New look for civic square to bring life back to city
PLANS are moving ahead for a major upgrade of Plymouth city centre’s Grade II listed Civic Square after the city received £12million from the Government.
A pre-application for the public realm design for the Civic Square has been lodged with Plymouth City Council.
The plans envisage a refurbished or replacement coffee kiosk/pavilion, new street tree-planting and soft landscaping works, and a new sustainable urban drainage system for the square in Armada Way.
The proposal is part of a wider plan to regenerate the area and two large neighbouring buildings: the council-owned Plymouth Guildhall and the former Civic Centre, which the local authority sold to regeneration specialist Urban Splash for £1 in 2016.
The idea, part of the council’s Resurgam economic programme, is to attract more people to live and work, and visit events, in an area which was seeing a decline in footfall before the coronavirus pandemic struck as traditional retail continued to struggle.
The scheme has now taken a major leap forward after Plymouth was handed £12,046,873 form the Government’s Future High Streets Fund.
That cash is expected to help kickstart the regeneration of the Civic Square, Guildhall and ex-Civic Centre, now dubbed The Civic, to create an “international” conference centre, offices and flats, with a music venue too.
Documents filed with the preplanning application said the desire is to create “a public realm design for the Civic Square that fully responds to the opportunity to celebrate and restore the most important heritage features of the square”.
It added: “To create a space that directly supports the proposed regeneration of the Civic Centre and Guildhall including: a refurbished/replacement coffee kiosk/ pavilion, new street tree-planting and soft landscaping works including feature works to the pond, paving and architectural features significant to the mid-century design, new sustainable urban drainage system for the square.”
In November 2020, landscape architecture practice Macgregor Smith said it would be collaborating with Plymouth City Council on the public realm proposals for the Civic Square.
The firm said: “The scheme will involve the respectful restoration of historic features whilst reinstating the square as the civic and cultural heart of the city in the 21st century.”
The public square was built between 1957 and 1962, designed by Geoffrey Jellicoe, and established as part of the civic layout of Plymouth planned in 1956 by the city architect HJW Stirling and based on Patrick Abercrombie and J Paton Watson’s post-war plan for Plymouth of 1943.
Scheme aims to ‘reinstate square as civic and cultural heart of the city in the 21st century’