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Lessons from the past for post-pandemic cities and towns
As part of our 10 years of Turley Heritage and Townscape series, read Senior Consultant, Claire Easton’s thoughts on how our towns and cities have responded to crises throughout history.
During the past year of social distancing, lockdowns and tiers, closure of offices and shops, and fast changing ways of working, one of the topics most discussed is how will this change places we live in?
How will our cities, towns and high streets adapt? What might they look like in the future? Even with the welcome news of a vaccine, the changes to the places we live and work in the future could still be momentous.
Our cities and towns, and the heritage assets within them are however already the products of thousands of years of change, a wealth of history which has repeatedly and successfully adapted to the incremental change of daily life, but also to major disaster and crisis. I live in York, a city, which through its mix of Roman street patterns, medieval walls and gates, and modern tourist destinations exemplifies survival and adaptation through changing times.
Rebuilding after disaster
Looking into the past, after the 1666 Great Fire of London, the city was re-built. Buildings were constructed to a new set of regulations, which form the basis of the same building regulations which remain today. The regulations included that all houses were to be in brick or stone, and wooden window frames were to be concealed behind brick. Later, during the 19th century, London experienced a number of significant outbreaks of Cholera, a disease that was able to spread rapidly in the densely packed and unsanitary city. Following the ‘great stink’ of 1858, the Engineer Bazalgette was instrumental in designing a sewer system which channelled waste out of the streets and across London, resulting in the disease being largely eradicated. Much of this system remains. In the past, we have responded to crisis and our cities have become better and safer places to live as a result.
More recently, temporary solutions have been used in our towns and cities to maintain activity and economies during a crisis. In Christchurch after the 2011 earthquake, a series of temporary pop-up businesses and community functions established themselves amongst the ruins of the city centre. New shopping centres in shipping containers, and bars in buses allowed businesses to continue operating. Temporary and open air libraries, gyms and dancefloors were set up in cleared sites. These ‘meanwhile’ uses already were operating back at home after the 2008 financial crash and have continued to be used since showing that constant dynamic adaptation is one of the things we do best.
Learning from York
The city of York, where I live, has experienced repeated invasion, originally from Romans and Vikings, and was later besieged doing the civil war, and bombed during world war two. But York is lucky and this history is used to its advantage; the Shambles, a late medieval street originally containing butchers shops survives, though today more often filled with tourists than invaders. Jorvik is a highly successful museum telling the story of the lives of the Vikings, who first invaded the city in 866. Buildings damaged during the war were repaired or remain as monuments to this part of our history.
Recently, a vacant plot of land close to the historic centre has been successfully repurposed as ‘Spark’, a collection of bars, shops and cafes located in shipping containers. Whilst opened before the pandemic, it has been ideally placed to operate during restrictions. Even in the last decade, York city centre has changed dramatically, with new independent bars restaurants and cafes catering to locals and tourists alike. Significant development is also on the way at York Central.
York has been suffering from high levels of vacancy in retail units, an existing problem which has been exacerbated this year, but there are positive signs with temporary uses of space appearing and proposals for new and different development in the city centre. Local cafes are offering working-from-home spaces to local residents. York has always been a city popular with cyclists but a real opportunity has arisen to reduce car use and extend bike and pedestrian lanes. I am confident that like so many times before, the city will adapt to, and survive, changing times. Ten years ago I lived in a different city and drove my car to work every day. In the future my commute will hopefully far more often involve a walk or bike ride along newly opened bike lanes to work in a city centre café, or shared workspace, where, through the use of technology I can connect with colleagues all over the country.
I hope we can learn lessons from the past on how crisis can be an opportunity for permanent change and improvement to our towns and cities. We don’t know how our cities and towns will look in the future, but hopefully the experience of the short term changes we have made will allow us to take the opportunity to shape these spaces in ways that will improve and benefit our lives and those who live in them in the future.
For more information on the work of our Heritage and Townscape service, please contact a member of the team.
18 January 2021