Look like we’ll just be getting a hotch-potch of ghastly buildings

IAGREE with the recent letter writer who likened the proposed development of Temple Island near Temple Meads in Bristol as “monstrous, ugly, appalling, a mass of terribly designed boxes that have been copied from some old Eastern Bloc country that were built in the 70s”.

My first thoughts on seeing the artist’s impressions for this development, which were first unveiled pre-pandemic as Legal & General’s ‘vision’ for Temple Island, were these were more the stuff of nightmares... Communist-era East European apartment blocks or Benidorm in the 1980s without the sea and sun.

Surprisingly, well-known Zaha-Hadid Architects, who often produce futuristic designs, are responsible for these ghastly designs.

This development and the adjacent new Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus for Bristol University (including three tower blocks of flats for students whose designs have drawn comments “ugly”, “monolithic” and “like Lego”) are key elements of the Temple Quarter Enterprise Zone around Temple Meads.

The TQEZ could have been an opportunity to transform this long run-down area of the city into something very special, a “Welcome to Bristol, at the forefront of technology and sustainability” signpost for this key route into Bristol and ‘magnet’ to pull in further hi-tech and creative businesses.

Instead, it seems we will have a hotch-potch of uninspiring buildings like a plethora of similarly uninspiring tower block designs proposed for other sites around Bristol, many of which have passed the council’s planning process.

Why is Bristol being blighted by new developments, ignoring the objections of locals and bodies like Bristol Civic Society and Heritage England, while some other UK cities are gaining iconic new buildings? Even the proposed Bristol Arena at Filton looks like some inflated shopping mall.

Are tower blocks the best solution to Bristol’s housing shortage anyway? By contrast, there are a number of interesting low rise developments (some using innovative modular building techniques) which seem much more forward thinking and human in scale.

Julian Hill

Knowle