Rex Jory: Adelaide is not a city designed for the modern era

Many of Adelaide’s most-used public areas are designed only for the use of those who drive cars and the city is suffering as a result, writes Rex Jory.

Rose Gardens in Adelaide and SA Wellington Square Wednesday 20 October 2021 Pic Roy VanDerVegt

A trio of Adelaide’s six public squares are at best a disappointment, at worst a disgrace.

They have been sacrificed on the altar of the great god, the motor car.

Victoria Square in the city’s centre, Hindmarsh Square and Hurtle Square look like the designers have pushed them through a chef’s slicing mandolin.

Planned by Colonel William Light as stock-grazing areas and ­retreats for people to relax, they are both car-friendly and pedestrian-hostile.

At least Whitmore Square, Light Square and Wellington Square in North Adelaide offer reasonable, unbroken expanses of open space and trees.

Peak hour traffic on King William St in Victoria Square. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Brenton Edwards

They partly meet the demands of contemporary use.

To be fair, the good Colonel could not have imagined, in the 1830s, that Adelaide would be overwhelmed by motor vehicles in the year 2022.

Even steam-driven vehicles, let alone traffic lights, electric trams, 36-wheel semi-trailers and reticulated buses, were unimagined 186 years ago.

Early drawings by Colonel Light – who sat under a tree on the site of the old Adelaide Gaol to design Adelaide – show the squares that he incorporated were sliced in quarters by roads.

These roads were used by ox-drawn carts, horse and buggies and single horses.

The pace was gentle, traffic was light, the atmosphere was serene and pedestrians were relatively safe.

Adelaide’s designer William Light

Now the three most offensive, inhospitable squares are noisy and shredded into tennis-court-sized blocks of green and concrete.

The recently renovated Victoria Square remains a giant vehicle roundabout.

Its best features – the public areas to the north and the open area and fountain to the south – are acceptable.

But if the human brain can put mobile cameras on Mars, surely we can design a traffic tunnel running east-west under the square linking Wakefield St and Grote St.

A tunnel would free up additional areas for pedestrian and public entertainment activity.

If we were truly bold, the plans and models of an underground rail link starting in Victoria Square and running under King William St to beyond North Tce could be hauled out of the state government basement and dusted off.

A shot of Hindmarsh Square

Colonel Light had great vision for the conditions of the 1830s. No such vision exists for the demands of the 2020s.

Hindmarsh Square – in perhaps the highest-density pedestrian region of the city – is cut in two by Pulteney St, and then its northern end has been decapitated by Grenfell St.

It is dominated by vehicles.

Hurtle Square, in a growing residential region, is much the same – shredded by Pulteney St and Halifax St.

The Adelaide City Council has erected a nice piece of art in the square reading The Forest of Dreams.

One online cynic wrote: “Really. It’s just four pieces of lawn on four corners of an intersection.”

Light Square, ironically the gravesite of Colonel Light, has a reasonable expanse of unbroken grass, scuttled at its north end by Currie St.

Wellington Square. Picture: Roy VanDerVegt

Whitmore Square and Wellington Square remain the only ones that are all but untouched by roads, apart from those around their perimeter. Cars feed around them but at least at their centre they work as pedestrian oases, somewhere to sit or play.

Perhaps, hidden in plain sight, they are a blueprint for other squares.

Adelaide’s great squares were not conceived by Colonel Light as motor vehicle roundabouts.

The Colonel designed them for the people.

It’s time they were given back to the people.

Whitmore Square. Picture: Brenton Edwards

City planners are, perhaps, too timid to reconstruct the squares to enhance their pedestrian value because they might create new traffic problems and further clog an already clogged city.

But Covid-19 has pointed the way to the future.

More people will work from home. More people are moving to regions.

Adelaide, the city, may have reached its peak as a motor car city.

I’m not saying that we should trash the city’s great squares and disrupt the existing traffic flows.

But why not quietly revisit the design of all the squares and – where it’s feasible – return them to the people?