The City Centre - A Place to Live

The importance of the City Centre cannot be underestimated. In many towns and cities, the centre has been turned into a place dedicated solely to business and shopping: impersonal and crowded in the day, unfriendly, even threatening and crime ridden at night.

We believe that it is of vital importance that Cambridge avoids falling any further into this trap. We want to develop the evening economy of the city centre. But we also believe that the way to reverse the process of decline is to make sure that the city centre is a place in which people live. Students already inhabit the area, but they do so for only half the year. We want to see a growing all year round population in the city centre. Economic development of the centre should be compatible with making it a place to live.

Making the city centre more inhabitable is not easy. Our offices-into-flats policy, for example, will only work given the right commercial conditions. But we are determined to do all we can to make sure that the city centre remains a viable community in its own right.

A number of other policy choices also flow from our commitment to making the city centre a place to live. We have successfully opposed projects that would have made the city centre more difficult to live in - for example the extravagant plans to turn the Market Square into a pink granite tourist attraction and the vast nightclub and hotel complex at Parkside. But a careful balance needs to be struck. Some city centre attractions, for example the Arts Theatre and Cinema, are not disruptive and indeed are just the sort of thing that people who want to live in a city centre expect and want. The ever present threat to the Arts Theatre, the result of Labour hostility to the arts in general, is a disaster not just for the cultural life of Cambridge but also for the civilised development of the city centre. We congratulate those involved in saving the theatre, regret the impending loss of the Arts Cinema as we know it and pledge a more supportive attitude to the theatre than Labour has shown.

On developing the evening economy of the city centre, our main proposal is the provision of a comprehensive evening bus service and the start of a late night service. We also want to see commercial night life as one of the elements of the Grand Arcade scheme and as one of the options for the redevelopment of the Arts Cinema site. We will encourage smaller shops to consider alternative patterns of opening, for example staying open during summer evenings. We will also, subject to consultation with local residents, develop a public entertainment area at Quayside similar to Covent Garden in London. We will open discussions with the Union Society about the wider use of their facilities.

Our attitude towards the city centre will also be a highly relevant consideration in other areas. For example, our attitude to edge of town shopping development will depend greatly on the predicted impact of such developments on the viability of city centre shops.

Tourism is also very important for city centre life. Tourism is of great economic value to the city, but its environmental effects have to be controlled. Working with the hotel trade and the colleges, we will aim to market Cambridge as a longer stay, city-break and conference destination and to reduce the domination of tourism by day visitors.

We opposed versions of ‘city centre management’ that were based on the assumption that commercial interests were more important than the interests of residents. But we welcome the development of a style of city centre management that treats residents’ interests as a high priority and which concentrates on improvements in basic services such as street-sweeping. We will continue to argue for the interests of city centre residents and for the representation of residents within the structure of city centre management.

A Responsive Council

We have consistently called for the Council to be organised primarily for the convenience of the public rather than for the convenience of its staff. We have campaigned, for example, for more convenient opening hours of council offices. We support making information on planning applications available at more locations in the city. We will make Council agendas, minutes and much other official information available via the internet.