Cllr Jim O'Boyle with a city centre update - Video and audio transcripts

Hi, I’m just having a little bit of a walk around the Precinct today because I just wanted to show you something that needs to be put in the context of all the work that we’ve done in the precinct over the last 18 months – 2 years. I will take my eyes off the camera so my apologies but you can see behind me, which is the Upper Precinct that is now completed, with the water features and the greenery, and the new central, of course, fountain. And what we’ve done is manage to actually increase the pressure on it as well. It’s just given a bit more oomph to the city centre and actually in better weather it’ll go even slightly higher than that. And you can see of course, that the Precincts on both sides of Market Way and of course over here we’ve got Smithford Way as well, they’re all finished now. There’s going to be new amendments to this going forward as well in terms of some new various food offerings coming down here in the not-too-distant future. But it’s just worth saying that the greenery that talked about, the trees that have been planted, and of course, the real quality paving that we’ve done here. It really does set off our city in a really important way.  

One of the things people keep telling us about is we need good quality shops. Well here’s the first one. It’s now open before Christmas, you’ll be pleased to hear. Flannels is now here in Coventry. Some of the price tags are quite big, I accept that, but equally Coventry is full of shops for everybody.  But this is another really good example, a real quality retail outlet. And the reason why they’ve come here is because of the work that we’ve done in the city centre, because of the improvements that we’ve made, and I think this is a real vote of confidence in our city. Ladies and gentleman, Flannels!