Will Dyson, Director of Placemaking, Culture Mile Business Improvement District, City of London, presents at the first community event organised by the BID on July 18 2024.

Update: the BID has published the slides used by Will Dyson here.

There was no official recording, and the lack of a sound system made hearing difficult (for me anyway) so I shot this on my phone and transcribed to provide some reference. See also video and transcript of presentation by Sarah Baker on community engagement.

• Feedback and ideas from the event
  
• No community forum for City’s Culture Mile area - analysis of the presentation on community engagement
• All Culture Mile Blog posts

Below is an uncorrected summary and transcript generated by the Notta AI app. I'll invite the BID team to edit, if they wish.

Will emphasised that the study team would value input to their work:

“I think we're at the point now in our engagement where we have set some sort of priority locations within the area, and we really want to hear some suggestions from people about what might improve those priorities.

“So you see one of the boards has the map set out which I'll show you shortly around the kind of priority locations that we've identified. We'd really love to hear your thoughts around what you feel the challenges are and also the opportunities, what might improve those areas”.

However, it wasn't clear how residents could provide that input. A community forum would be one method, but as Sarah Baker made clear in another presentation, that will amount to two meeting a year.

• The City Corporation recently released an update to their plans for public realm improvements in Smithfield.
• New vision for City’s Culture Mile raises issues of accountability - also provides reference back to the 2018 “Look and Feel” strategy for the area

The following uncorrected summary and transcript generated by the Notta AI app.

The meeting discussed the Cultural Mile Bid's placemaking strategy and public realm strategy for the area. The key objectives were to create inspiring and engaging public spaces that work for everyone, establish a strong identity, attract investment, and support growth and vitality. The strategy involved analyzing the current state, conducting public engagement, identifying priority areas, and developing a vision and recommendations. The priority areas included the Barbican Station exit, Smithfield/Museum area, Barbican development sites, Guildhall back streets, and St. Giles' Cripplegate Church area. The strategy aimed to address challenges like mobility, wayfinding, and enhancing the sense of place through interventions such as pedestrian-friendly improvements, celebrating heritage, and enhancing green spaces.

The speaker introduced the concept of placemaking, which focuses on creating inspiring and engaging public spaces that work for everyone, whether living, visiting, or working in the area. The Cultural Mile Bid decided to create a placemaking strategy and public realm strategy to inform their work.

The Cultural Mile Bid appointed Steer and AR Urbanism, experienced in placemaking, and Authentic Futures, heritage consultants, to deliver the strategy. The brief was developed in collaboration with the City of London Corporation, as much of the work involves public spaces under their responsibility.

The overall aim of the strategy was to analyze the current state of public spaces, create a strong identity for the area, attract investment, and support the area's growth and vitality. The output would be a vision and strategy, not a detailed master plan, but a starting point for conversations and potential interventions.

The process involved an initial context and condition appraisal, analyzing how the area functions, movement patterns, and existing projects. Public engagement was conducted through surveys and stakeholder consultations. Based on the analysis and engagement, priority areas were identified, and a spatial strategy was developed.

The identified priority areas included the Barbican Station exit and Aldersgate/Goswell Road junction, the Smithfield/Museum area, the Barbican development sites, the Guildhall back streets, and the St. Giles' Cripplegate Church area. The aim was to address challenges like mobility, wayfinding, and enhancing the sense of place in these areas.

1. 00:11:23 Develop interventions and recommendations for the priority areas, such as pedestrian-friendly improvements, celebrating heritage, and enhancing green spaces.
2. 00:03:25 Continue engaging with stakeholders, including the City of London Corporation, TfL, GLA, and local businesses, to gather feedback and drive the work forward.
3. 00:03:37 Use the strategy document to engage with key stakeholders and attract investment for implementing the proposed projects.
4. 00:03:08 Address challenges identified in the analysis, such as improving mobility, wayfinding, and enhancing the sense of place in the priority areas.

For those I haven't met before, I am Director of Placemaking at the Cultural Mile Bid. We said we were going to use jargon, but placemaking is probably the biggest bit of jargon. When we talk about placemaking, what do we actually mean?

So really, this area of work is building on a lot of what Caroline and Sarah talked about in terms of creating this sense of place. And what we're thinking about is the public space, the actual physical spaces around our area.

