Category Public Space
Testing Shared Space in Poynton
The final nominee in the Academy of Urbanism‘s Great Street category is Park Lane in Poynton. Located on the the busy A523 between Macclesfield and Stockport, it was Poynton Town Council’s adoption of a radical approach to dealing with this problem that resulted in it being short listed. Rejecting calls for a bypass, pedestrianisation or speed […]
‘The ideal of walkable urbanism’
The second high street on the Academy of Urbanism’s short list for ‘Great Street 2014’ is North Street in Bristol is located south of the river and the city centre in Southville. Originally an industrial district, accommodating a coal mine and large warehouses for the tobacco industry, and small terraced houses for workers in […]
10 things I love about Sydney (that you won’t find in your guidebooks)*
1. Food! From bill granger (always lower case) to Kylie Kwong, Neil Perry to Matt Moran, Australia is obsessed with food, its provenance and those who create. This is not a passing fad, this is a long standing national obsession. From celebrity chefs from all corners of the world to the expansive fish market in […]
Open door policy
On Wednesday I spent the afternoon with fellow Academicians from the Academy of Urbanism at Cockpit Arts and on Lamb’s Conduit Street in Camden. The street is the first of three short listed for The Great Street Award to be assessed, with Bristol’s North Street next week and Poynton High Street the week after. Named after William Lamb who, […]
Olympic Transport: Learning from the Past
Moving around a host city during the Olympic Games period is a tortuous process. With the sudden influx of large numbers of visitors, any transport system that operates reasonably well under normal conditions is placed under tremendous strain during such events. It is no surprise then, that host cities include transport infrastructure upgrades in their bid proposals […]
A Not So Short Trip to Sydney
On Boxing Day, after a week of wondering whether any flights would leave and a couple of months allaying concerns regarding engines falling off, I boarded an A380 headed to Sydney. I’m pleased to say that the engines remained attached! I’d spent several years living in Sydney before returning to the UK four and a […]
Quick Trip to Bath Part I
It is impossible to stroll around Bath (the city not the tub) without drooling over the sandstone, the proportions of the buildings and some magnificent trees, without wishing that you lived there. Or at least I can’t…. On the down side the city has a nightmarish one way system (and the genie in my sat […]
Bondi the Beautiful: Constructing an Icon
There are something like seventy beaches within using distance of Sydney… All of them attract their quota of sun-worshippers and paddlers and swimmers, who pleasure themselves on these sands without let or hindrance, because every beach is dogmatically public property in this country, the place, as many have remarked, where Australian democracy visibly functions most […]
On Urban Green Space
The influence of the forms and actions in nature is so needful to man, that, in its lowest functions, it seems to lie on the confines of commodity and beauty. To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney […]
Kat Martindale 
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