A CONCRETE 1960s car park in Worcester - seen by many as an eyesore - has been included in a book trying to change people's opinion of contemporary landscape.

Images of Change, an archaeology of England's Contemporary Landscape, includes a picture of the multi-storey car park in Friar Street.

The car park, owned by NCP, was part of the Lychgate shopping centre - now called Cathedral Plaza.

Author Sefryn Penrose said she wanted to explore how many years it took before something ceased to be an eyesore and started to become part of our heritage.

"Worcester's Cathedral Plaza car park, with its spiralling ramp jutting onto Friar Street, is typical of the scale that many 1950s and 1960s building projects had on town and city centres across Britain," she said.

"These epic projects often replaced neglected and unpopular older, sometimes medieaval, street patterns and represented visions of auto-utopias - zoned car-happy cities that were ultra-modern.

"The Lychgate shopping centre was one of these, and its multi-storey edifice made its mark on the historic buildings of Friar Street and dominated the environs of the cathedral."

Councillor David Tibbutt said his own opinion of the building, which is not city council-owned, was that it was not a pretty sight.

And Worcester City Council planning manager Paul O'Connor said it would be removed if the council had the powers to do so.

He said: "This sort of argument has been going on for quite some time.

"What you need to do is consider the building in context. In isolation it could be considered of its period and worthy of future conservation, but when taken in context - and it has been the view of the city council for quite some time - the Friar Street car park could be improved at the very least.

"Indeed we would like to see its removal as it is in one of the most historic streets in the city but it is not in the city council's control to do that."

Jonathan Macmillan, owner of Insitu Furniture, which is situated opposite the car park, said it was quite an unusual design. "A positive thing I can say about it is that it does its job.

"Aesthetically it is of its time. It is a reflection of that idiom but it doesn't really fit into the traditional view of a market town like Worcester."

In 1996, then Worcester city councillor Jeff Carpenter, had been campaigning for more than 10 years to cover up the exit and wanted the concrete ramps of the multi-storey car park to be covered with ivy or trailing plants.

In 2005 the building was also listed as joint forth in a poll of buildings in the city which faced bulldozing as part of the television series Demolition.

The Channel 4 show aimed to find the country's least celebrated construction and destroy it.

At the top of the list was Elgar house in Shrub Hill.

Both NCP and Cathedral Plaza declined to comment on the car park's inclusion.

The book is being released on Thursday, February 28 costing £17.99.

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