Castlepoint Shopping Centre car park, Castle Lane, Bournemouth. Design Specialist culture takes us backwards to pre-Victorian, primeval-chaos. I do not even LIKE confusing swirly flows. Detailed answers given here. Buses and bicycles (I use both) should not gobble lavish space from cars. The solution to the arty architect, and potty planner, problem lies in the East.
09h43-BST Tuesday 22 April 2008-CE
New things are supposed to be better than old things. The lessons are supposed to have been learned. We are supposed to be some steps further up the ladder. The body of expertise, in any given profession, is supposed to have been added to. But there is at least one location in Bournemouth, and one structure associated with it, that is clear evidence that, in fact, architects and planners, in this case, are not the clever modern whiz-kids we have a right to expect but, rather, useless yoyos and pathetic plonkers.
It is called the two-level car park at Castlepoint Shopping Centre. Before, there was the perfectly acceptable and useful Hampshire Shopping Centre. Cars got in and out of the car park with very little trouble at all. Now, the number of shops is increased, and parking is on two levels. But, soon after opening, a year or two ago, the place was shut down because problems were found in the concrete used in the building of the two-level car park. Props were put in and the place was opened again.
The underlying problem is the cult of the DESIGN SPECIALIST which permeates not only magazine art, interior decorating, and the graphics on the TV screen, but also architecture and planning. We are over-run with arty bozos that have zero education of any useful sort, zero common sense, and zero ability to grasp, or operate within, practical reality.
Looked at from above, as in looking down at a plan on the table, the Castlepoint Shopping Centre car park area is a pretty, swirly thing. Ever so award-winning material the typical arty bozo would coo in a voice choking with emotion. But what we are looking at, in real-world execution is an area with masses of wasted space.
In the lower level, pillars waste space. Further space is wasted in car-ramps to the upper level. There are two accesses to bus stops, one on the main Castle Lane road, and one on an unnecessary and ill-designed inside road, Hamblin Way. Cycle lanes that are not necessary (I speak as a cyclist) waste space. Buildings on Castle Lane, on the frontage of the site, waste space with their extravagant sprawling, and then have their own car parks wasting more space.
The upper level of the car park needs demolishing along with the car-ramps. The inner Hamblin Way road and all its lavish fiddly shrubbery and grassy bits needs incorporating into the (lower and only) car park, with the buses banished to their own lane and laybys in Castle Lane itself. The car park, using all the space, would be able to have long straight lines of spaces. Exits to the car park need to be given their own phase of traffic lights, unshared by other streams.
Most of the shops open onto an upper walk way. Steps and travelators to that level would remain, of course. They take up a minimal amount of space compared against the car-ramps.
On Saturday 19 April 2008, it was taking at least a fully hour for cars to get out. As James Morton of Daily Echo reported yesterday, one guy dropped in for a quick bit of shopping at 14h30 and did not finally get free onto Castle Lane until 17h00. I am prepared to compromise: Rather than shoot DESIGN SPECIALISTS in all their forms, as I would prefer be done, I am prepared to agree that they be dropped by parachute into the jungles of Borneo.
FIN 10h30
