Brum Boy said:

Just thinking how you could extend City Centre Gardens to create a large park from Cambridge Street to the canal on a small budget.

Ideally you would take down the 4 tower blocks but with some creative landscaping and design the towers could be left alone and incorporated into the park. The additional park space could be created by landscaping over the towers access roads and parking areas. Planting of tall shrubs and trees could be higher around the towers so they would blend in to the park landscape and still feel private to the residents. Free parking could be offered to the residents within one of the council run car parks on Brindley Drive so residents would not lose out.

I would only remove the low rise social housing block on Kingston Row meaning a small number of residents would need rehousing as a result. Maybe 20-30 I would guess?

To part of Cambridge Street I would create a service road for the buildings facing Centenary Square with remote controlled barriers at both ends. Remove the roundabout to make the park a little bigger and resurface the service road by continuing the paving scheme from Centenary Square.

The main entrance to the park would be from the passageway between the ICC and Rep Theatre and also directly from the canal network.

So if all this was costed I don’t think this would be a great deal of money to achieve. I will leave this with someone in the council to do the Cost-Benefit Analysis.

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