Council ramps up pressure on Island site owners
Nottingham City Council has begun investigatory works on the Island site near the Railway station as it continues to encourage the existing owners to develop the land or sell it for development.
Following on from recently producing a site masterplan and adopting a Supplementary Planning Document (SPD) to inform the approach to development the Council says it will now be conducting a number of tests on the site to understand its constraints better as part of progressing a Compulsory Purchase Order, and the results will inform a future planning application.
Works will involve three weeks of drilling and trial holes across various areas of the site so as to conduct tests on the condition of the land, including soil quality, any gas build up or other issues which might affect its development. These tests will take roughly four weeks to complete once the sampling of the site is completed.
The works will assess the site’s suitability for plans set out in the council’s masterplan for the site, which proposes high quality apartments, office space, commercial premises, new use of existing heritage sites, improved streets and greenspace, footways and light industrial units.
Nottingham City Council says a range of developers have expressed an interest in working with the council on the Island Site, which covers 10.5 hectares between London Road and Manvers Street. No work on developing the site has happened since planning permission granted in 2008 lapsed, with no progress made.
Council leader councillor Jon Collins said: “The Island site is one that clearly hasn’t progressed as it should. The site has enormous potential and rather than wait for something to happen, we’re getting our ducks in line in the long Compulsory Purchase Order process by assessing the viability of the site for the type of high quality developments we’re looking to encourage in the city.
“We’ve had interest from developers keen to work with us to make that happen, and getting these works done should start to firm those plans up. The owners are welcome to keep talking to potential developers themselves, as we’d hope they would, but we are ready to step in to prevent the site stagnating further.”
Nottingham City Council is proposing an employment-led, mixed use development including:
• More than 500 high-quality apartments
• 66,000 sq m of quality business space including grade A offices, research & development use and life-sciences expansion space
• Around 5,000 sq m of supporting commercial uses
• High quality public realm and a network of new and improved streets, cycle routes and footpaths
• The re-use of the existing heritage assets of the Great Northern and James Alexander Warehouses
• Light industrial units.
