2.1 Arrival

This section provides a ‘thick description’ of Southwell Council's offices and the council planners. It grounds the reader in the realities of white-collar working life for many employees in urban edge-lands and for our planners in this case. It also serves as a brief introduction to planning pressures in the English urban fringe.

Riding the tram to the office park early on a summer morning, I travel in the opposite direction from most people, who are headed to the city centre. The windows of the houses get smaller, giving way to expanses of new build. It's about a one-mile walk from the tram to the council offices; there are no signposts for pedestrians, but I latch onto a scant trail of knowledge workers, with their manbags and reusable coffee mugs, who are making their way through the edge-lands to their offices, navigating the five-legged roundabout and walking along the pavement by the dual carriageway. As I get nearer, I cut off the highway onto one of the ancient rights of way that, somewhat incongruously, criss-cross the manicured landscape of the office park. Here, the yellow loosestrife is in bloom and allotment smells reach me over a tall fence. Back on the main artery of the office park, a team of landscape gardeners is maintaining the intentional curves of the corporate hedging and spraying weedkiller on the soil between the shrubs. I am one of about five pedestrians; the road is backed up with a mighty queue of near-stationary cars, filing slowly into work, punctuated by the occasional double-decker bus.

We are on the city-edges, in post-suburbia (Phelps, 2011); the buildings – a private hospital, an empty former government call centre, a pharmaceutical company headquarters, an improbable hotel that serves people for whom a business park is a destination – have a boxy sameness that you can't hold on to. The old town hall, a distinctive grade-II listed building on a busy high street a few miles from here, has been repurposed as a commercial business centre offering office and meeting space. The ‘new’ council offices brought its employees together – in the old arrangement, some departments were dispersed across several sites – but the location is anonymous and placeless. The official address is denoted by the unmemorable identifiers ‘Sector 5’ and ‘Enterprise Way’.