Park Street Car Park, Cambridge

Contractors are putting up scaffolding round the unlovely and unloved Park Street multi storey car park.  It is to be redeveloped as an apart-hotel with 250 public car parking spaces in the basement.  It closes on the 4th January.

Park Street car park, Cambridge

I’ve looked up its history on Cambridge New Architecture (Philip Booth and Nicholas Taylor, 1970).  The car park was built in two phases, 1962-3 and 1967-8 to designs by De St-Croix of Truscon Ltd, with T. V. Burrows, City Surveyor.  The original design capacity was for 440 cars.  Truscon was the contractor and the cost was £154,000.  It was Cambridge’s first multi storey car park.

Booth and Taylor: welcomed it ‘as a first step in removing the private car from Cambridge’s choked centre’; and said the overall structure ‘has much to recommend it, with its use of Truscon’s simplified concrete construction’, though they had reservations about some of the materials, detailing and landscaping.  They concluded that despite the low charges (1/- (5p) for four hours) ‘…it is improbable that the Park Street Park will be used fully until cars are proscribed in central Cambridge.’

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