I wandered through the dead zone of the Grafton Centre in Cambridge as I waited to go for a dental appointment yesterday.
When I started work as a planner in the 1970s the planning agenda was driven by the perceived need to provide for an expected demand for more shopping floorspace. The debate had been going on since the 1950s when the Holford and Wright report proposed expansion in the Fitzroy-Burleigh area. In 1973, plans by architects Piano+Rogers, later famed for their Pompidou Centre in Paris, were approved by the City Council, only to be subsequently rejected on financial grounds. Grosvenor Developments took on the scheme from 1978 and the lack lustre building by Fitzroy Robinson was opened in 1984. It was expanded in the 1990s and refurbished in 2017. After the initial novelty, it remained a secondary and little-loved shopping centre despite these efforts. Now the victim of changing shopping habits, there are proposals for redevelopment for laboratory space.
The Grafton Centre is a saga of lost opportunities. The Piano+Rogers might have given Cambridge an exciting new building that looked towards an optimistic future. On the other hand, proposals for comprehensive redevelopment in the kite-shaped area of land (at that time dominated by terraced houses, shops and small businesses dating from the late 19th Century) were met with controversy and opposition. Ideas for mixed use regeneration involving extensive conservation of the existing fabric, at the opposite pole to the P+R scheme, were never considered seriously, however. Perhaps labs are the future, or is this just another missed opportunity?