Online Survey
The link to the online survey: https://forms.gle/PnZD1kMUrRXjvQrU8. Please accept that the survey is optimised for mobile use; if you use a bigger screen, some of the features look less optimal.
Travelling Exhibition
Mint Methodist Centre, in Fore Street, where we will take the model to our Sat Open Meeting on Sat, 20 June.
Shop window of ‘Viola Wellness’, 20 North Street, next door to Devon Ukranian Association, 20 June(afternoon) – 6 July.
Mint Methodist Centre, in Fore Street, on the Wesley table in the back of the Worship Area, 6 July – 18 July
Further stops to be announced soon.
Review of Charrette and Open Day
The Charrette, a creative workshop, on 10 June saw 17 invited guests meeting our team to comment on a model of the street built by Citizen Architects and to creatively reflect on our vision document. We were made aware of additional features of the street and came up with further options of how to improve the street. All this fed into a public event held in the Devon Ukranian Association on Saturday, 13 June. The Open Day invited the public to take a look at the model and a list of 15 areas for improvements. We got very good responses with more than 50 members of the public voting on the measures and providing us with further feedback and insights. Both events were supported by a ECC Ward Grand from the St David’s Ward.
We received lots of positive feedback at both events. The specialists at the Charrette liked our initiative and were impressed by the detailed approach. Councillors and officers volunteered to find out things and to inform others in ECC/DCC. Artists came up with further ideas how to provide a face-lift to the facade of the Guildhall Shopping Centre, with some ideas looking not too costly or difficult to achieve. There was a wide agreement that the building fence in front of 7-10 North Street was an obstacle with not much of a purpose; it has been there for the last 2 years blocking the pavement and the loading bay and obstructing the view down the street and onto the hills in the distance. The existing lighting was also seen as suboptimal. We were surprised to hear that on the corner of North Street / Paul Street the Guildhall Shopping Centre originally had a lift, to bring up people from the street level to the walkway around the Centre: this enabled visitors to enter the Centre on two sides on a level approach, cutting out the steep hills on both streets. It was a clever idea of the architects in the 1970s and we will have to look into whether the lift can be re-installed with 21st-century technology.
The Open Day on Saturday saw further details added to our knowledge of the street. Being at 19 North Street and in the street for 6 hours on a Saturday showed us the amount of traffic using the road to cut through the city, not speaking of a good number of cars and motorbikes revving their engines while going uphill. The traffic ward has had rich pickings of cars using the ‘loading only’ bays for parking. We were pleased to see this enforced. Members of the public came into the Devon Ukranian Association shop and discussed their views about the street, while enjoying a cup of tea/coffee with us. The amount of commuters using this street daily added a new facet to our accumulating information about North Street. We were surprised by some of the voting results.
Photos from both the Charrette and the Open Day
Photos of the model
