Mayor Sir Peter Soulsby is using his strong mandate and the discovery of Richard III’s remains to reverse decades of car-centric planning in this medieval city
Leicester was eviscerated in the 1960s by modernist town planners. They scythed through the medieval core of the city with two inner ring-roads, and multi-lane highways were built to provide fast access to the M1 motorway. The city, like many others, became dominated by cars: congested despite the width of the radial roads and dangerous for anybody not protected by a metal cage. Leicester was once a great English medieval city, like York, Durham or Lincoln. It has many Grade I listed buildings and, with the Jewry Wall, one of the tallest Roman structures still standing in Britain. But with its history smothered in tarmac and blocked off with concrete, Leicester became unremarkable, anodyne, an East Midlands city far from the tourist trail.
This changed three years ago thanks to Leicester’s oldest economically active citizen. Dug up from beneath a council car park, King Richard III is now a welcome and valuable tourist attraction, known to locals as KRIII. Leicester is using the remains and the romance of the last Plantagenet king to push for cycleways and more pedestrianisation in the city centre, trimming some of the space previously devoted to cars. Much of the city’s transformation was planned before the timely reappearance of KRIII, but deposing King Car is much easier when you’ve got a real one to put in its place.
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from Health & wellbeing | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1LAZtbN
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