Salford Council submits huge CPO of land and buildings
SALFORD City Council has submitted a compulsory purchase order to buy up huge swathes of land around Chapel Street.
The order not only covers several buildings fronting Chapel Street including a former post office and The Bell Tower, Peel Park Inn and Ye Old Nelson pubs – all of which are currently derelict – but also the City Wharf office complex on New Bailey Street, the Mark Addy pub, the Riverside House office scheme and part of the land surrounding the Ralli Quays government office complex currently occupied by HMRC.
The council is also looking to accquire the car park at the back of The Royal apartment complex on Chapel Street, the derelict Dock and Pulpit pub, a car park on the corner of Browning St and St Stephen Street, the derelict Church Inn pub on Ford Street, a warehouse on Egerton St, a depot on Riding St and car parks on Bolton Street and Beck Street.
As part of the works, Salford City Council is also seeking access to offices, shops and other premises around Bexley Square, as well as the New Harvest Church and the New Oxford pub.
Councillor John Merry CBE, Leader of Salford City Council, said: “We have made a compulsory purchase order to facilitiate the regeneration of the Salford Central area, in line with the planning permission granted last year to English Cities Fund.
“This order is an important step towards the transformation of the area, including making significant improvements along Chapel Street.
The CPO process follows the submission in July of the biggest ever planning application in Salford’s history by the English Cities Fund and the now-defunct Central Salford Urban Regeneration Company.
The application was for an area bigger than the first phase of Peel’s Media City complex, covering an area of 17.44 hectares.
It involved the creation of a substantial new Commercial Quarter on the opposite bank of the Irwell to Allied London’s Spinningfields scheme in the area around Salford Central station. It also involved the creation of a new square, St John’s Place, to be based around Salford’s recently-restored cathedral.
In total, it covered construction of 197,000 sq metres of office space, 390 hotel rooms and 864 new homes. When submitted, the application was opposed by the agents acting for Ralli Courts’ owners, who argued that it infringed Article 1 of the European Convention of Human Rights by planning to deprive its client of its property.
The objection stated that the scheme of 13 office units, which employed around 239 people, was “an attractive and highly successful office development” which had only been built in the 1980s and was not in need of redevelopment.
Cllr Merry said that English Cities Fund “have already been in discussions with the vast majority of owners and occupiers in the area for some time, and will continue to seek to reach agreement with those affected.”
Speaking to TheBusinessDesk.com shortly after the application was submitted last year, Salford URC’s former chief executive Chris Farrow said that it had already begun work with English Cities Fund – a joint venture between Legal & General, Muse Developments and the Homes and Communities Agency – on acquiring vacant or abandoned properties in the area and would use compulsory purchase orders where necessary.
He added that some of the properties were owned by companies with registered offices in the Cayman Islands and other overseas destinations who had proved “unresponsive” to several attempts to engage with them about plans to improve the area.
A £7m programme of public realm improvements has already begun in the area which has involved traffic calming measures that will restrict the main Chapel Street thoroughfare down to a single carriageway. These have been funded by the North West Regional Development Agency and the European Regional Development Fund.
