Brisbane City Council commits $500,000 to refresh Wynnum Central
As announced recently on the WynnumCentral Facebook page (Thursday 2nd April) and featured in yesterday’s Wynnum Herald, Brisbane City Council is planning to invest a cool half a million dollars in a refresh of Edith Street, Florence Street and Bay Terrace by reviving the fifteen year old Wynnum Suburban Centre Improvement Project.
Brisbane City Council will have an information stall at the Twilight Market, with works planned to start in June.
Our take
Wynnum last saw a refresh back in 2001 which saw flower beds, new parking arrangements and street furniture introduced into the Wynnum Central area. Apparently costing $1M, the scheme unfortunately did little to halt the decline of the shopping precinct, with at worst around 35 shop premises empty.
Although we welcome any spending by Brisbane City Council on Wynnum, at WynnumCentral we believe there are other things that should be prioritised for spending and which bring a suburb back to life, such as the approaches we promote – a more entertainment/dining focus, shops being prepared to be open longer hours on the weekend, and a program of interesting events.
We are starting to see some of this happen, and shortly there will be new buildings going up in Wynnum that will add to this revitalisation.
If we had any say over the spending of the $500K, these items would be on our shopping list…
- public toilets somewhere at the west end of Edith Street
- an electric power source for public events such as the current twilight market*
- partial pedestrianisation of Edith Street (see our previous article on this here)
- a reorganisation of parking arrangements so that public parking is genuinely public parking (see our previous article here)
Let us know what you would like to see in the comments below and if we get enough ideas we’ll put together another survey. We’d also urge you to visit the Brisbane City Council stall at the market and make sure your views are heard.
*two of the biggest costs involved in putting on the twilight market are traffic control (which wouldn’t be needed if the market were held in a pedestrianised area) and generator hire for the food stalls and entertainment
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I would love for Edith st to be pedestrianised! there isn’t really enough parking on Edith st as is so I don’t believe it would interfere with that at all and it would make Wynnum a destination suburb
Why don’t you spend the money on doing something about all those alleyways? ‘Melbourne’ it up a bit. Look how popular Cambridge Lane Espresso is in Manly…
since time and walking disability is my problem, I would like wall gardens , ornaments or water features , remove road gardens & return previous parking bays, make back of building parking more open by removing property boundries & levelling & sealing the ground, footpath seating , garbage bins & bubblers, public toilets, on street electric outlets for fair stall holders, a predestrian area made by no weekend and after five pm parking or traffic for Edith street and late night shopping weekends with more illumination at those times.
$500k will be eaten up quickly and we won’t be likely to see much change. Suburbs like Redcliffe and Bulimba are really moving forward. Surely after so long in power our local member could have seen more change in Wynnum.