167-bed student scheme gets green light as firms look to move out

Nottingham City Council has given planning permission for a city centre office block to be turned into a 167-bed student flat development.

The scheme, by Trent Pads, will see Archer House on Castle Gate be turned into student accommodation. At present it used as office space for the likes of recruitment firm Macildowie.

In May, James Taylor, managing director of the recruitment firm, told TheBusinessDesk.com: “Macildowie has grown, and this continued success means that we’ve had an office relocation in mind for a while. Though the lease of Macildowie’s Nottingham premises isn’t due to expire until mid 2018, we have been preparing to move to a bigger and better city centre space for the last 18 months.

“Our first priority was to ensure we were well prepared for this move, and so last year we invested in an upgraded communications network, allowing us to implement a new VoIP phone system which we can take anywhere. We also transferred our servers off-site to get all the benefits of a high security, private cloud.”

Last year Nottingham City Council released a report committing itself to supporting further city centre student accommodation after it found that the vacancy rate in the schemes is as low as 1.6 per cent.