I attended the Politics in the Pub event on Tuesday night discussing the recently announced plans for Bradford’s Markets and Darley Street. The three speakers made some good points but they also failed to address some of the practical challenges facing the City Centre and some of the unanswered questions that the plan fails to address.
Let me be clear, I love the Oastler Market and shop there regularly and will continue to do so should it move to another location but the market itself will not be the catalyst for regenerating Darley Street as some people appear to be suggesting. If the market was a big enough draw on its own it would be thriving where it is but it is clearly not, to argue therefore that it can support the regeneration of a whole street, as some seem to claim, is therefore dubious unless there is significant other work and financial support which is as yet unclear.
The problem is that many of the units on Darley Street do not meet the needs of retailers in the 21st Century, and as someone who used to shop there regularly some of them struggled with the last century,and they would need significant investment to bring them up to date. There is also the challenge of having a two floor market, something which has not worked where it has been tried in the past and which has previously been rejected in Markets reviews in Bradford.
In addition to the Market stallholders there are also many shop fronts on John Street and Rawson Road which would be affected by the closure of the centre and it is not clear where these would go if they wished to stay trading. The council has stated it will help them relocate but it is not clear where this would be to and given the discrepancy between council and private sector rent levels (the council are much more realistic) whether they would remain viable. The same is true of the Asian Bazaar which occupies land which is likely to be needed for development. It may be that as part of the reduction of the size of the retail footprint some of these shops may not survive but we need to recognise that this may be the case.
It has always been recognised that the retail footprint in Bradford would move and shrink once the Broadway centre was opened with the Kirkgate Centre becoming the top of town retail boundary. Plans were being developed over the years to deal with this and one of the options considered was to move the Oastler Centre to Darley Street but it was not pursued, in part, because of the valuation put on the building at the time as well as some of the concerns listed above. The valuation has reduced which is presumably why this particular obstacle has been overcome.
If the move goes ahead and the market and other retailers are accommodated elsewhere there is then the issue of what to do with the large development site at the top of town. Currently the plans talk about family housing and I agree with two of the speakers at the Politics in the Pub meeting that this is unlikely to be viewed as viable or desirable by investors and the current social housing sector is in such a state of flux that I am not sure that they would look on this site as a priority. But more important than viability in the first instance is the principle.
I know, better than many, the pressure there is to provide land for housing, and I have previously voiced my concerns about the fact that this pressure is resulting in land that should be used for job creation and economic development is being redesignated for housing which will affect our ability to create local jobs and investment. A cleared site at the top of town is a clear example of these competing pressures and I am concerned that the current suggestion for housing will result in a lost opportunity for job creation. I would love there to be family housing built in Bradford City Centre and tried for years to encourage developers to take the plunge but with no success and at the meeting on Tuesday I met no one with a family who would want to live in the city centre for all sorts of reasons so I am fearful that the idea may not actually happen but as I say my biggest concern is the loss of employment land.
Developing the site for mixed use, including modern, purpose built manufacturing units to attract spin offs from projects such as the Digital Health Zone, the university and also tap into local entrepreneurs would boost the economy and create jobs. This could be done via a joint enterprise with a developer ( see last years blog on regeneration) and mixing this with some housing, and lets be honest this may mean flats (but lets make them larger flats to accommodate more than just young singles, or in my case old singles) as well as some street level food outlets and restaurants we could not only revitalise the top of town but also boost city centre footfall.
So then what do you do with Darley Street? As I have said I do not think moving the market there will resolve either the markets problems or Darley Streets’ challenges. An alternative would be to look at land closer to Broadway to build a new Market to put it at the heart of retail. There are a few options that can be looked at if the Council was willing to be radical and this could also mean that you could combine the two markets. As for Darley Street I would seriously consider demolishing the buildings that are in the centre of the street ( M & S and the others) and making it an urban park with small kiosk type units which could be used to animate the street into the night. This would form a destination link between the top and bottom of town and also open up Piccadilly and the wonderful buildings that are blocked out, and in soime cases unused at present.
Some people have suggected putting a canopy over Darley Street to make it an all weather venue. Whilst that may be a nice idea I would have concerns about it becoming a wind tunnel.
How much would all this cost? I don’t have access to the technical know how to put a price on it at present, nor to argue with those ‘experts’ who come up with intiguing costsings depending on whether they like the ideas or not, but the Council does have a budget for the current scheme and if it can pull in a private sector partner with the imagination and vision to support it then it could happen in some form or another.
People who know me will recognise that none of the above is startling new thinking from me and this is something I have been discussing anbd working towards for the last couple of years but given the council’s recent announcements and last nights meeting it seemed a good point to join in the current discussion and put some ideas forward whilst people are talking about it. I hope people, even if they don’t agree with all or any of it, will at least find it a useful contribution to the ongoing debate that was started last night.
dgreen367 