Finally Broadmarsh: The £500 million game-changer

I was sitting in the office early last week looking over some sprawling indicative drawings for the wholesale rebuilding of a massive part of Nottingham. And it’s a big deal.

The drawings sketch out the detail of a £500 million retail scheme ranged across three levels which could not only put Nottingham beyond the reach of its regional rivals, but also rid the city of the out-dated eyesore that is its southern approach.

So what was my reaction? One of deja vu.

The story of the redevelopment of Broadmarsh is a modern-day parable about the relationships between big cities and big developers and shopping centres and the economy.

I first saw photos, drawings and CGIs of the redevelopment of Broadmarsh in the early noughties. Even then, redevelopment was long overdue, with the centre which defines the boundary between the city centre and its southern approach looking every inch the 1960s Arndale dinosaur it really is.

As time went by, the amount Westfield said they were going to spend on the redevelopment slowly rose. But so did the sense that it wasn’t their top priority. Nottingham City Council bent over backwards to try to make sure it remained a priority. Indeed, some critics would point to the strange decision to rid Lister Gate of what looked like perfectly healthy trees. Chopping them down opened up a nice sightline to a re-clad Broadmarsh entrance, but was there really anything wrong with the trees? We’ll never know.

What we do know is that while Nottingham City Council tried to keep what had become a £700m scheme alive, Westfield promptly went and spent a load of money in Derby.

The Australian developer has a long-established reputation for taking a robust attitude to business, but this decision went down very badly in Nottingham – on two fronts.

With the arrival in the City Council’s planning department of Jennifer Dearing, an experienced outside consultant brought in to give some backbone to a drifting planning department, Nottingham’s attitude to Westfield hardened.

More than once, I heard senior figures in the city say that if all Westfield had to offer was a bigger version of the curtain-walled giant they built in Derby, then Nottingham was no longer interested.

It didn’t stop there. The city took the advice of some senior national figures in architecture and urban development and decided that, whatever happened, the plans Westfield had sketched out to the council all those years ago were dead. Whether it was Westfield or someone else, a new approach was needed – one which would use large-scale retail redevelopment to solve an ageing blot on the landscape.

The credit crunch effectively killed off Westfield’s original plan. No one was going to throw £700m at a large scale shopping development when retailers were being deserted by consumers suffering from badly-bruised credit cards.

But none of this changed the fact that Nottingham is Britain’s fifth biggest shopping city and the centre of the East Midlands’ catchment. It may have bled some people to Leicester (which now has a John Lewis as well), but Derby hasn’t got the high-end retail brands to challenge. Neither is as big.

So now, finally, we have a new plan - all £500 million and 5,000 jobs worth of it.

Going back to my initial point, I have to admit that I haven’t seen it all before in the design sense. The drawings I pored over last week show a scheme that has changed drastically. Instead of a monstrous, old-fashioned mall, Westfield has now agreed to produce a series of smaller buildings which will open up new street scenes, and rid one of England’s eight most important cities of a Berlin Wall of a centre which shouts regional mediocrity at anyone walking in from the railway station.

It could lead to Nottingham getting something genuinely different – a new generation of shopping centre which doesn’t stand out like some monstrous blob. One with streets to wander through and an open air atmosphere, one with views of the city it is part of.

So it’s wrong to be churlish about this plan. If it proceeds the way Westfield are suggesting then it could change the face of the city for the better while bringing in 5,000 jobs.

The knock-on impact of its construction will be considerable: a project of this scale will have an economic multiplier during and after construction through the jobs it creates and the money spent during building and the likelihood that – if it brings in new names – it will bring in new visitors.

Those new names should, finally, include Harvey Nichols, with whom Westfield has an informal agreement.

It may also add to the logic behind investment in redevelopment of the railway station and expansion of the tram

In short, a project of this size has the potential to give the city’s economy a noticeable tick-up.
A scheme on this scale does not come without its question marks. What will happen to other parts of the city’s retail core when Broadmarsh opens? And what impact will it have on the Victoria Centre (which has expansion plans of its own)? How will we cope with radical revisions to the city’s road network implied by this plan?
The biggest question of all is the oldest question of all. After all these years, is Westfield finally going to come good on its promise?