I was a bit of a fan of the old secret garden in the Westgate Multistorey Car-Park (that's an earlier blog-post about it) before a massive demolition job reduced the car-park first to chewed concrete fragments, then to a colossal hole in the ground, and thence, by degrees, to the cathedral of commercetainment we have today.
From what I spotted the other day, from up in the leafy skywalk, it may be that the developers were also secretly (or not so secretly; the development explicitly set out to include and/or reference the existing buildings where possible) fans.
What are they building down there, surrounded by the dollhouse brick cliffs, and behind the no through road and works signs? I fired up my zoom for a closer examination.
Sinister black jumping blocks, white-lady type standing stones, some of the returning trees, uplights and strappy/shrubby planting.
Gone are the swirls of the old garden, but the shape still echoes the walls around it, with awkward angles and defiantly overlapping polygons. Those upturned stones look like escapees from Oxford's Story Museum ready to come to life, should the shopping centre ever fall quiet, and drag blank faced and stony tailed through the abandoned shops; or maybe they form a perhaps sinister echo of the rough prostrate stones that lie under the trees in the Paradise Square Peace Garden on the other side of the Westgate.
Look again at that first picture; strange long cobbles are waiting to be built into a decorative surface that will recall the old Westgate's cobbled garden, but this time in cool Millennial greys instead of straight-edge 80s browns; and cast your eyes up the wall; tensioned wires are waiting for the fast-growing creepers planted along the wall's base to make this the New Westgate's first green wall.
No idea what's going to happen to that old fence panel, or even if the tiny patch of green space behind will be part of the finished garden. Maybe it will stay interstitial; conflicted; untended, a little mysterious wildspace in the heart of the shopping centre.
From what I spotted the other day, from up in the leafy skywalk, it may be that the developers were also secretly (or not so secretly; the development explicitly set out to include and/or reference the existing buildings where possible) fans.
What are they building down there, surrounded by the dollhouse brick cliffs, and behind the no through road and works signs? I fired up my zoom for a closer examination.
Sinister black jumping blocks, white-lady type standing stones, some of the returning trees, uplights and strappy/shrubby planting.
Gone are the swirls of the old garden, but the shape still echoes the walls around it, with awkward angles and defiantly overlapping polygons. Those upturned stones look like escapees from Oxford's Story Museum ready to come to life, should the shopping centre ever fall quiet, and drag blank faced and stony tailed through the abandoned shops; or maybe they form a perhaps sinister echo of the rough prostrate stones that lie under the trees in the Paradise Square Peace Garden on the other side of the Westgate.
Look again at that first picture; strange long cobbles are waiting to be built into a decorative surface that will recall the old Westgate's cobbled garden, but this time in cool Millennial greys instead of straight-edge 80s browns; and cast your eyes up the wall; tensioned wires are waiting for the fast-growing creepers planted along the wall's base to make this the New Westgate's first green wall.
No idea what's going to happen to that old fence panel, or even if the tiny patch of green space behind will be part of the finished garden. Maybe it will stay interstitial; conflicted; untended, a little mysterious wildspace in the heart of the shopping centre.
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