How do we create this kind of inspiring, engaging spaces that work for everyone in the area? Whether you're living, visiting, working in the area. What are the kind of things that we can do to help improve that?

So as a priority for our businesses and for our board in particular, we took a step back and decided that what we needed to do is to create a placemaking strategy and a public ground strategy that kind of helped to inform a lot of the work that we're doing.

So about eight months ago, we set about appointing a piece of work, which is a fairly significant investment for us. It's something that we feel is a really important strand to the work that we're doing as a bid.

So we appointed Steer and AR Urbanism, who are very experienced in the world of playground and placemaking. We have Julie here from Steer with us today. And they partnered with Authentic Futures, who are heritage consultants.

We felt that this mix of different disciplines was really important. It's about how do we get the sort of feasibility side of it right in terms of some of the boring stuff around transport and that kind of thing.

And then also, how do we bring in some of the really important aspects of heritage culture? How do we bring those kind of different placemaking elements to the table? So we appointed the team to deliver this piece of work.

The brief was developed in collaboration with the Corporation. We're very conscious that a lot of the work we're doing is around public space. It's around the public ground that the Corporation are responsible for.

We see our role as very collaborative with them in delivering a lot of these projects. The overall aim of the structure that we're developing. So first of all, it's around public ground improvement. So how does it sort of function?

as an area? What do we have here? An analysis of the state of play currently. How do we create that kind of strong identity for the area? And that's for everyone. So whether you work in the area, you live here, or you're visiting, what does this area mean to people?

What does it represent? We're trained and attract investment, and we know that as an area of the city of London, that's very important, and it's important for everyone in the area too. So how do we make this area an attractive space for a variety of different sectors?

And ultimately support the area's growth and vitality, which is something I'm sure we can all agree is something that we'd love to see for the area. The output of that is a really strong vision and strategy.

This is the start of the conversation. It's not a master plan. It's not going to go into the level of detail on suggesting particular interventions that are kind of drawn up in a lot of detail. It's suggesting from the analysis and the engagement you've done, what could the art of the possible be?

What could we start to have those conversations about with the corporation, with other authorities, and with local businesses? stakeholders as well. The proposed projects will also look to address some of the kind of challenges that come through in our analysis.

I think we can also agree that there are parts of the area that are not perfect and there are parts that are crying out for someone to sort of understand what can be done here. So we really see that as a really kind of driver for the project and it's a way that we can then use that document to engage with key stakeholders.

So you know the city, TFL, the GLA and other different partners. This is a really important document for us to be able to use our investment and the priorities being established and drive that work forward.

To give you an overview of the timeline of which the eagle -eyed line you own on the note that it's already slipped but this is the original timeline. So it's a huge piece of work. We started this back in October and we've gone through a number of phases.

The important thing for us was the initial context and condition appraisal. What we mean by that is actually just understanding what we already have in the area. How does this area function? How does it move?

How do people use space? So you'll see we've got some boards here with some of the results of that analysis. This hasn't been published anywhere yet. This is all part of press so you'll be able to see some of the results of the engagement that you've done as well as the analysis work.

A lot of that, I mean there's a huge amount more than on the board there but we probably would fill this our church. With some of the movement strategy work, some of the analysis around footfall, some of the analysis on station exits and how people use the area which is obviously really important for understanding where are the really key public spaces that are understraining currently.

The visioning piece of work. So based on all of this engagement analysis we did a piece of work that sort of understood what do people want to see from the area. We did some snapshot engagement with the public on the street at various locations around the area.

We've engaged with a number of of local stakeholders so the name before and we've been pretty helpful in providing some input and pushing out some of the servo work that we've done and all of that has driven into this kind of visioning piece of work which then ultimately has led to a spatial strategy and that really means kind of understanding where are the priority areas for us, where are the bits of the area that we want to be focusing our investment on and that's really important for our stakeholders to understand which we've got our efforts really.

And then finally the final study so we are in the final stages of developing that and we are eager to share with you, we can share with you as much as we can at this point around the kind of analysis and engagement work and some of the priority areas and then what will then happen is based on all the feedback that we had from various stakeholders of those kind of conversations with the corporation and other stakeholders,

but we're really keen to start that conversation, that's where we see our role. So, just to take you through a little bit of that process, we're now going into too much detail for you, but you can see there, we've kind of spatially mapped a lot of things in the area, so that can be green spaces, it can be transport movement.

