There is an imprisoned church in the middle of Plymouth, closed off to the rest of the world. It’s shut in not by gates but roads as it sits in the centre of a roundabout that is wholly inaccessible on foot. Or indeed by car as there is nowhere to park around it. Charles Church is, in fact, abandoned as it was burnt down by German bombing in the war and therefore there’s not a queue of potential worshippers outside, but its walls stood firm and the roofless church presents an impressive picture of survival in the face of adversity.

In a rational world, this remarkably resilient church would be celebrated, rather like the old bombed out cathedral in Coventry. It would be a tourist attraction, perhaps decked out with a few posters setting out its history and celebrating its fortitude.

But no. The dour town planners in Plymouth instead implemented a far more cunning plan. They built a roundabout around the church ensuring no one could to wander round its walls staring at the sky and possibly think about their god and his purpose. I am no Christian, despite my name, but I do think that this is a terrible desecration of a holy site brought about by the worldwide homage to the car.

I had only been to Plymouth a couple of times before in my life and I was there to give a lecture at the local University of Plymouth where I have the honour of being a visiting fellows. It was a great, well-attended event but I was deeply saddened by the state of the city. It is difficult to know whether it was the Luftwaffe or the city planners which have done the most damage, but I suspect it was the latter. Plymouth before the war, I was informed, was a relatively compact city with windy streets, a tramway system and a coherent town centre. Now it is dominated by four or six lane highways full of cars hurtling around the roundabouts leaving pedestrians to shelter away from the speeding traffic on the admittedly wide pavements along with cyclists who, Japanese style, have no alternative but to use them since the roads would be a death trap.

The city was rebuilt in the aftermath of the war at probably the worst time in terms of urban planning. It was the period when the car was seen as the sole solution to transport needs and therefore the planners carved out these huge roads as they considered that this was the only way to cope with the growth of the motor car.

Perhaps that was excusable. They were mainly following the zeitgeist when governments were in hoc to the extremely powerful car lobby. But that was some 60 years ago and thinking around these issues began to change as far back in the 1960s when the environmental damage caused by these policies was become apparent.

There have therefore been a couple of generations of politicians who could have started to make changes and realise that this obsession with car freedom was at the expense of both sustainability and commercial sell sufficiently. Yet, it is only in the past few years that, at last, work is going on to make the town centre more liveable but as yet the hegemony of the car remains unchallenged. Much money is being spent on improving public spaces, but no challenge is being offered to reduce the impact of over-motorisation. Even putting in bus lanes on some of these urban highways is seen as a step too far in the face of protests from the car lobby. And astonishingly, the roundabout imprisoning Charles Church was redesigned a few years ago, but with no thought to liberating the church.

It is admittedly hard to know where to start in terms of taming the car in Plymouth. However, it was noticeable that as I walked through at 8am on a weekday morning to reach the station, there was not the slightest hint of excessive traffic or congestion. There was more than enough room for the sparse number of cars and buses whizzing along them. There is, it is clear, simply too much space given to cars. Planners could do worse than look to Paris which I visited last year and saw several roundabouts which have been turned into useable public spaces by blocking off one side and, indeed, even a forest has been planted on some of the liberated space. Indeed, Paris has been transformed in a decade of pro-people policies which have turned the already beautiful city into the best in Europe. So people of Plymouth unite to free Charles Church. There is nothing to lose but a bit of road space. The campaign should start now.

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