NEWPORT SITE VISIT
At the end of September 2017, Vectis Studio went on a site visit to the quaint town of Newport on the Isle of Wight. The main purpose for the visit was to gauge some understanding of the atmosphere in the area along with main attractions – to get a real feel of what the town is like.
The project we were assigned with was to create a masterplan for the town, in order to regenerate it, whether that be through green spaces, university education, digital retreats, creating new eco systems or even the idea of turning the town into a totalitarian state. The possibilities that we had were endless.
We were each assigned an area prior to the visit to focus on in order to evaluate it and to then individually create a square for our 1:250 scale model of Newport. In total, we created 25 squares for our working model, each of which were slightly under the size of an A2 sheet (297mm x 420mm), which included listed buildings, ground contours along with roads and bridges to add in more detail.
Whilst visiting the Isle of Wight, we noticed that the town was very grey and dismal. Most of the shops were charity shops, many old clothes stores were permanently closed and had ‘To Let’ signs posted in the windows. Most people we saw were of the older demographic age group. It was evident to us that this town was dying and needed a new lease of life.
We walked around for 5 hours, taking in the history of the old market town and attempted to think of ways to incorporate new ideas into it without taking too much away from it. We then ventured down to the Quay Arts Centre and spoke to Ranieri, a member of the Isle of Wight council who was kind enough to explain to us the current issues in Newport.
She explained to us that after 5pm the town dies. There are no green spaces. There is no buzz or nightlife to the town. There are hardly any places for inhabitants to go to if they wanted to socialise. Most young people leave the island and move to another part of the U.K as soon as they’ve finished their secondary or college education. These issues that were addressed proved to us that there are many problems in Newport that need addressing, and regeneration is a necessity in keeping this town alive.
After receiving this information, we then visited the records office to go through old town maps to see how the towns structure had changed over the years. Once we had looked through the relevant information we then left to head back to Portsmouth. We all had plenty of ideas that we wanted to experiment with and took away with us a huge amount of useful information that we could apply to our work.
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CLAUDIA ASHDOWN