Cabot Circus and Champion Square

Client: Bristol Alliance/Future/Bristol City Council

New Leaf Studio’s input began relatively late in the build programme for this major city centre mixed use redevelopment, initially to design the car park and surrounds to a new hotel.

Adjacent to the hotel was an area that had been master-planned as traditional highway with a small “leftover” piece of open space. Staff at Bristol City Council recognised this space as an opportunity to do something different, developing it as the city centre’s first area of “shared space”.  A concept where differentiation between vehicular and pedestrian surfaces is removed entirely. New Leaf Studio were appointed to produce proposals for the space which has become known as Champion Square. The limited, pre-determined budget has resulted in a fairly simple scheme, however the shared space principal has worked well, with the site being used as a case study for shared space in a number of publications.

New leaf Studio were then also asked to design various other areas of the site that had not already been resolved, including planting to a large gyratory island, provision of a temporary coach park as well as providing assistance to the developer to achieve close-out in respect of their commitment to the Council in terms of defects liability, final treatment and fine tuning of public footways, installation of bus stops, adoption of planting and provision of new trees in the public domain.