Scarborough Railway Project

After a pretty tense day before the presentation where at points it seemed we were going to face total failure we eventually managed to get our presentation finished, and I think we have learned how in future we will manage our presentations. The format we used for the presentation was a 15 minute talk where we put across our initial ideas a combination of realistic and more fantasy ideas to evoke debate. Then following this we had a workshop session where split into groups of the areas discussed within the presentation: Masterplanning, Marketing, Events, Exhibitions, Waymaking and Interventions. The results were generally good as the people there were genuinely passionate about the site and for some people was particularly emotive as it had been an important part of their childhood holidays. I felt it was important to get across to some people who felt that nothing should be done, although that is a possible final conclusion it was important to look at a number of possibilities for development they may not have thought of and to emphasis that other things could be done to the line which didn’t have to be something physical or permanent. Some good ideas were put forward which will be summarised in a following blog and was interesting to here the variety of opinions and views. I would say in general the ideas were well received, but there was the general view that whatever had to be done, should be sensitive and should relate to the context which was quite confusing with its previous industrial and urban heritage compared to the current rural cycle path. There were so many ideas we used the meeting as a way of starting to focus on a number of areas and have split up further. We have decided to focus on: the interventions and possibly a prototype, the podcast and the masterplan.

We visited a couple of the key regeneration projects within Scarborough the following day the rotunda and the spa. The master planning group had fun sketching out their ideas on the beach to the amusement of passing dog walkers.