What a load of bollards!

If, after watching the Winter Olympics, you were tempted to experience the thrills of the downhill slalom, you can get a pretty good feel for the sport by talking a brisk walk through Newport's Commercial Street.

Newport city centre is inherently a very pretty city, architecturally at least. The buildings that line Commercial Street are particularly beautiful and both visitors and locals appreciate them. Of course, there are the occasional ugly cuckoos, such as the Littlewoods building, but while these scar the line of the street, the general feeling as you look up is of a city with character and beauty.

When you lower your gaze, it all falls apart.

It's not so much the shop fronts themselves, these are generally OK. Most retailers understand that an attractive façade makes all the difference in tempting shoppers. Where Commercial Street falls apart is in the mess created by the various necessary and unnecessary street furniture. By 'street furniture' we're not just talking about seats and benches, but all the other stuff - signs, phone boxes, telecoms boxes, bins and, most menacing or all, bollards.

What is it with Newport's addiction to bollards where they're not needed? Commercial Street has been pedestrianised since 1986, and with statues guarding either end, there's no way traffic could access it. So why all the bollards?

Even in areas where traffic does have some access, such as Bridge Street through Cambrian Road, and at the bottom of Stow Hill through Skinner Street, the number of bollards is overwhelming. Seriously, what are we protecting against here? Is there really that much risk of cars drifting too close to shop fronts or mounting pavements?

The infestation of bollards serves to make the whole city centre one big mess. Furthermore, they are inconvenient and you have to keep your wits about you, especially if pushing a pram.

Of course there are some areas where, it could be argued (at a push) that some bollards are necessary, for instance opposite the Queens Hotel and outside the old Pizza Hut. Traffic is banned throughout the day, so retractable bollards are raised to close the street off. But just look at the way this has been presented, with dramatic orange lines painted on the road, yellow-topped bollards, striped raised bollards, warning lights... A touch overkill perhaps? All that's missing is a machine-gun post to make sure we get the message.



More warnings than you'll find on the access road to the Pentagon?

The combined impression created by the street furniture along with the artistic stuff such as statues, is one of complete disarray. Harsh yellow-topped bollards hover around the base of statues like so may hoodies. It's unnecessary and messy.

If you move a few yards down the street pictured above you reach the full-on pedestrianised area. Here we have plinths with statues and ornamental street lights. There is no way a (sane and sober) driver would ever think they could drive down here, but still, just to make sure we have yet more unnecessary bollards.



The chap on the phone needs to pay attention if he's to avoid that bollard he's walking towards...

As you turn into Cambrian Road (the heart of Newport's night life) you are presented by an avenue of bollards. Remember, this is a road where traffic is largely restricted through the day and where the majority of traffic will consist of taxis on a Friday and Saturday night. Most revellers pay no attention to the difference between road and pavement at these times, so the bollards are ineffectual anyway.

How much better, neater and fresher would Cambrian Road be without all these bollards?

There is an alternative solution to the somewhat dated idea of separate roads and pavements - one that many countries across Europe are successfully engaging with. 'Shared Space' sees traffic and pedestrians allowed to integrate without the need for raised pavement or even signs. By the use of different coloured and textured paving materials, drivers and pedestrians are subtly guided. Sharing the same space each takes more care, with demonstrable reduction in accidents.

For more information on Shared Space see this article I wrote a few years' back on behalf of Brett Landscaping.

Shared Space delivers neater, more effective and more pleasant urban environments. Newport needs all three of those. It certainly doesn't need hundreds of pointless, ugly and inconvenient bollards.

Here's an idea for Newport City Council... pull up all the bollards, and melt them down to make a tribute to the Chartist Movement. Just please, less with the bollards eh?

reNEWPORT Report: Uncomfortable reading... for Bob Bright

December saw the publication of the report from reNEWPORT - a business development taskforce to the Welsh Government. The taskforce is a private sector group which, through consultation with the people of Newport, has arrived at a series of recommendations on how the city can be re-energised.

To put the background of the report into some context, Newport has been on a downward spiral for some years. There are plenty of opinions about why, but nobody can deny that, since being granted city status, Newport has consistently failed to meet the accepted criteria of a successful modern city. Business, retail and good quality employment has been steadily receding, the city is getting (and feeling) poorer, it feels mismanaged, and nobody from the city's council appears capable of putting forward any serious suggestions on how to get out of the mess.

Perhaps the only truely ongoing positive is; that the people of Newport are becoming united and increasingly vocal in their concern about the rot that has set in.

