The Avenues: future proofing Glasgow’s Streets

As the world’s attention turns to Glasgow, an enduring legacy has been created in Sauchiehall Street.

Ian Hingley

Urban Movement

Sauchiehall Street Avenue was completed in 2019, transforming a hostile, degraded and vehicle dominated four-lane highway into a humanised public space. Traffic was squeezed into a single running lane with a second lane for bus stops, taxi ranks, loading and disabled parking. This created room for the new public spaces and more favourable conditions for life on the street with calmed trafficresulting in reduced noise and air pollution.

The initial £6.5 million investment in Sauchiehall Street has given Glasgow a new high functioning public realm, that is equipped to meet the needs of the 21st century citizen, setting the standard for the upcoming Avenues.It provides an infrastructure that enables more of life to be lived out in the street in safe, comfortable and accessible spaces and will act as catalyst for an active travel revolution in a city where obesity levels are relatively high and life expectancy is relatively low. Encouraging more people to walk, cycle and use public transport, rather than drive, is one of the programmes primary objectives. In addition to providing the actual physical infrastructure (footways, cycle tracks and bus shelters etc.) Sauchiehall Street now demonstrates all of the ten indicators of TfL’s ‘Healthy Streets’ initiative.

The design introduced two new principal components: a 2.5m wide multifunctional verge / furniture zone next to the carriageway (which hosts the trees, seats, cycle stands, decorative lighting and all other street furniture), and a 3m wide bidirectional cycle track. These new components, when combined with the widened and resurfaced footway, create a single linear ‘public’ space on the north side, framed by the trees. On the southside, the footway was also widened, decluttered and resurfaced, and now has ample licensable space outside cafes and bars along with extensive public seating.

The most dramatic new physical element, however, are the trees. A single straight line of thirty-eight semi-mature (40-45cm girth, 7m high) mixed species deciduous and fastigiate trees run down the centre of the street. They were planted into a 2m wide trenched rootzone, created with structural crates and surfaced with Caithness slabs and detailed with permeable joints to allow surface water to penetrate.

The new segregated cycle track allows cyclists to travel west, legally, for the first time since the introduction of the one-way system, and initial counts by the council show that cycling levels have increased by 80% eastbound and 600% west-bound.

Sauchiehall Street Avenue

© Ian Hingley

Sauchiehall Street Avenue

© Ian Hingley

Walking is encouraged by increasing the width available to pedestrians by widening footways, creating furniture zones, removing trade waste bins and resurfacing with Glasgow’s standard Caithness stone slab. Footway ‘continuity’ across side roads helps to encourage pedestrian and cyclist priority and remove trip hazards created by the traditional upstand kerb arrangement. Accessible seats, all with backs and arms rests, were arranged at regular intervals to offer places to rest and socialise.

Sauchiehall Street is now more social, active and economically buoyant as people occupy the street in ways they previously couldn’t. This is evidenced by the number of people simply out in the street with pavement café culture the new norm.

Glasgow City Council’s Derek Dunsire had secured the City Deal funding and prepared an open, pan-European tender to find a design consultant to develop Sauchiehall Street. He had been intrigued by Urban Movement’s holistic approach to street design, which focused on making streets humanised public spaces, structured around active travel and green and blue infrastructure that were not subordinate to `highways’ requirements. Urban Movement eventually won the tender for the Sauchiehall Street Avenue and later a second commission, partnering with Civic Engineers, to design the first tranche of the Avenues, which included Argyle Street, Dixon Street and St Enoch’s Square amongst several others.

Glasgow city centre has very few public open spaces, street trees or seats. To help address this shortfall, Sauchiehall Street was simply reconceived as a linear public space that met the Avenues programmes’ sustainable infrastructure and active travel objectives. The street design was informed by principles set out in ‘Designing Streets’ (the Scottish equivalent of ‘Manual for Streets’) as well as best practice from across the UK and Europe, particularly Copenhagen and Berlin and earlier Urban Movement projects in Clapham and Brighton.

Establishing pedestrian and cycling priority at the side roads was a difficult challenge, as traditional highway design prioritises vehicle movements, making pedestrians wait, step down and cross the road when there is a gap in the traffic. One of the biggest constraints on the layout were the under-ground conditions, specifically the location of utilities. Thorough site investigation allowed us to (reasonably) accurately predict their location, which determined that the trees should be planted down the middle of the street.

Visually impaired people were (and still are) concerned that the cycle track, located at the same level as the footway and the verge, would not be easily identified by either long cane or guide dog users. To help with detection, a contrasting material was used to surface the track along with a raised profile edge unit. This was felt to be the best compromise solution, as a ‘stepped track’ detail would create a barrier for mobility impaired people and those pushing buggies.

Raingardens to manage surface water runoff were originally planned for Sauchiehall Street, but were not built due to fears over the proximity of basements. They will, however, be included in all future Avenues.

Ian Hingley is a chartered landscape architect and urban designer with over thirty years of experience, specialising mainly in the design of streets and the public realm.