There are a couple of pics taken on tuesday evening below. First impressions of the site are:
a) its massive and would take a day to cover the whole area. I managed to get around the bit between London Bridge, Union Street and Blackfriars Road.
b) the area has a very wide variety of different land uses and types of building fabric ranging from large office blocks to tight knit historical terrace streets to 1920s style local authority flats.
c) some streets would be quite easily pedestrianised as its already very lightly trafficked in part, but some kind of audit is probably needed to assess a kind of pedestrianised street network, with different levels of vehicular access (obviously some roads will need to remain primarily vehicle dominated if the scheme is to be realistic)
d) there is already quite a lot of 'arts quarter' uses from small design workshops and architects practices to larger arts institutions. It is quite easy to imagine how this area might be in some ways as there are existing examples on more micro scale that exhibit the kind of characteristics we might be looking for. Examples are, converted arches on the alleys alongside the railway viaducts, lighting projects under the bridges (with a unified theme creating a type of character area)
e)problems are dark and unwelcoming streets (security issues), problems of restricting car access (from traffic pov), large ex-industrial lots used as car parks or garages and providing no frontage or life on the street. Lack of a good mix of uses to ensure livliness at different times - there is resi, commercial and retail but it is segregated block by block -suggest live/work type accomodation, ground floor retail/studios/commercial (small scale) resi /office upstairs?