Salford Central Projects

Guiding the regeneration of Salford Central from early vision to delivery

Overview

Salford Central is located to the eastern edge of the City of Salford and adjacent Manchester City Centre and includes some of Salford’s finest buildings including Salford Cathedral, St Philips Church and the former Town Hall. The area had been declining as a civic, commercial and retail centre for several decades with many initiatives attempting to halt the decline.

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Multiple roles

Initially we worked for English Cities Fund (ECf) to develop a vision to comprehensively regenerate this important part of the City of Salford to help diversify its economic base and bring in new activity. Our proposals included transforming the main street, Chapel Street (A5), from a traffic choked highway to a vibrant tree lined street; enhancing the areas heritage assets; creating new urban neighbourhoods with a choice of new home together with a new corporate office district and delivering well designed safe streets. Through this work ECf were awarded preferred develop status.

We were then appointed by the Central Salford URC to prepare a development framework for the area. This was prepared through a collaborative process that involved engagement with numerous consultees including statutory authorities, heritage groups, landowners, politicians and members of the community. We facilitated a number of workshops and the input informed the development framework. This was adopted as planning guidance and paved the way for the biggest planning application in Salford ‘s History. We assisted the developer (MUSE) with the planning application and subsequently were expert witnesses at both a planning appeal and CPO inquiry.

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Vision

Central Salford will be transformed. A beautiful, vibrant new urban centre with striking economic opportunity is waiting to be born out of its fine heritage and the unveiling of its many natural assets. The City’s elegant but underused buildings and its vacant but potent spaces will be filled with places to live, work, shop and enjoy life. The restored health of Central Salford will flow across the entire urban area stretching out to benefit all of Salford’s communities.

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Delivery

Initially progress on the ground was slowed by the economic downtown however the transformation of Salford Central is gathering momentum - Chapel Street has been transformed – traffic was diverted away from the street and a high quality, public realm scheme has been delivered along its length.

New apartments buildings with ground floor retail have been built to provide frontage to the street and secondary streets are lined with townhouses. The first buildings have been delivered around Central Salford station – One New Bailey which provides 125,000sq ft of office use together with a hotel and multi storey car park have been completed. Two residential towers are under construction.

Whilst it has taken the best part of ten years since we prepared the framework Salford Central is now a different place and the vision prepared with stakeholders is starting to become a reality on the ground.

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DATA

CLIENT

English Cities Fund

LOCATION

Salford

TEAM

Davis Langdon
Arup
Keppie Massie

DATES

August 2006 - January 2007

OUTCOMES

Assisted English Cities Fund to secure preferred developer status
Development framework adopted by City Council
Support to Outline Planning Application
Witness at CPO Inquiry
Chapel Street public realm delivered
Pedestrian bridge to Spinningfields completed
Office, residential and hotel developments completed