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City Centre Framework

Bristol Council has been consulting on a draft City Centre Framework (CCF). The CCF is both a spatial framework and a movement framework. This is in principle a good thing – making the connection between the two. It covers a relatively small part of the city centre – Old City, Lewins Mead, Broadmead, bottom of M32, Castle Park, North Redcliffe, as adjacent areas are covered by existing planning policy documents.

Whilst welcoming the CCF in principle, the Society has commented that the document could be more visionary and more holistic, and suggested it could be improved in a number of ways:

  • Purpose and value of the document: The document could give a stronger vision to developers, and more specific guidance. The document should make clear what its planning time horizon is – 5, 10, or 20 years. The document could say more about how the proposals will be taken forward. The movement framework needs to cover a larger area.
  • The movement framework is incomplete: We support the key objective of “Tackling traffic congestion; making the city centre better connected, accessible and healthier”, but the document fails to follow through on this objective. It should start from some basic principles and cross-Bristol measures such as controlling traffic entering the city centre. It should include a walking network; consider movements from outside the area; face into issues like reallocating road space; and include some visionary schemes to simplify the highway network.
  • Public realm proposals could be more visionary and more specific: Visionary proposals could include the corner of High Street and Wine Street. The public realm proposals need to be more grounded into the other parts of the framework: a starting point should be a network of primary and secondary pedestrian routes. The CCF should provide more detail on the proposed public realm improvements.

The full BCS response [PDF, 236KB].

Alan Morris

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