On the face of it, in producing this report, the Welsh government has effectively tired of watching from the sidelines as the Capital's nearest neighbour is steered into further decline by a clueless council, and has sent in a team of people who actually know what they're talking about to work out what could and should be done to halt the decline, and crucially, to give Newport a future.

If you need an easy one line summary, the reNEWPORT report lays out what needs to be done to drag Newport into the 21st Century.

The report is extremely important. In living memory, there is one thing that Newport has been lacking  - Vision [an opinion recently shared by Argus reporter Maria Williams]. The report delivers a vision.

The thought process should be obvious. Vision is the goal. To achieve the goal you develop a strategy, and to deliver the strategy you develop the tactics. At every stage, every decision you make as a city must have an eye on delivering the strategy to achieve the goal.

Within the report there are some 'nice-to-haves' in amongst the 'need-to-haves', such as fluffy ambitions for Newport to become UK or European Culture Capital in 2021 (which will take a gargantuan effort), but the report is broad and encompasses everything from heritage, to technology, to culture, to infrastructure and makes a lot of very sensible real-world suggestions that could be kicked off immediately.

By contrast, for decades, and without a vision or direction, the city elders of Newport have failed to recognise that the world is changing and consequently have made an endless sequence of stumbling bad decisions that have worked to make the city poorly equipped for the 21st Century. Planning decisions have been made without a view to consequence, growth or integration, and the result is a disjointed city which is difficult to get around, unwelcoming for business, with no game plan for growth, and which works against its own best interests.

For many people, the most surprising aspect of the report will be that it builds very much on the idea of Newport as a technology hub. But it shouldn't really be that much of a surprise when you consider the city's modern history with regards to technology in both enterprise and education. After the decline of coal mining and heavy industry, technology has been the unsung quiet-man success story of the region.

Technology and communications is a wise choice for a vision. For the last year and a half I've worked with one of the UK's leading technology PR agencies (based in Chepstow), representing some of the biggest global players in the fields of telecomms infrastructure, cyber security, networking optimisation and the like. This is a very successful and lucrative industry sector which is, to a degree, reasonably well protected against the effects of recession that can be so devastating for other industries (such as retail). It generates well paid employment, and there is no reason why Newport could not make great strides as a technology hub as the report suggests.

The report's modern-world conclusions will not sit well with the council. Indeed, we learned as much when the 'leader' of Newport City Council, Bob Bright, hurriedly dismissed the reNEWPORT report with 'we could all have written down those ideas'. He might as well have included the words 'new-fangled' in his banal critique. You need to read the word 'leader' with the same cynicism that I wrote it because Bright is a man who is increasingly the weak link of this current council and who appears as out-of-touch with the ambitions and wishes of the people of Newport as he could possibly be. I don't know and have never met Mr Bright, but on witnessing his performance at the recent extra-special meeting to vote on the £90 million loan for Friars Walk (the same meeting that he begrudgingly offered apology through gritted teeth for the Chartist Mural fiasco), he struck me as a singularly humourless, unimaginative and unmodern man as you could not want leading your city, and his only leadership qualities appear to be of the party political variety.

Bob Bright's comments have been received with the contempt they deserve, both publicly through the media, on social media, and in informal conversations. Again, this serves simply to illustrate the degree to which communication is another of Bright's key weaknesses. When he keeps schtum, as he did with the mural, he gets it wrong, and when he speaks off the cuff without consideration he succeeds only in leaving a nasty taste in the mouth.

Newport does have a bright future, but not a Bob Bright future. It needs the Welsh government and the experts to set the vision and the strategy on how to deliver. Bob Bright's council - and to be fair every previous council that I ever have known in Newport - are not, and never have been qualified or competent to be at the helm of a city which needs to sail on to more verdant shores. Let's face it, the council has never known how to steer the ship out of the harbour, let alone chart a course to a brave new world. But the reality is that the tide has gone out and the Good Ship Newport is run aground on the mud.

'The City of Newport... On The Rise' report is perfectly timed, is comprehensive and is much needed. At the moment it stands as merely recommendation, but the tone suggests that, in the face of ongoing complacency by Newport, it might well become something more. Personally, I can't wait. Bring it on.

Bob Bright's Twitter profile pic. The face of a bright and positive future for Newport?

Why it's wrong to demonise Queensberry

In all the furore surrounding - and indeed triggered by - the destruction of the Chartist Mural, people are venting their anger in many directions, some right, and some not so. Queensberry Real Estate, the developer of Friar's Walk, is increasingly being talked about in negative terms. But the reality is that Queensberry is almost definitely an innocent party in all this.

A little bit of background on my experience here...

