The way town and city centres are used has changed. People are shopping more online, so the draw of the high street out of everyday necessity is declining. Instead, these spaces have to be valued for the experiences they foster. That’s what Dr Saira Ali, president of the Landscape Institute (LI) and team leader for landscape, design and conservation at Bradford Council, had at the forefront of her mind when Bradford began building its business case for how to use Transforming Cities Fund resources.   

Ali says:

“At Bradford, we are driving that placemaking agenda as a local authority. We see it as a way to kickstart the economy by helping businesses, as a way to make sure our population is healthy, to increase biodiversity, and as a way to address climate change.”  

At the heart of its proposal was creating a greener and healthier city. “It was about the revival of city centres, but I saw this as an opportunity to be a bit bolder and a bit more ambitious.” The result? 2.1km of traffic being removed. What once was a five-lane highway dividing the city centre is now a park – and it was transformed within two years.   

UK City of Culture 2025 

While building its business case for the Transforming Cities Fund, Bradford was also bidding to host UK City of Culture and so the vision of what Bradford was going to feel and look like fed into this. “You’re selling a vision,” Ali explains, “Because you’re going to be on show, there for the world to see. It’s your shop window and you’ve got an opportunity to get money to make a change to your city and people’s lives through events and activation. And it’s the spaces between the buildings, the landscapes, which makes these things successful.”   

Bradford led a cultural programme of 5,000 events – over 75% of which were free – that pulled in three million people, involved over 650 local artists and organisations, and resulted in capital investment for more than 30 local cultural organisations.  

Rather than just focussing on the city centre, Bradford took a much broader view, “It was about how our whole district was going to be activated and on show. We have a strapline – one landscape many views and we wanted it to encapsulate that.” The first UK City of Culture 2025 event took place in a cold and snowy January; but even so 10,000 people gathered in City Park to celebrate Bradford. On Ilkley Moor, an orchestra played in the rising sun, while sculptures led people across Worth Valley as a walking exhibition.  

Landscape-led projects  

It was a joined-up initiative which involved and celebrated what makes Bradford, Bradford. It’s an approach that wasn’t just for UK City of Culture.

Ali says:

“We’ve got a good relationship as landscape architects within the local authority, so when decisions are being made about spaces we’re there from day one, working collaboratively so we can help shape things.”   

“Quite often, even now, you have engineers or architects or quantity surveyors leading on schemes. Landscape architects are part of the team, but they’re not the decision makers. In Bradford, my engineers, my planners, our public health team, our neighbourhood team, gives me the space to lead. I’m joint leading on projects and that’s really what we need across the country because the way spaces look and feel determines whether they’re successful or not.”  

This model of having landscape architects as key decision makers in multi-disciplinary project teams is not common throughout other public authorities across the country, but is a way of working that Ali believes should be the standard. 

It’s a dream scenario for our industry and the results speak for themselves. But how were Ali and her team able to get people on board with this way of working at Bradford? “Anybody that knows me knows that when I’m determined to do something, I find ways to do it. But what I do is take people on that journey with me.”. 

When a scheme is over budget and the solutions seems to be to remove the green infrastructure – as is often the way – Ali says they think creatively and hold firm.

“It’s happened in Bradford where a project goes over budget. The scheme changed, trees started to come out, SuDS came out. But we were able to redesign it and actually make it greener – because what people forget is green infrastructure actually is the cheapest element and there’s ways of doing it to make it cost efficient but not compromise at all. We were a little bit later delivering the core part of our city centre transformation, because we wouldn’t budge until we got sign off on the scheme, and we weren’t prepared to back down. But it was a delay that we were prepared to accept so as to not compromise.” 

Ali is also smart when it comes to getting funding. “I’ve never put in for a bid or put a proposal in and not got funding because you’ve got to be creative and innovative in how you do things, not just give a bog-standard tick box application. I’ve got a business background so I will find the business case for funding.”  

In 2008, she secured £1.1m of economic benefit money for Bradford to deliver public realm on high streets, making the business case that green infrastructure has a huge economic benefit – which wasn’t so widely talked about then. It took seven months to research and put the business case together but it paid off. 

