Pilots of Penzance
North of 50
Don Sawyer
If you’ve heard of Penzance at all, it’s probably as part of the title of Gilbert and Sullivan’s treacly operetta The Pirates of Penzance. But Penzance is a real city, alive and well on the magnificent Cornish coast, a city that has a lot to teach us about how to build and maintain strong, sustainable communities.
Researchers into the characteristics of happy communities point to a number of key elements that add up to jollier cities: short commutes to work; lots of public spaces; little design and service differentiation between poorer and wealthier sections; inexpensive, efficient and comfortable public transit; prioritization of bike, foot and public transit; and a vital downtown with crowded streets. Penzance has these in spades, and my recent visit there convinced me that 400-year-old Penzance is also a pretty good model for 21st century community planners.
With a population of about 22,000, Penzance is small city a little larger than my community, Salmon Arm, and a little smaller than Penticton. Like those communities, Penzance is both a commercial and tourist centre, and has a lovely waterfront. But beyond these similarities, Penzance and Okanagan communities have grown – and are growing – in strikingly different directions.
To show you what I mean, join me for a quick tour of the city.
We arrive from London on one of the five daily round-trip trains, which move people efficiently and comfortably from center of London to Penzance in about six hours. As we climb off the train in Penzance’s modest but attractive Victorian station, we turn right, and in less than a block we’re smack in the middle of the city. Let’s turn left up High Street. The narrow road is lined with lovely commercial buildings, many protected under the Penwith Local Plan, which controls the development of the entire downtown core as well as the waterfront. There are two levels of sidewalks – one along the street, and another a meter or so above to serve the stores, pubs, and shops, a kind of pedestrian service road. There are surprisingly few cars, but busses to and from all parts of the region chug through the streets one after the other.
Turning right, we are on a beautiful pedestrian-only street lined with crowded bakeries, flower shops, butchers, and several small green grocers. And a Woolworth’s, selling discount goods from a 200-year-old shop that fits right into the architecture of the downtown core. It’s November, and about four raw degrees out. But the streets are packed with pedestrians, young and old, wheeling small shopping carts behind them, sitting in cafes and on public benches. These are not tourists. (Only a couple of hardy Canadians would think Cornwall was a really great November seaside destination.) These are locals who chat and laugh as they squeeze the apples and kibitz with the baker.
At the top of Chapel Street, we find out why there are so few cars. The only public parking lot is wedged in behind a pub and the public washroom facilities. It has exactly 20 spaces. If you want to come to town, take a bus, train, bike or walk. And can you ever walk! Miles of public walkways crisscross the city, wandering behind people’s backyards with their laundry hanging out to dry, running between tall brick walls covered in ivy, rising in stone steps up hillsides. No part of the city is more than a 15 minute stroll from any other part. That’s mainly because if you go another few meters up Chapel Street, the city does something quite remarkable. It stops.
Penzance has no sprawl, no outlying shopping centres to kill the downtown, no monster retail outlets that shift commercial activity outside of the core. It also has little housing outside the compact city. Instead, medium density housing is everywhere, some of it magnificent Georgian and Victorian row houses, but also subsidized council estates, which -- even those built in recent years – maintain the traditional look of the city through the use of traditional architecture and local materials.
Let’s continue on down to the waterfront. Rather than hotels hogging the shoreline, a broad promenade, maybe 50 meters wide and several kilometres long, curves along the bay. Hotels, restaurants and businesses are restricted to the far side of the road. A public saltwater pool, built in 1935, nudges against the sea wall. To the south, the promenade gives way to the Cornish Trail, 200 kilometres of coastal trail that draws 150,000 people each year to enjoy the magnificent scenery.
Walking back into town, small pocket parks, little green oases, are everywhere. Walkways and roads often end in public squares with statues of prominent Penzancians. A downtown library, housed in a 150-year-old building, is connected to an art school that draws students from all over Britain and builds on the community’s long artistic tradition. A wonderful museum celebrates both pre-historical and historical settlement and traditions. Families and couples holding hands stroll through lovely Morrab Gardens, with its collection of sub-tropical plants.
Oh, I know. That’s over there. The city was built before cars. They have more heritage buildings. People are more used to walking. The climate is better. They have a longer history. We can find lots of reasons to continue our wasteful, community shattering, car-oriented, lifestyle, but in our hearts I think we know it is unsustainable and, ultimately unsatisfying. There is a reason communities like Penzance thrive and grow in thoughtful, careful steps, build on and respect their pasts, and protect their downtown cores.
It’s because it works. With gas prices skyrocketing, climate change threatening, economic markets trembling, it may well be that Penzance, and communities like it, are pilots of where we should be going in rethinking our own cities.
Back to the future indeed.
Print (Microsoft Word Document)
