The Coventry Society supports the Council’s plan to close High Street to vehicle traffic and we hope that it will contribute to a longer term plan to reduce the traffic passing through the Hilltop Conservation Area, voted by Coventrians as the city’s favourite Conservation Area.
In response to the Coronavirus epidemic the Council has closed High Street to traffic during the working day. The Council’s press release states:
“New measures on Coventry’s High Street will be introduced to help create more space for people to queue safely outside banks and building societies.
“With the UK in lockdown for a number of weeks, residents have only been able to use essential services and shops within the city centre, but High Street has been a busy area due to its number of banks and building societies, with busier times seeing people queue across Broadgate.
“To help ensure people can queue safely whilst maintaining social distancing, High Street will be closed to cars from this week between 9am and 5pm daily to allow pedestrians to use the road space to queue.
“Councillor Patricia Hetherton, Cabinet Member for City Services, said: “High Street has remained busy with people using those essential services throughout lockdown, but we’re pleased to say that most people have maintained social distancing whilst they’ve been queuing.
“However, as some areas of the city centre will begin to go back to work soon, we know this might make the city centre busier in certain areas and we want to make sure that people can still socially distance and use the city centre safely.
“That’s why we’ve decided to close High Street to cars between 9am-5pm, giving more room for people to queue up and making best use of the space available. The closure will also mean that people who want to pass the people who are queuing will be able to step safely into the road area to pass.”
“We’ll keep this under review while we continue to monitor foot traffic around the city centre and introduce more measures to keep people safe if we need to.”
The closure will be in place between 9am and 5pm to enable deliveries to be made after hours.
In 2019 Coventrians voted Hill Top as the City’s favourite Conservation Area in a Civic Voice competition to find England’s favourite Conservation Area. A decision on this is awaited.
By all means extend traffic-free City Centre but please stop filling up the traffic-free Precinct with unnecessary blockages (trees, benches, fast food wagons etc), which impede pedestrians and screw up social distancing. Can’t some of these blockages and impediments be relocated to former BHS?