In 2017 Ali was making the argument for health, in 2014, it was climate resilience, which has now come back around. “As a local authority, we don’t have much money,” expresses Ali, “but will always find the opportunity to get money from places. We can write bids and will find a way that we are eligible.” 

This has benefitted landscape-led schemes in the Bradford district because colleagues within the council now know that if they bring Ali into a project earlier, while they might have a set budget, she can work with them and find other opportunities to bring in money to deliver all the outcomes that they want – and ultimately the scheme will be better.

“I’m not shy when it comes to getting funding,” Ali says. “Developing really good relationships and trust is key, so when I tell people they should come onto a project, they know that the money they’re putting in will have enormous outputs. I would also take people from the council to see what good looks like in Europe or other UK cities to show them what it’s all about.” This is something Bradford now facilitates itself, so that others can learn from its successes.

Opportunities for the landscaping sector 

It’s promising to hear about landscape-led local authorities like Bradford, and this way of thinking and working is opening up opportunities for contractors and designers. “There are multiple reasons why landowners or investors or local authorities are starting to look at public space differently,” says John Wyer, founder of Bowles and Wyer. “It could be about flood reduction, greening, temperature mitigation, better mental and physical health, better commercial value.  

“We’re increasingly seeing a trend around reducing traffic in city centre areas as well as a reduction in roadside parking. We’re even seeing a tightening of roads to discourage people from driving into city centres – post Covid-19 there were lots of areas where roads got much narrower and those have not been fully explored which means opportunities for small-scale designers.” 

Examples of this are scattered throughout London. At Exhibition Road the street was given back to pedestrians. Here, a “shared space” has been created, with kerb-free surfaces, the removal of a gyratory, and a 20mph limit imposed to create a safer and calmer environment that puts pedestrians first. A project at Sloane Street saw the creation of wider pavements, a planting scheme designed by Andy Sturgeon and improved pedestrian crossings.  

“Ten years ago, the transport department, or even local authorities, would block projects like this. Now, it’s reversed. They’re quite keen on encouraging that sort of thing. So that’s a set of opportunities, and it’s up to individual firms, whether they’re design practices or contractors, to think how they would benefit from those opportunities, and it may be forming close relationships with developers or a local authority.” 

Heatwaves are also pushing cooling up the agenda. London has even created a map which provides details of the cooler places within the city, with one overlay showing the tree canopy cover. 

Bowles and Wyer has been engaged with Westminster on several small sites and dealing with the development department has been quite different to dealing with a housing department, says Wyer. “They’re, understandably, very development minded and the sites move very rapidly. Instead of dealing with an asset, they look at opportunities.” This relationship began because of a project manager Bowles and Wyer had previously worked with. 

Raising standards with green spaces

London Plan Policy G5 also now requires all major developers to include urban greening as an element of a design, and the Urban Greening Factor (UGF) evaluates the quantity and quality. “UGF started off as a proposal and then became a recommendation from the mayor’s office and then became mandatory as the boroughs took it on board,” explains Wyer. “The mayor recommends 0.4 for developments that are predominately residential, and a target score of 0.3 for predominately commercial development. But developers chase it and try to exceed it.  

“UGF is having a similar effect that BREEAM has had. It’s generally driven up standards because it’s measured and no one wants to say they’re not an excellent rating. The only way to achieve a high UGF and good returns on the investment, in most cases in central London, are by putting in serious landscape on top of buildings and up the facades of buildings and in the public realm.” 

Opportunities on the horizon

Considering house affordability, Wyer says there will be movement into a stronger build to rent market. Research from Savills shows that the sector attracted £2.2 billion of investment in Q2 this year. “Developers are seeing it as a better way to work long-term,” says Wyer. “It’s more predictable, and it allows them to get penetration into parts of the market that they weren’t previously able to – because there are generations that distrust buying or think they’re never going to be able to afford a place, so they’re more interested in good quality long-term lets. From a landscape point of view, it works because instead of just doing the minimum, developers have a long-term interest in the site.” 

The way our towns and cities are being used has changed, it seems there’s a shift in the way they are being designed as a result. Local authorities are considering what will draw people back to the high street, with public realm at the heart of this. Bradford is arguably leading the charge, and building good relationships is allowing it to succeed.