Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
City’s post-war plans on road to nowhere
Canterbury’s post-war road plans actively encouraged the movement of cars into and through the city.
Encouraged by reports such as Traffic in Towns, the final plans included an inner ring road, two cross-city relief roads – all of them dual carriageways – and no less than four multi-storey car parks; one at each of the main compass points.
Such plans were expensive and also required the demolition of countless properties untouched by the Blitz.
And so, as an interim measure, inner-city bombsites were turned into surface car parks.
Furthermore, many more interim car parks were created by demolishing old buildings and then pausing until conditions were right to built the new ones.
One good example of the latter is the vast amount of surface car parking created at Whitefriars in the early 1960s, by the demolition and clearance of the old Simon Langton School site.
The older of the above pictures dates from the mid 1960s and looks across a widened Gravel walk, from the back of the recently built Coach and Horses pub.
The first of the four planned multi-storey car parks was built along the south side of Gravel Walk in the late 1960s.
In the event, only one other was built: at the top end of Castle Street.
A reversal of the Traffic in Town policy began in 1970, with the pedestrianisation of St George’s Street, followed by the entire main street by the early 1980s.
The ring road was never completed and the demolition scars left by the planned cross-city relief roads began to be redeveloped, mainly for housing.
By this time, traffic was very much discouraged from entering the city, and the solution to this was the provision of park-and-ride sites; again planned for all four compass points of the city.
The second photo dates from 1997 and shows the Wincheap park and ride site.
This is soon to be greatly expanded and become the amalgamated site of both south and west approach parkand-ride sites.