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Victoria Baths reopens, then shuts out

Victoria Leisure Centre has reopened to the public after its £9m refit. This is an occasion to celebrate the return of a key community facility to the area, but there are aspects of the design, particularly it's relationship to the new Sneinton Market Square, that are very poor indeed.

What makes this breathtakingly shoddy is that every single one of these faults was pointed out to the architects, Levitate, and their clients, Nottingham City Council, at pre-planning stage, yet each one has surfaced in the final scheme.

I've mentioned the benches... My question 'are they impossibly big steps or painful benches?' seems to have been answered by the addition of seat backs: "They're benches, now f**k off" is the message I'm getting. There's more than a whiff of afterthought about these, you get the sense that there are 15 backless metal bench seats in storage somewhere...

Worse is the obscuring of the glass into the pools at ground floor level. A fundamental design flaw in this project was placing the pool next to the public space (and there were alternative locations, by the way: the pre-existing large pool was ideally sited...). The architects claimed that the windows into the pool would animate the market square, the doubters pointed out that noone likes to parade around in their swimmers in a big public window, but especially not the people that this facility, as a community pool, should be aimed at (you know, the overweight, people with little kids, members of ethnic minorities would don't exercise because of fears about privacy....).

Sure enough, the windows have been obscured with wind-o-lene (classy touch) even before opening, so that they now resemble a shut up shop (see photos above showing night time views into the pools, before the centre opened). Expect this to become permanent and to extend up the glass, as early morning serious swimmers begin to complain about the glare off the water from the east facing glass wall... (yes, another flaw pointed out at pre-planning stage).

At an urban level, the obscuring if the glass all along the market square leaves a grand total of NO animating windows (that is, ground-floor openings showing activities within the building) along this edge of the square. Given that this was the problem with the original building in the site (and even that had ONE ground-floor opening to the square) this is at best a opportunity missed. It also contradicts the advice of the "Gehl Report"- the neighbourhood design plan commissioned to kick start the Sneinton market regeneration, and the Council's own Nottingham Urban Design Guide.

And yes, sadly this was also pointed out at pre-planning stage.

The main thrust of the 'Gehl Report' was to prioritise successful urban space over shiny new glory projects. It seems that no one was listening. I remember the look on one councillor's face when it was suggested to him that this was not the best location for a pool hall on the site. Devastated he muttered "but then we'll have to find another use for that side of Sneinton Market". Well, yes, if you want public spaces to work you do need to think about it.

Victoria Baths- wraps are off photo gallery

I rest my case- Sneinton Market Square designed for skateboards

Skateboarding banned from Sneinton skate park?

Ironic they banned skateboarding from Sneinton Market square, as the design seems a lot like the skate park in this video:

Hard wired for inaccessibility: Sneinton Market Square

All stainless steel and granite, Sneinton Market Square has clearly been built with longevity in mind. Which is a shame because we are going to be stuck with this flawed scheme for a long time.

The problem for me starts with the failure to recognise Sneinton Market Square as a place in its own right. Even the name is a botch job- an attempt was made to rebrand what has always been called Sneinton Market as Sneinton Square. As the Market Traders' website proclaims "Sneinton Market- it ain't square". Arguably, neither is it in Sneinton. So if it did happen to be square, it certainly wouldn't be Sneinton Square. The solution? Stick it all together to give Sneinton Market Square.

What was worrying the rebrand team was perhaps the idea that the space (square) would not be distinguished from the activity (market). But this goes far beyond the nomenclature- the project reveals a lack of understanding that the specific place is a unique combination of activities, buildings, roads, meanings, people.

This is manifested most clearly in the apparent belief that it would be fine to simply rip of the materials and detail of the 2007 Nottingham Old Market Square redevelopment, and apply them without understanding or interpretation to Sneinton Market. I was invited to the first public consultation for the Sneinton Market project, when the message from the locals was very clear - we do not want a doppleganger Old Market Square, Sneinton Market is a different kind of space and needs to have its own identity.

