Community Arts Centre

Caldicot recently earned the title of ‘Rising Star’ due to its sudden boom in the housing market. However the area soon became a sleeping, layover town with bloated schools and a high street with little engagement and was approaching stagnation. Recent plans from both the local council and citizens aim to rejuvenate the town physically and socially.

My site (a supermarket carpark located behind the town’s highstreet) is the culmination of the town centre’s three key issues: a shunning from nature from the pedestrianised centre and an over reliance on cars, an indirect access to key town features with pedestrian routes decided after car roads and an aging highstreet struggling to engage the new townspeople.

My design aims to bring in a new wave of life into the town centre. Creating an arts centre can elevate the town’s prospects and cross a generational bridge. Working in the same space with other ages allows for the passing on of trades onto a new generation who will inturn have greater career prospects. At a large scale an arts centre could also be a platform draw in more visitors to the area as a creative space popular across the county. Connecting my design to the sites surrounding context allows it to create a more cohesive urban block and work inline with new values of the local council and the town’s citizens. The proposed Arts Centre re-organises pedestrian routes, prioritising travel by foot rather than cars (however preserving disabled access to the adjacent supermarket). This design also brings nature and vegetation into my site, where a garden provides a peaceful space in the town’s centre fully surrounded by the urban block. Both the structure and infrastructure of my design links into the town where direct routes create a civic centre and open outdoor spaces connect to the town’s social and commercial side.