitude towards the car - both in terms of the theories and ideologies its designers used, and in the physical manifestation of the place itself.

Background and history

Poundbury exists today primarily thanks to HRH Prince Charles – the Duchy of Cornwall. His views on architecture, and how in turn the architecture profession has received this, can be read elsewhere. What specifically interested me was that Poundbury’s “…entire masterplan was based upon placing the pedestrian, and not the car, at the centre of the design.” To understand the relevance of Poundbury when considering the relationship between urban environments and the car, it is necessary though, not to focus on Poundbury’s visionary Prince Charles, but Leon Krier – Charles’s masterplanner, and New Urbanist.

Krier’s book – ‘Architecture: choice or fate?’ – sets out the principles that form the basis of New Urbanist theory which he employs at Poundbury. Not a fan of large, modern, metropolitan cities – he argues that they develop in problematic ways – nor Suburban sprawl, Krier instead suggests a model of ‘the city within the city’. These are smaller urban villages, situated close to one another, yet that don’t physically connect. The intention is to “re-establish a precise dialectic between city and countryside.”

Poundbury embodies these ideals, situated approximately two kilometers from the heart of Dorchester town centre. In between the two is a less dense, greener, urban ‘strip’. The place is split into four quarters, being built in phases (currently only phases one and two have been completed). Each quarter comprises it’s own mini-centre - a square intended as a focal point, for people, rather than cars.

Poundbury sketch layout Above: Pounbury schematic layout in relation to Dorchester, as I see it

Experience

Yet visiting Poundbury and observing how people actually live there, reveals deep flaws in Krier and Charles’ model. Poundbury feels like a village that has not yet been through the industrial revolution – yet (paradoxically) it feels dominated by the car. The central squares are not ‘people’ places - they are car parks. The streets around them are deserted of both people and vehicles. Ultimately, you discover the cars have been shoved out of the way, into back alley muses containing nothing but garages, eating up acres of space. The result is that both streets and courtyards are devoid of life and feel soulless.

Walking through Poundbury is analogous to Jim Carey’s chatacter in the Truman show. Life feels somewhat fake. In part, this is unsurprising - The Truman show was based on and filmed in Seaside, Florida which was designed by the ‘fathers’ of New Urbanism – Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and a place which Krier speaks about enthusiastically in his book.

Ultimately, despite being planned as “…a high-density urban quarter of Dorchester which gives priority to people, rather than cars, and where commercial buildings are mixed with residential areas, shops and leisure facilities to create a walkable community”, Poundbury’s fails in three key areas, expanded upon below:

• Services

Richard Rogers argues that for a place to be truly ‘walkable’ one needs the ability to work, live, play, (by inference meet people, eat, shop, entertain and be entertained) within the same (1 mile or so?) area. Although Poundbury was developed as a mixed-use community, as one might expect, many of the people who live there do not work here, and vice-versa. Likewise, the keystone services and amenities taken for granted in cities and towns - the supermarket, cafes, bars, a cinema, restaurants, educational and academic institutions, gyms, theatres, a take-away, a library or bookshop – simply do not exist in Poundbury. Poundbury has a high end hi-fi store, three wedding and bridal shops, and a ‘Budgens’ mini-mart shop masquerading as “Poundbury Village Stores”. Bluntly, being denied the amenities modern people and modern life require, strangulates Poundbury.

• Accessibility

If the designers had truly wanted the residents of Poundbury to use their cars less, then would it not have been more pertinent to explore and create better links, pathways and services between two of the places which Poundbury residents might most frequently be predicted to need access – Dorchester and the nearby Tesco’s supermarket? The supermarket sits only 1.4 km away as the crow flies (fig.26), but there is no path, no route for pedestrians, or other vehicles - so almost everyone drives there, as the supermarket is just around the ring road. Dorchester itself is 1.6 km from Poundbury’s central square. These distances (around 1 mile), equate to around 20 minutes walking time - too great a distance and time to prevent time-pressed people from using their cars. Alternatives options to jumping in the car are needed, and they are notable by their absence.

