Improving the Elder Place corridor

Background information

The Elder Place Corridor is to the north-east of the city centre. It includes Elder Place, Providence Place, and St Peter’s Street.

Currently, the area can feel unsafe as it suffers from graffiti tagging and other antisocial behaviour. It also has narrow or missing pavements and limited accessibility, poor streetlighting, through-traffic, a lack of trees and green spaces, and things to see and do.

We want to make this unloved area more welcoming and vibrant.

We have a small amount of funding from local developers to spend on the Elder Place Corridor. The money needs to be used to improve its look and feel, improving things like roads, pavements, streetlighting and public spaces.

We’ve come up with some early ideas and preliminary designs called our 'concept plan' and we’d like your views and feedback on them. We’d also like to know how you want to use the area, your ideas for how you think it could be improved and how you might wish to get involved.

Using your feedback, we’ll further develop the designs and hope to begin making the improvements we can with the money we have in 2026. We don’t have enough funding to make all the improvements to the area in one go, and so we plan to focus first on Elder Place as this is where we feel the most improvements can be achieved.

When and if more funding becomes available, we’ll continue to make further improvements based on these designs. We will need significant extra funding to make all the improvements included in the designs.

What is the Elder Place corridor project?

The Elder Place Corridor is the name that we’ve given to three streets in the northeast of the city centre. These streets are Elder Place, Providence Place, and St Peter’s Street. They run along the back of London Road, from Cheapside up to New England Road.

The area is run down, has a poor image, and feels unloved. We want to help inject some new life into it, to make it a more welcoming and vibrant place.

Why is the council focusing on this area?

There are several areas we think could be improved. These are:

• the narrow pavements create accessibility problems especially for disabled people, older people, and children and families
• pavement widths and clutter and parked cars mean that many people walk in the streets, while the London Road multi-storey car park is under-used
• some of the streets can also be difficult to cross
• the area is mostly covered in dark, hard surfaces and sits at the bottom of a hill which can cause flooding problems
• there are hardly any trees or plants
• the area can attract crime and antisocial behaviour, like graffiti tagging or drink related disorders
• the area is poorly lit

What benefits will this project bring?

We want to create a more welcoming and vibrant place that puts the community first – and benefits London Road businesses. We want to help create a place that is:

• more accessible, for all to use and enjoy
• enables more walking, wheeling, and cycling, giving people cleaner, healthier and more sustainable options to travel
• greener and more climate resilient
• more sociable and safe, by creating spaces for people to rest, enjoy, and engage in community life, providing well-lit streets, and commissioning public art
• more complementary to the surrounding area, a place with a strong sense of community

How will the Elder Place corridor project be paid for?

We have some funding from local developers to spend on the area. Because of where the funding has come from, we can only spend this money on this project.

Specifically, we must spend the money on capital (one-off physical) things that improve sustainable transport (walking, wheeling, and cycling) and the public realm (the spaces between buildings that the public can use, like streets, green spaces, cycle ways and pedestrian areas).

We cannot spend this money on revenue (ongoing) costs, like running our day-to-day services.

As well as this developer funding, we are seeking significant additional funding from outside the council to enable the full potential of this area.

At what stage is this project?

The project is still at an early stage. We've already spoken with local residents, businesses, organisations and groups, who have shared their thoughts and suggestions on how to make the area better.

We have used this feedback to develop our ideas and help shape our ‘concept plan’, which are our preliminary designs for the area.

We want to share our early designs with you, and we’d like your views and feedback on them.

When will we see the results of this consultation?

The consultation finishes on Tuesday 5 August 2025. We will then need some time to analyse the responses that we’ve had, and to finish the concept plan.

We will share a summary of the consultation findings and the finished concept plan with you by the end of September 2025, by posting these on Your Voice.

What happens next?

We will use your feedback to adapt the concept plan and create a detailed design for the part of the area we’d like to focus on first, most likely Elder Place from York Hill to New England Road.

The detailed design would involve further consultation with the local community. We’d then like to begin making improvements in 2026.

Because we don’t have enough money to improve the whole area all in one go, we will need to do detailed design and building work over time. We plan to make changes to Providence Place and St Peter’s Street once we’ve secured further funding for the project. 

Further funding will need to come from outside the council.

The proposals mean removing some of the on-street parking bays. Where will I be able to park instead?

We are not proposing to remove any of the disabled parking bays, but over time would like to remove many of the shared-use bays so that we can make the area more accessible and put in place improvements to make it a more welcoming and vibrant place.

There are several multi-storey car parks in and around the area, and we would encourage all visitors to the area to use these instead of the on-street parking bays.

The London Road car park costs about the same as parking on-street, and offers reduced rate season passes for residents and employees, and a permit scheme for those on the waiting list for a resident parking permit (in Parking Zone Y).

We also plan to put in place new loading bays.

Why don’t the proposals include closing the turning from London Road to York Hill, as this causes a significant amount of through traffic on Elder Place?

The through traffic is due to a left-turn ban at the Preston Circus junction, on the northbound London Road. This means that relatively large numbers of vehicles route through Elder Place to New England Street to travel westbound, towards the Seven Dials or Old Shoreham Road.

To reestablish this left-turn would require a remodel of the Preston Circus junction. This would take significant time and investment, and this project does not have sufficient funding to complete this work.