Crucially, the bottom one there, we've mapped existing projects that happening. It's no surprise to anyone here, but there's a lot of change already in the area, the development plans for various buildings, or some more major transformation schemes, Smithfield and the museum site being already key to those.

So we mapped that out because what we wanted to do is identify where the gaps between that, and understand where we might be able to kind of join them up a little bit and understand how people move around the area.

The engagement was really insightful, and thank you to those that helped take part in this. We really valued everyone's views, it's ongoing, which is part of what tonight is about. We really want to continue to hit people's views.

I think we're at the point now in our engagement where we have set some sort of priority locations within the area, and we really want to hear some suggestions from people about what might improve those priorities.

So you see one of the boards has the map set out which I'll show you shortly around the kind of priority locations that we've identified. We'd really love to hear your thoughts around what you feel the challenges are and also the opportunities, what might improve those areas.

And then on the right hand side, we sort of think about this vision for the area. So we've got a slide on the boards over there, but how does this area work for everyone who uses the space and how do we make sure that it's working as hard as to fulfill those kinds of needs?

And I think that's a really key thing that as you look at the rest of the, the presentation is really close to our hearts, but we want to make sure that we're sort of thinking about this area in a holistic way.

And that slide is not there, so. The priority. locations up here. We've got a board over there which has the priority locations and so essentially I will try and describe this to you, this is interesting, so essentially one of the key locations, we've got four key priority areas, one of those is the, let's do this, you will not be able to see this but you'll be able to see a shorter, general overview of the area.

Orange areas are the bits that we're focusing on, on this side of the area we have the exit of Barbican station, so that's the junction around Aldersgate and Goswell Road and we feel that that's a really important entrance to the area.

We've got the Smithfield, the museum side to focus towards the west side there and then we've also got some major developments around Barbican. and along the wall. This area is kind of sandwiched between them and is not being looked at by in at the moment, so we feel that this is a really important opportunity for us to try and rethink that junction, rethink that journey for everyone that comes into the area and moves around the area,

and also acknowledge the fact that we've got these really major arterial roads, the routes that run through our area. All the Skate and Goswell Road are major roads, but how do we make that a more pedestrian friendly experience?

How do we improve that experience? To the south of here, I'm going really general now, this section around here is all around the Guild Hall and the kind of back streets around there. There's some really nice heritage back streets that can be celebrated, so places like Colman Street are really nice character streets that are very high footfall, lots of potential there, and we really want to celebrate some of the bits that connect all of that up,

some of the kind of nice green spaces, some of the route towards the Barbican. Again, a real opportunity for us in terms of that, the entrance point from further north around Islington, coming into the Culture Mile area, and we see that as an opportunity to help with wayfinding, but also celebrate some of the local area.

And then finally, we're thinking about the area within some of these public places, so one of the really valuable public spaces that's come up very strongly in the consultation is the space around St.Charles's Book of Great(Golden Lane Estate?) and in the centre of the Barbican. This is a public space and as you all well know, it's really loved and well used. We really want to try and help people to get there so that they can actually use that nice tranquil space.

Also, think about how we can enhance that a little bit, so thinking about nice seating and greening that enhance that tranquil space for people and create that sense of, actually it's a really nice public space within this really nice heritage setting.

So we've got some ideas around a shorter term intervention we might do there, compared to some of the longer term around. that oldest gate in Goswell Road. Ooh, that was challenging. So you can have a look at that in a bit more detail.

And then we've also got some of the consultation results which show what some of the priorities are from the range of different uses that we spoke to. So thinking about, you know, is it more breathing?

Is it more activation? What do people want to see from those spaces? And then we would really welcome your thoughts about some of these priority areas which you can look at in detail. What do you think might be some of the solutions?

How might we overcome some of those challenges around mobility, wayfinding, sense of place? That would be really welcome. Thank you very much.

There were six information boards on display, which I snapped for reference … if not for legibility. I've asked the BID if it is possible to publish them, or otherwise make them available.

Update: the BID has published the boards here.