Giving Corn Exchange Square Back to Pedestrians

Until five years ago, Corn Exchange Square in the centre of Wexley was a square in name only. Its cobbles had long since disappeared under asphalt, and the space was divided between a car park, a taxi rank and a tangle of guard railings that funnelled pedestrians along its edges. Shoppers hurried through it on their way somewhere else; almost nobody stopped. When the city council finally decided to remove the traffic, it held an open competition for the redesign, and the winning scheme, by a small practice of landscape architects, has transformed the square into what is now, by most measures, the busiest public space in the city.

The architects began by asking what the square had been for. Historically, it was the place where farmers brought samples of grain to sell to millers and merchants, and the Corn Exchange itself, a handsome classical building with a columned portico, still forms the western side of the square. Rather than competing with it, the designers chose to keep the centre of the square largely open, so that the building's façade can be seen from almost anywhere within it, and to place most new structures around the edges, where they frame the space instead of cluttering it.

The first thing most visitors notice, approaching from Market Street to the north, is the market canopy, a lightweight steel and glass roof that runs along the northern edge of the square, from the corner of the Corn Exchange eastwards. On weekdays it shelters a food market; on Sundays it hosts a craft fair, and in bad weather it is simply a place to stand out of the rain. At its eastern end, the canopy stops short of the north-eastern corner, which is occupied by a group of Lime Trees planted in the 1890s. These were the only feature of the old square that the public consultation insisted on keeping, and the designers went to some trouble to protect their roots during construction.

At the heart of the square are the Water Jets, a grid of fountains set flush with the paving, which can be switched off entirely when the space is needed for events. On summer afternoons they are crowded with children, and the designers deliberately left the surrounding paving free of benches so that parents could watch from the shade further away. South-west of the jets, filling the corner between them and the city's main shopping streets, lies the events lawn, a gently sloping area of hard-wearing grass that is used as a venue for concerts and open-air cinema. Its slope was carefully calculated so that a seated audience can see over the heads of those in front.

Some of the scheme's most innovative features are the least conspicuous. Directly south of the lime trees, running along the eastern side of the square beside Tanners Row, is the rain garden, a sunken bed of moisture-loving grasses and shrubs into which rainwater from the paving drains. Instead of overwhelming the city's ageing sewers during heavy storms, the water soaks slowly into the ground, and the planting has attracted insects and birds that had not been recorded in the city centre for decades. Similarly, the cycle hub, tucked against the western edge of the square immediately south of the Corn Exchange, provides secure parking for two hundred bicycles, a repair workshop and changing rooms, yet its low green roof makes it almost invisible from the square itself.

Along the southern edge, to the east of the lawn, stands the Pavilion, a single-storey café with folding glass walls that open onto the square in fine weather. Beyond it, in the south-eastern corner of the square where Tanners Row meets the main shopping street, the designers found a new place for the war memorial, which had previously stood on a traffic island where it was almost impossible to visit. It now has a quiet setting of its own, screened from the activity of the square by a low hedge, and the annual remembrance service is attended by far larger numbers than before.

Not everyone welcomed the changes. Some traders complained that the loss of parking would drive customers away, and a number of older residents regretted the disappearance of the taxi rank. Yet surveys suggest that footfall in the surrounding streets has risen by almost a third, and the square is now regularly cited in professional journals as an example of how a car-dominated space can be returned to people without losing its sense of history.