Maud Marshall, chief executive of Bradford Centre Regeneration, the private-public partnership set up to drive the redevelopment of central Bradford, has been here for just over eight months. What does she think of it so far? JIM GREENHALF reports For the past two weeks Maud Marshall has been travelling to parts of the Metropolitan District, gauging reaction to Will Alsop's masterplan for central Bradford.
She's been to Keighley Library; The Crescent Hotel, Ilkley; Cardigan House, Bingley; and Shipley Library. The afternoon I called on her in her plainly-furnished fourth-floor office in Merchants' House, Little Germany, she had the evening meeting at Shipley ahead of her.
Had the meetings been well attended? Not terribly well, she said, but added that the time of year, Christmas being just around the corner, was not good for public meetings. Maybe not. However she can take comfort from the fact that since September more than 4,000 people have made the effort to visit the exhibition centre in Market Street.
She said some people out in the sticks wanted to know how the redevelopment of the city centre would affect or improve the area where they lived.
"I tried to explain that as council tax payers it wasn't in their interests to pay for a city centre that was empty, " she said. So in the eight months she has been here, have her views of the people and the job ahead changed?
"I don't think my views have changed because I knew it was going to be very hard and that if we were going to try something different it would generate a lot of criticism and some applause.
What I have been tremendously encouraged by is how passionate people become about this city.
This is the surprise.
"There's a lot of negativity and some hope. The negativaty probably stems from past disappointments. I think there is maybe a Bradford psychology that is questioning and less than positive.
"In terms of hope I think there are always people who have got great enthusiasm and see Bradford for what it is. A city with a proud history" Perhaps a city too conscious of its past is exposing its lack of confidence in the future. Maybe that's what explains both the passion and scepticism Maud Marshall experienced. Besides, Bradfordians enjoy being contrary. It's a favourite pastime. Offcomed 'un should take everything they are told with a shovelful of rock salt, lest they go skidding off in the wrong direction.
When Maud Marshall was offered and accepted the job of chief executive of what was then Bradford's Urban Regeneration Company she said she was intending to live in the heart of Bradford.
"I'm renting a flat in Little Germany. It's very quiet but a very high quality environment and less than five minutes' walk from work, " she said. At present she's in a dilemma whether to buy or continue renting.
The aerial view of Will Alsop's masterplan resembles the business end of a trident or the heel of a hand with three fingers. These four areas are key neighbourhoods identified in the masterplan; they are what Will Alsop's team call, "fingers of intervention."
We have all seen the colourful developments dreamed up by Alsop's team - the city centre park, the lake, the wetlands, the new library building reaching out over the water like an enormous diving board. People have either enthused over the originality of these schemes or mocked their inappropriateness. But are Alsop's designs chiselled in tablets of stone?
"The masterplan sounds like a diktat but as far as we are concerned it's a conceptual framework. It has to be flexible, firstly because it has to be durable over 15 years, and secondly because we are not trying to dictate to the people of Bradford.
"But Bradford needs something radical so the city can reposition itself. What we have to do in the months ahead is work up detailed plans for each of the four neighbourhoods identified by Alsop, using the plan as a catalyst, an inspiration for change.
"A huge challenge for us is to design, build and manage the public realm, " she said, referring to Alsop's envisaged open spaces linking the heel of the hand, the centre of the city, to the Thornton Road/Goitside finger.
Back in the 1850s or 1870s when St George's Hall and City Hall were designed and built by Lockwood and Mawson there was no masterplan; the shape of the city centre evolved by putting up a building and then, over time, reacting to it.
What about converting the former Odeon cinema building into a concert hall, as many correspondents to the T&A letters pages have suggested?
Maud Marshall said a concert hall would take an enormously long time to plan and build and something had to happen before then.
"At this stage we are asking people what they think of our ideas about opening up the city centre, that it should be more open to the public. A lot of traffic coming into Bradford is going straight through it and we would like to turn that around. That does not mean shutting the car out of the city: it means looking very carefully again at transport planning to find ways of reducing the amount of traffic - 40,000 vehicles a day.
"It means more integrated car parking and park-and-ride schemes. There are a lot of concerns about what will happen if we shut Prince's Way. Hall Ings is going to be reduced anyway because of the Broadway scheme.
"At the moment Bradford's road system says to the pedestrian, 'You stay behind the barrier; you go down under the ground.' It says to the motorist, 'This is a dual carriageway; you can go at speed.' "We have used the time from October to December to have a dialogue with Bradford and beyond. We are absorbing and distilling our findings and how we can respond. In March we hope the Council will adopt the masterplan as the framework and that's the first major stage over.
"That's when we start drilling into the four neighbourhoods in the masterplan in more detail and coming up with projects that are not merely 'instant gratification'; but we can't go on planning and planning forever. We have to start doing things, " Maud Marshall said.
What with the Morrisons takeover of Safeway, the demolition of much of 1960s Bradford, the Broadway shopping scheme, Alsop's masterplan and Bradford Bulls going for the world championship, the citizens of Bradford have much to look forward to, to engage their sceptical interest.
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