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A final goodbye to the ‘city in the sky’
It was a lofty scheme by the city fathers to create a ‘city in the sky’, with large plazas above street level linked by aerial walkways.
Now one of its last vestiges has disappeared with the demolition of the concrete pedestrian walkway on Lewins Mead.
is needed now More than ever
With the inexorable rise of the motor car, plans were made and sometimes executed in the sixties for great concrete routes through the hearts of our cities. In Bristol, plans thankfully never fully came to fruition.
But the footbridges over Nelson Street, Rupert Street and Lewins Mead, and the empty areas above our heads to which they lead, are a stark and brutal visualisation of what might have been if the 1961 Forum Plan for Bristol had gone ahead.
The Fight for Bristol (ed. by Gordon Priest and Pamela Cobb; Redcliffe Press, 1980) explains these plans:
“The group of architects who put (the plan) forward combined super highways with dreaming notions of pedestrian decks to create squares of Venetian splendour where Bristolians would gather in their thousands on election nights six metres above the smoothly uninterrupted flow of traffic.
“The dream seemed so achievable. Perhaps part of it, at least, should have been done. The centre deck might have worked; noise and fumes might not have made it unusable. Often the wrong parts were carried out.
“The major central area civic contribution of the sixties was the complex of pedestrian decks that survive in truncated form above the street at Lewins Mead and beyond and which virtually nobody uses. This was to be the essential link between the Centre – or even Forum’s great piazza above it – and the Broadmead shopping centre and beyond.”