Action plan to build 3,500 new homes in city centre

The draft document, drawn up by Bradford Council planners, is set to go out to public consultation to help shape a blueprint for the city’s development over the next 15 years.

Councillor Val Slater, executive member for housing, planning and transport, said she was keen for businesses, retailers, residents and community groups to get involved and help shape the future development of the city centre.

She said one of the Council’s key priorities was seeing previously developed, brownfield sites, brought back into use, taking up the theme of the Telegraph & Argus ‘Save Our Green Spaces’ campaign.

She said: “Currently in the city centre, most of it is built-up, but there are a lot of brownfield site buildings that can be reused.”

She said the T&A campaign had helped the Council to identify brownfield areas which could be redeveloped.

The Council plan includes:

• Boosting the city centre nightlife, by encouraging more people to live at the heart of the city, and making it safer at night by upping CCTV and policing
• Creating a Business Forest near city park, with grade A office space hoping to tempt businesses into moving their headquarters there
• Mitigating the effect of the Broadway Shopping Centre on the current shopping district, by introducing more residential development there and promoting it as an area for ‘city living’
• Allowing the University of Bradford to expand, creating a more welcoming centre for students to visit and socialise l Developing the area around Central Library as a new ‘cultural expansion zone’.

Click to see details of the development plan

In the plan, the Council sets out what sites it will encourage developers to take on, and what types of development its planners would allow at each site.

The wide-ranging scheme would see thousands of homes built on dozens of the city’s brownfield sites, in a bid to ease the area’s housing crisis.

Among the buildings set aside to be fully or partially redeveloped into homes are the empty department store TJ Hughes, the former Yorkshire Water depot in George Street, old schools, disused mills and vacant council offices.

Many car parks would also be earmarked for new homes, shops, or other facilities, with developers encouraged to incorporate basement car parks in their schemes.

The plan is at an early stage and if the Council’s executive approves the first draft next Tuesday, the first public consultation will begin.

Councillor Val Slater, executive member for housing, planning and transport, said she was keen for businesses, retailers, residents and community groups to get involved and help shape the future development of the city centre.

She said while the Council wanted to hear what people thought of the its proposals, it also wanted people to come forward if they had any other ideas.

Coun Slater compared the plan to a paint-by-numbers picture, with the Council shading in what kinds of development it would like to see on vacant sites.

But she acknowledged that while setting out the vision was important, it was more difficult to make it happen.

She said: “We can know what we want it to look like, but actually to deliver it is another matter.

“You can buy a paint-by-numbers, but there’s lots of factors which influence how it comes out.

“It’s about the skill of the artist, and the artist in this case is quite complex. It is developers, the economic conditions, other people joining in.

“It’s no good saying this picture, when it’s painted, will be a Rembrandt. We want it to be aspirational, but realistic.”

She said the plan wasn’t just about what would go where, but would also set the standard for the quality of any developments.

She said: “It’s about the right homes in the right places at the right price.

“It’s not about building little tacky buildings that people don’t want to live in.

“It’s about creating homes that people want to live in for a lifetime.”

Andrew Marshall, planning and transport strategy manager, who led the team creating the Area Action Plan, said the process was at an early stage and the public could now help to shape its direction.

He said: “We are not saying we have got everything perfectly right here – that’s the point of this consultation – though it’s grounded in the knowledge we have to date.”