Once upon a time, Leeds had trams, lots of them. They helped people get to work, come to the centre to shops and to meet each other for work and play. But then, catastrophically, for the city's long term future and prosperity in 1959.... ... this extensive system was dismantled and ripped out of the ground, the trams scrapped or left to rust. So great was planners', architects' and the city council's confidence that the city of the future would be, as Le Corbusier had taught, a...

This is where London stopped.

Stand outside 48 Cavendish Road, Barnet, spin around & you see English countryside to your north & inter-war suburbia to your south. This is where …

… London’s ever outward expansion near continuous since the 1660s was finally halted first by …

Why are so many of our streets spoilt by ugly & unnecessary phone boxes. Our latest report #BoxBlight tells the story of why, explains how we can stop it & caused a stir. Why?

The full report is here👇but first here's the story of why we have the phone boxes we have & the key takeaways from dozens of conversations with lawyers, planners & councillors. A 🧵.... (1/?)

createstreets.com/projects/box-b… ..First up, we no longer need many phone boxes. Calls from phone boxes have declined 99.5% from 800 million minutes in 2002 to only 4 million in 2021-22 due to these things...

#StreetScar We’ve all seen this: the freshly laid paving, newly laid granite setts or Yorkstones lovingly laid on a slow street or in front of a freshly repaired parade of shops. Within months, weeks or, sometimes days, a slice or a square of them are pulled up thoughtlessly...

📸@stabiloFFC
..cracked, smashed or, worse, thrown needlessly away and replaced by a scar of tarmac , a scar which lingers for months or years or forever and which seems to laugh at any local or neighbourhood desire to live in a place with self-worth...

📸@WorcesterCivic & Timothy Evans

At present most British people assume that new development will make old places worse? Only 2% trust developers. One aim for the newly proposed #CambrigeQuarter, alongside creating new homes and supporting UK productivity must be to change that for the next 100 years. But how? .. well @michaelgove invited us to "imagine a major new quarter for the city, built in a way that is in-keeping with the beauty of the historic centre" So we have...

Has @HighwaysSurrey cracked the formula to creating healthy streets? We think they might just be on the right path

People want healthy streets. They want streets that are welcoming. Streets that are safe. And streets that are attractive for all to use & enjoy.... https://t.co/P2klhNsvQxtwitter.com/i/web/status/1…
But beyond hyperbole how can we ensure this happens in every street time & time again without fail.

The answer may be a Street Design Code… and for the first time ever, its all available online…

#JaneJacobsWasAJedi

In honour of the happy elision of #JaneJacobsDay and #MayThe4thBeWithYou here is Jane Jacobs during her period on the Jedi Council. As is well known.... ... she battled Sith Lord DarthMoses about the routing of new dual airway skyways through city centre Coruscant ....

A few yards and 50 years apart. Two approaches to designing a high street in Leicester right next to each other.

The collapse in civic pride, ambition & delivery is profound and goes far beyond changing technology or economic pressures. Leicester city centre seems to specialise in dramatic changes in facade quality from the polite to the delinquent. The city is doing great things on movement & active travel but most buildings from last 50 years are woeful. #BeautyAndTheBeast

A little bit of West London in Düsseldorf. Perhaps a bit idiosyncratic but a clever response to mature plane trees. And with clever evolution of the pattern from … … the penthouses in place of mansards on the top storey to …

Ever heard of Toulouse as a city centre whose improved street design is revolutionising local prosperity?

It’s not normally lauded as a case study. But quality of the street design is staggering. The results are stunning. Literally no empty shops in town centre. How? A short 🧵 Well, it has to be admitted, they have a trick up their sleeve: the city centre’s buildings are almost uniformly beautiful, largely unscarred by war or traffic-modernism. Many …

The first half of this is clearly right. The second half misses the category we made in the C20th. Put simply, you cannot have infinitely free moving cars throughout a town centre without destroying the agglomeration & prosperity effects that create the town in the first place.

https://twitter.com/johnredwood/status/1565934815010066432

“Category error” not “category” !

Small rural towns will always need parking but this need not ruin their squares with a judicious use of fine setts, street trees & urban re-greening to frame & control the parking … … similarly it is possible to permit passing traffic whilst using street trees & at grade carriageways and pavements to demonstrate very clearly that “humans come first”…

There are many paths to meeting our housing needs but one of them surely runs through South Tottenham. Our new paper, Learning from History - published today, by @bswud tells an important story …

createstreets.com/wp-content/upl… … South Tottenham is one of the centres of Britain’s thriving Haredi community who tend to have large families & need to be within about 1km of their synagogue on the Sabbath. This put huge pressure on housing …

Many rightly extol virtues of Dutch improvements in street design but many French streets have improved hugely over last 15yrs. Here’s an almost random small town (Vallency) example with street trees elegantly narrowing carriageway & rendering whole street humane & safe … … trees contain parked cars & level carriageway & pavements are neatly distinguished by shallow & well designed stone gutters. The street does not ban cars but it’s a people-first place with …

Temple Bar, Fleet Street.

London historically was rather better managed than we give it credit for. With proper pavements since the 1760s (reportedly English & Scottish construction teams raced each other to see who could build more quickly) ... ... protruding signs were also banned on Fleet Street between the 1st & 2nd images. They could be dangerous. For eg in December 1718, a Fleet Street signboard gave way, fell down &, bringing the house down with it, killed four people including the Queen’s jeweller.

The world we have lost.

The C17th “Dutch House” stood on the corner of Bristol’s High Street & Broad St. Saved by the Lord Mayor from traffic engineers in 1900, it was badly damaged but not destroyed by bombs on 24 Nov 1940. It was needlessly demolished 3 days later. The World we have lost.

The sturdy Greek Doric of the Albion Congregational Church, Hull.

Gutted by firebombs in 1941, the shell remained intact, the building recoverable. It was demolished post-war.

"Good fences really to make good neighbours" @melyork from @TimesProperty @ @TheSTHome covers our #LivingWithLockdown survey. You can....

thetimes.co.uk/article/would-… ... read the full report here. Findings included

✅We came together during lockdown. People knowing >6 neighbours increased 29 to 37%

createstreets.com/wp-content/upl…

One of London's least known but most telling seventeenth century monuments is York Water Gate now rather sadly stranded below lawn-level in Thames Embankment Gardens. What is it doing there? In fact it is one of the last remaining clues not just to the original line of the (once much wider) Thames but also to the Palaces that ran down from the Strand to the River.

York House was built 1st for the Bishop of Norwich before being transferred to the Archbishop of York.

Very welcome support (£175m) for walking & cycling which is a) firmly based on community consultation & b) requires ongoing monitoring .... gov.uk/government/new… “Evaluation of early School Streets projects has shown traffic outside schools has reduced on average by 68%, children cycling to school has increased by 51% and harmful vehicle pollution outside schools is down by almost three quarters”

Why does utility preclude beauty? By Paris

A market ... (Les Halles)... ... a Parisian street kiosk ...

Alexander Hamilton talked of an “enthusiasm in liberty” that turned men into heroes.

Yesterday, ordinary Londoners, ran “into the fire” to save others.

As our quiet tribute to the heroes of London Bridge, here’s Claude de Jongh’s little known painting of London Bridge in 1650. This is the “Old London Bridge” which was erected in 1209 and not demolished until 1831 but its location, its importance as a place of crossing the tidal Thames is the very maw of London’s history - only a few yards from the Roman bridge which sited the city.