What does it mean to have designed the new Colston Hall when you are from Bristol yourself?
It certainly increased the interest for me and I hope my prior knowledge of Bristol helped. I visited the Colston Hall and The Little Theatre as a child with my parents and my school and subsequently with friends as a teenager and young adult. I saw Otis Redding there on the famous Stax/Volt tour just before his death and will never forget it. Do you think your own background with the city influenced your design ideas? I did my dissertation at university on post-war planning in Bristol, which I seem to remember being pretty critical about. One of the interesting things about the development of Bristol was the decision to move the commercial centre to Broadmead, when before the War it led in a continuous linear pattern from the Centre, via Corn Street and Castle Street to Old Market. The vitality of this route was legendary, a bit like a Spanish ‘paseo’, so packed out with pedestrians that vehicles were almost automatically excluded. Building a new shopping centre in Broadmead and the c
