Oxbridge Homezone
Summary
The Oxbridge Home Zone in Lowestoft is one of over sixty Home Zone projects across England intended to enable local communities to make their streets safer from traffic. It is the only one of these projects to have employed a lead visual artist as a member of its professional team. The artist's project brief was to incorporate well-designed community-focussed elements into the scheme. Les Bicknell's designs for traffic calming 'gateway' areas feature integral textual references to local history, lending the streetscape some of the characteristics of a giant book. Despite an extended period of consultation with local residents, some public response to the project has not been entirely positive. The main scheme has been complemented by a number of follow up projects.
The Oxbridge Home Zone is the most recent of a number of ongoing environmental public art projects in Lowestoft by Paul Amey, Anuradha Patel, Lee Lapthorne, Chris Tipping, and David Ward, which derive from Waveney District Council's regeneration strategies.
