Your say / Bristol Arena
‘Granting planning permission to YTL Arena would do untold harm to Bristol’
Fifty years ago, some terrible planning decisions were made that we look back at today with amazement, but we can remind ourselves that planners were following the wisdom of the times.
On Wednesday, Bristol councillors will consider whether to grant planning permission to YTL to construct a 17,000-capacity arena on the edge of Bristol and South Gloucestershire.
If they grant planning permission to the YTL Arena, then people in the future will look back and not understand at all why they did such harm to the city.
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There are two main reasons why the YTL Arena should not be granted planning permission: location and how people will get there.
YTL Arena will be built within the Brabazon hangars on the edge of the former Filton Airfield – photo: Martin Booth; CGI: YTL
1. Location
Sometime in the last century town planners were all in favour of building large-scale out of town developments. These attractions sucked life and money towards the fringes and led to a decline in city centres.
This process is known as doughnutting, because cities develop holes in the middle, and in UK we saw many cities go savagely downhill, with huge retail, hotel and other closures in the centre.
The harmful effects were clear enough that the Sequential Test was introduced as national law to help councillors avoid harming the places they represented. This test requires applications for large attractions to be located in centres, if a suitable space is available and “only if suitable sites are not available should out of centre sites be considered”.
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Read more: YTL Arena boss: ‘We’re building much more than just an arena’
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In Bristol, we have a suitable central site available. It’s very central – it’s next to Temple Meads and called Arena Island. It used to be inaccessible and polluted, but the council has spent £12m of our money constructing bridges to it and clearing the land.
It is still our land, even though the council have been doing their best to sell it quickly at a knockdown price. It has not yet been sold to private interests and it is up to us, Bristol, what we do with it.
It is a perfect location for a major attraction (our elected representatives voted 50-0 that it is the best place for an arena to be located) and we should not even consider harming our city centre by building an arena on the borders of the next county while Arena Island is available.
The Island formerly known as Arena before Marvin Rees pulled the plug – photo by Martin Booth
2. How people get there
Public transport to Filton is better than it used to be but by the time the proposed YTL arena opens there will still just be one suburban train an hour to it.
YTL’s own hopeful figures project up to 85 per cent of people arriving by car: such an overwhelming amount that Highways England have lodged several official caveats and conditions to the application.
Not only is it insane to build such a car reliant attraction in the 2020s, when we’re trying to lessen car use, but we know that the cars will only get there if new roads are built through Bristol, using tens of millions of pounds of taxpayer money.
We’ve been here before in the 70s, when the M32 was built right into Bristol, dividing communities in a way that took decades to recover from (if we have ever fully recovered).
In the 60s and 70s, terrible planning decisions were made by people who sincerely believed they were doing the best thing.
Today, we know that building massive attractions on the edge of town is crazy. We know that encouraging greater car use and building major roads right through cities is madness.
If we grant planning permission this week to the YTL arena then we will know that we are making a bad decision and when people look back in 50 years at what we did, we will have no excuse.
Main image: YTL
Ali Robertson has lived in south Bristol for 12 years. He used to run the Tobacco Factory Theatre and is now a freelance theatre and arts producer.
Read more: What to expect from the YTL Arena in Filton
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