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30 C O N T E X T 1 7 9 : M A R C H 2 0 2 4 ROGER HIGGINS Regeneration in Carlisle The turbulent history of Carlisle dates back 1,900 years to its role as the largest fort on Hadrian’s Wall. Today, a series of regeneration projects is putting new life into the city. Carlisle hosted the IHBC Summer School of 2013 on the theme of traditional skills.With the opportunity to dress slates and blacksmith in the Market Square, the focus of the school was the importance of craft skills to support our built heritage. Delegates were also briefed on emerg- ing regeneration plans for the city, drawing on concepts set out in the city council’s Urban Design Guide and Public Realm Framework (2009). The first envisaged scheme – public realm improvements at Castle Street, an ancient thoroughfare linking the Market Place to the castle via Carlisle’s 12th-century cathedral – had just been completed, coming a respectable runner up in the Urban Design Group’s public realm awards. Other schemes included reducing the severance effect of Castle Way, the 1970s dual carriageway cutting the city off from the castle, enhancements at the Grade II* Citadel Station and a suite of public realm proposals stretching across the city. Fast-forward a decade and many of the projects anticipated in that document are only now breaking ground. The first phase was due to begin in January 2024 with a redesign of the Green Market, which is an annex of the larger Market Place but a key node between the main retail offer and the historic quarter. This £4.4 million Future High Street Fund scheme will lift the tired, red-block paving laid in 1989, creating a new entertainments area with stepped seating, a reintroduction of natural paving materials and a reduction in the current open-access loading free-for-all. This first step is part of a wider £80-million- plus investment programme which will see fur- ther public realm works and the construction of a new University of Cumbria headquarters at the Grade I Citadel. The Citadel, or English Gate, forming the southern entrance to the walled city, was built by Henry VIII to replace the medieval Botcher’s Gate to the designs of Stefan von Haschenperg. The site is highly significant and prominent, a jewel in the crown of the city, with the University of Cumbria a fitting new occupant now that the city’s judicial and civic functions have decamped. Portions of the medieval fortress remain under the 1822 redesign by Sir Robert Smirke and Thomas Telford, when the now defunct forti- fications (by then an unsatisfactory gaol) were converted into Carlisle’s Nisi Prius Court and County Court, twin stone cylinders guarding the entrance to the city. With the twin citadels to the south and the Norman castle (a location used in the time- travelling Jacobite potboiler ‘Outlander’) to the north, Carlisle’s martial past is very much in evidence. The western walls of the city still stand, last seeing service in the Jacobite uprising of 1745 and with their eastern sec- tion dismantled only in 1814. The strategic and contested location of the city predates English and Scottish conflicts and runs back An impression of how the new Court Square might appear