For some time I worked for a very good PR company in Bath. I was very happy there and I enjoyed the city, the team I worked with, and the clients I looked after. Our office - in a very quaint converted townhouse in Lower Borough Walls - sat on the verge of the SouthGate Centre, one of Queensberry's landmark shopping centre developments.

One of the clients I looked after was Bath Business Improvement District (BathBID). A BID is a business-led and business funded body formed to improve a defined commercial area. It was set up by Bath and North East Somerset Council (BaNES) and basically all businesses over a certain revenue have an extra 'tax' (for want of a better word) that they pay which goes into a pot to help with the promotion and management of the BID area. It's a great idea and the BathBID delivers real results - from better security and refuse management, to organisation of events like the Christmas Market, to getting John Cleese to turn on the Christmas lights. Newport could really benefit from having a BID, and indeed for taking lessons on how to run a city from BaNES and the BathBID. But that's for another blog.

SouthGate Centre (and the businesses within) is a significant contributor to the BathBID, and so I spent a lot of time either in SouthGate Centre, or working with the Centre management on various stories and initiatives.

The one thing I can tell you about Queensberry is; they are very, very good at what they do. SouthGate Centre revitalised a part of the city which was in dire need of attention (between the railways station and the bus station). Queensberry delivered a shopping centre that is very well designed, very convenient and easy to use, and extremely well managed and promoted. From moving in fake beaches and deckchairs in summer, to Christmas events, there is always something going on there and it is genuinely a really nice place to be.

Crucially, Queensberry delivered a development which perfectly compliments the city of Bath. From the look to the ambiance, it just works. It doesn't sit as a 'sore thumb'.

SouthGate Centre, Bath. A Queensberry development that compliments the city

We need to appreciate here that Bath is a heritage city that has in place a very strict rule book for building and development, and even for how shops present themselves. For example, if you want to build you need to use Oolitic Limestone - better known as Bath Stone, the warm honey-coloured stone that defines the city. Even the global giants McDonalds and Starbucks are restricted on how they present themselves. They can't simply do as they please, as it would appear they are allowed to over here in Newport. There is a rulebook in place, and they like it or lump it.

Queensberry, as a highly professional and experienced developer will not have railed against the design considerations and limitations when they read the brief and starting their thinking about SouthGate Centre. They will have considered it an exciting challenge to rise to. The thinking would have been simple, 'Right team, we need to develop a shopping centre in Bath. It needs to use Bath Stone, and it needs to fit in with the wider Bath landscape. Thinking caps on...'

Ultimately, they will have taken great delight when their design ticked all the boxes and was approved by BaNES.

So let's now look at the Friar's Walk development in Newport which I'm personally against, but only because I don't see that we need more new shops [see my previous blog for the reasons why]. But if we are going to have Friar's Walk, then I'm glad that Queensberry got the gig because it won't be half-arsed. It will look good and it will be well managed.

We - the people of Newport - were 'threatened' many times that the Chartist Mural would jeopardise the Friar's Walk development. The inference was that if we didn't shut up our whinging, Queensberry would go off in a huff and never look back. Like so many naughty kids we were told to sit down and be quiet or Santa wouldn't come.

I don't believe this for one moment.

My suspicion is that what we have here is a particularly negative aspect of Welsh political and business culture - fear.

I suspect that the Council never actually approached Queensberry to talk about the issue of the mural and certainly never thought to stipulate that the mural was incorporated into any design for approval. The Council just IMAGINED that Queensberry would react negatively and, as is so often the case, decided to simply not raise the problem to the developer. Instead, they thought they could sort the issue out themselves, and as we now see, this was an incredibly foolhardy approach which has done nobody any favours, including Queensberry.

I believe that, if Queensberry had been invited to tender a design which incorporated the mural, they would have simply relished the challenge, added it to the brief, and would have done what was required with no problem. This is what they do. This is why they are good at what they do.

Of course I stand to be corrected, and I welcome any response from the Council that they DID stipulate the incorporation of the mural at the invitation to tender. But I really don't expect that to be the case, and I will certainly be both surprised and disappointed if Queensberry actually turn out to be the stroppy teenagers that Newport City Council has, through their threats, inferred they are.

So don't automatically diss Queenberry Real Estate. We are all in the dark about the exact timeline and dialogue leading up to the destruction of the Chartist Mural and the briefing and approval for Friar's Walk. Queensberry are, in all likelihood, holding their heads in their hands over the complete pig's ear Newport City Council has made of this so far, and of how they have been dragged into this as part of Team Bad Guy by the Council's ineptitude, and ultimately how the Council has delivered at their door bad PR and bad feeling even before demolition has started to make way for Friar's Walk.