Ashford’s one-way ring road had become a ‘race track’ and a restricting collar to the town centre, strangling the life out of the town. The aspiration was to convert the ring road into a series of two-way quality streets and to ‘break up’ the whole ring road concept.
An enlightened client allowed the landscape architect to develop the design of a unique and distinctive public realm. It was important to look at precedents and the work of the Dutch engineer Hans Monderman was introduced. The result is one of the first integrated pedestrian and vehicular routes in the UK.
The brief led to the exploration of ways to achieve this by pushing the boundaries of conventional highway design. There was a need to start with ‘place making’ rather than filling in the bits left over after the highway had been designed.
