THE future for Hereford’s £200 million Edgar Street Grid (ESG) project hinges on healing the city’s “scar”.

Basing his idea on initiatives that have worked in London and on mainland Europe, ESG architect Ben Hamilton-Baillie believes he has an answer to the project’s biggest practical problem – how to get shoppers and customers into the grid site and not isolate the city centre.

It means a facelift for Newmarket Street, which Mr Hamilton-Baillie brands a scar stopping the city centre being seen for what it is – a “fascinating” centre in streetscapes that he believes belong among the best in Europe with the “intrigue and surprise” they offer.

His idea has those streetscapes flowing into a Newmarket Street unrecognisable from its congestion-clogged state today.

It would be a space common to both pedestrians and vehicles – each dictating the movement of the other through specific design features.

It’s all barely on the drawing board, and ESG knows it’s in for a tough sell. But it’s the reason that Mr Hamilton-Baillie, an international expert on street design, was brought on board.

Right now, said Mr Hamilton-Baillie, Newmarket Street was a physical and psychological barrier built, as it was, when the big ideas were about segregating traffic from cities.

The link between the grid and the city centre represented an opportunity to try something entirely innovative and maybe even shape future thinking on what city centres could be, he said.

Newmarket Street carries thousands of vehicles a day through Hereford. In line with Mr Hamilton-Baillie’s thinking, the way into the street off the Edgar Street roundabout would also have to be completely re-configured. Much also depends on the number of vehicles the proposed new road crossing road for Hereford would keep out of the city. ESG chief executive Jonathan Bretherton said that solving the “walk-in” problem was essential to the Grid’s success. The ideal solution, said Mr Bretherton, lay in achieving a natural flow between the grid and Hereford city centre.