Chapter III – part three: A historic town

The primary network

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In the normal way it would not be good practice to consider the central area of a town in isolation from the rest of the built-up area. In a case such as the present, however, the centre is so distinctive, so clearly demarcated from the rest of the city, and the environmental requirements so exacting that separate consideration of its distribution system is permissible. Even so we would have wished, had we had the opportunity, to have made a full study of the whole-town primary network. As it was, we had to make some working assumptions. In particular, we assumed that a primary distributor road would be located in the vicinity of the old city wall Some such proposal is in fact embodied in the statutory development plan.

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We then considered whether there would be any possibility at all of extending any part of the primary network into the old city without doing irreparable damage, because any such measure would greatly assist access to the central shopping and office areas. It would also enable local circulations to be rearranged in such a way that a great deal of the traffic which would otherwise be filtering through the old street network could be drained off, thereby helping to reduce internal traffic flows to an acceptable level.

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To explore the possibilities we made an analysis of the land uses in the centre and found that it could be divided into 10 sub-areas each having a broadly homogeneous character (Figure 161). The severance of these areas by heavy traffic flows would be extremely detrimental to the environment. Most of these sub-areas have strong ties with each other. There is an almost complete absence of physical breaks between them and there are so many buildings worth preserving that the possibilities of inserting a major distributor are severely limited. We concluded that the only feasible line was across the south-eastern quarter. This would involve some sacrifice, but the area seems committed to extensive redevelopment and has lost much of its unity with the rest of the historic city.

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Another possibility we considered was the insertion of an east-west link, roughly along the line of the River Wensum, to serve the industrial concentration. There were arguments for and against this, but we decided to reject it because a major road on this line would break the unity that exists between Magdalen Street and the rest of the city. We had no hesitation in rejecting absolutely any idea of a north-south link which would sever the mediaeval city stretching westwards from the Cathedral.