Patel Taylor Architects seemed to be responding well to this idea- presenting contextual analysis that identified the particular vistas, buildings and routes to which they were responding. It was all overly focussed on 'townscape' perhaps, underplayed the need for flexibility to accomodate different uses and stopped short of any binding ideas about identity (resorting to marking out an imaginary street pattern in the paving). But I came away with a belief that with further immersion in the area and the specificities of place-making for markets, PTA would be able to pull off a decent scheme.

So what went wrong? I suspect it might be related to the fact that my last sighting of the design team was of them strolling down Manvers Street to catch the London train, following that initial consultation. By the time I attended the next consultation (or rather, display of the plans that had been approved by (and I quote) "the Leader"), the city Highways Department were running the show.

Nice enough people, and highly competent at drawing up and specifying a scheme based on the Old Market Square example, but they had lost sight of even the basic townscape principles set out by PTA. They were instead enthusiastically setting about solving a number of health and safety issues created by the decision to appropriate the large step/seat arrangements of the Old Market Square and use them in places where actual steps or seats might have been more appropriate. I was assured that there would be hand rails to stop people falling, and textured paving to stop the visually impaired venturing onto bits of structure that might be dangerous.

I have no beef with the Old Market Square scheme, in fact I think it is an excellent piece of design and well executed. The difference is that the OMS design recognises that people behave in certain ways when walking across a public square, and responds accordingly. You can find yourself walking on to parts of the space that are technically seats, or fountains, but you have generally done this wittingly and are given a way out. On all approaches, the OMS opens out in a welcoming way and allows you to wander across it unimpeded. 

Not so at Sneinton Market Square. On approach from the city direction, you are faced by two sets of knee-high steps in dark granite, with a series of low granite blocks set on top. This difficult-to-scale stepped wall is far from welcoming, and you are forced to enter the space at either edge, past stainless steel bollards controlled presumably by the speaker phones set in to the nearby posts.

From the direction of Sneinton, a line of dark granite blocks, stainless steel bollards and litter bins appears unbroken and uninviting when viewed at the approach angle, only opening up when you come close to allow you to sidle through. Arriving from St Ann's, you will have to be careful to avoid ending up at the top of another set of over-scaled steps, forcing you to either hop down ungracefully or backtrack to level ground.

Observing the collection of brooding low dark granite blocks, and trying to understand them, two analogies came to mind. Firstly, the cubic concrete tank traps found along the east coast- there to defend a space from invasion by foreign forces. Then those hulking timber planters, wheeled out to block off pedestrianised streets and topped off with flowering annuals from the '..in Bloom' era. 

The Sneinton Market blocks lack the dramatic scale and material contextualism of the tank traps - which use the beach shingle on which they sit as concrete ballast. They also will be a good deal harder to shift when ideas change about how the space should be used than the erstwhile planters. But the basic idea is the same- the blocks have been placed in order to defend the space from vehicle access. I am afraid that someone, perhaps those nice Highways people, has become very afraid of what might happen if a car drives across the space without permission from the speaker phones.

It's a bizarre worry we have in this country that cars will go careening across pedestrian areas, scattering boxes of oranges, clucking chickens and trash cans, unless they are corraled by bomb-proof barriers. This fear has driven the designers to place these blocks, too high for steps, too unfriendly for benches, according to the principles of traffic defense rather than human experience.

Its a very poor starting point when trying to design a public space that should support a multitude of vibrant activities, inspire confidence in the future of the area, and in the words of the PTA website "create a sense of place".

Beachcasting

*When I say in action, I really mean, on the whole, inaction.

Three slightly less dull snaps.

Here are some shots from my rubbish little ipod touch camera. Thanks to my obsessive collecting of camera and image editing apps I can spend happy minutes trying to take not too crap snaps and make them look slightly less dull. Today's offerings mostly courtesy of 'slow shutter cam', 'camera +' and 'photogene', plus a supporting cast of thousands.

Ethereal leaves

Curious geese

Amazing end of September weather took me out to the local Colwick Lakes, with my 3-year-old, for a picnic. Naturally the Canada Geese took an interest.

Leaf chocks

What happens if you leave  your rusty Nissan parked up on a windy autumnal day.