Dorchester map Above: an annotated aerial view of Poundbury with key landmarks and POIs in Dorchester marked

• Parking and streetscape

This area is the one Poundbury comes closest to getting right. However, some short-sighted ideas, and odd implementation, create issues. Krier is right for suggesting, “The speed of vehicles should be controlled not by signs and technical gadgets (humps, traffic islands, crash barriers, traffic lights, etc.) but by civic and urban character of streets that is created by their geometric configuration, their profile, paving, planting, lighting, street furniture, and architecture.”

Yet somewhere between drawing board and physicality, things have gone wrong. Poundbury does feature narrow, winding streets with ‘dropped kerbs’ that seem to discourage cars drivers from traveling particularly quickly. At the same time however, its lack of real hierarchy and distinction in building types – and the apparent desire to completely remove street signage, or implement any technology – means that the place does, to use his words about certain other places “demonstrate [its] unique capacity to disorientate, confuse…” Poundbury isn’t readable; it isn’t legible to an outsider.

Parking is worse still. The overarching desire to maintain ‘order’ – for everything, including the car – and to be neat and tidy, seems to have created issues when it comes to dealing with where to put stationary vehicles, and how much space they are allowed. Vast parking mews at the rear of houses tends to keep vehicles off the main road, but the benefit of this is questionable. The garage mews take up enormous space in the areas behind houses, occupying huge tracts of land that in ‘real’ cities simply isn’t there. Squares and courtyards have no focus, no life, and where there is some focus like a shop, simply become car parks.

Garage Mews Above: one of the many garage mews, which take up acerages of space in Poundbury

If the intention was to put pedestrians (or even cyclists and other small vehicles) first, Poundbury might have looked at employing the incredibly successful ‘Woonerf’ system seen in Holland – which limit the space for cars on residential streets – and makes the street-spaces vibrant, safe environments in which children can - and do - play. Might it not have been better to move the cars out to two, maybe three main ‘areas’ on the edge of the development? But then this would raise the prospect of creating multi-story car parks, which Krier criticizes for little good reason, but at great length, in what he has written.

Conclusion

Poundbury is an interesting example of an attempt to build a new development in the early twenty-first century. Objectively, its failure is not down to the plain-to-see distaste for modern, nee modernist architecture which its facades embody, and for which it is most commonly criticised. Instead it is the failure to provide any vision or any excitement, about how the future of urban environments might be, and how people and vehicles might move around and share space, that disappoints most. Worryingly, for a place that is intended as a counterpoint to sprawl and overcoming car dependency, Poundbury provides little in the way of a blueprint for how things could be done.

It is also a lesson in why not to look at mobility as only being about cars, and why a creeping agenda of discouraging or limiting movement and mobility could be dangerous. Should others try to ape Poundbury’s developers, they too risk becoming preoccupied with trying to create well meaning solutions that don’t take into account the needs and desires of modern lives. One hope that if future developments try to counteract the car and its impact, they don’t forget about other forms of private mobility, which can complement or repurpose traditional cars. Sadly, for all the anti-car bluster, there is not a hint of a cycle lane, a bike park, a PRT system, a car-share scheme or a Segway to be found here.

An opportunity has been missed here, because of a refusal to embrace and experiment with new ideas, technologies, and products. This place could, and should have been an exemplar or a test bed in how we might live and move in the future. Instead, what best encapsulates the failures of Poundbury is this: its inhabitants appear condemned to a life on Dorchester’s ringroad, traveling to a big-box Tesco’s store, built on a greenfield site, in a car that weighs twenty times their weight, and typically has three empty seats.

One can only hope that those tasked with helping shape future towns and cities - both in the UK and abroad - who are now bussed to this place to ‘learn’ from it as some kind of example, recognise its failures and don’t condemn the inhabitants of their future towns to the same fate.

Published by Joseph Simpson on 17th February 2010

Some notes and information on this piece:

This piece is an adaptation from part of Joseph Simpson's Thesis "The future of the car in the city" - Royal College of Art, June 2008. A full set of references for this piece are available on request, but are not included here in our usual hyperlink fashion as they mainly refer to offline sources.

The piece is not creative commons licensed in the way our usual pieces are, as it is sibject to some copy right from The Royal College of Art. Please contact me if you would like to use or reference it so that I can grant permission. A copy of the original piece in pdf format is available on request.

Joseph Simpson visited Poundbury in October 2007

February 17, 2010 in architecture, Cities, Design, Leon Krier, Observations, Parking, Poundbury, Prince Charles, Sustainability, urban design | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

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