Circus Act
Ten years may be a lifetime in politics, but when it comes to city centre regeneration it’s really not that long at all. Chloe Rigby finds out how the Cabot Circus development is changing the face of retail in Bristol.
In a decade, Bristol’s Broadmead redevelopment has gone from an aspiration to a grand opening. It’s an impressive acheivement, especially when you consider this is not just the building of a mall but the biggest project in the city since it was reconstructed after the Second World War. What’s more, the £500m scheme was delivered on time and on budget.
“There have obviously been moments when people have been annoyed and motorists have been in queues,” says project director Bob de Barr of the Bristol Alliance. “But even given the inconvenience it’s a prize worth having. After all, we’ve been reshaping and repositioning a city.”
The project has been an enormous undertaking, involving two major development companies, seven architectural practices, 70 contractors and subcontractors, and 20,000 construction workers.
Chris Joyce, regional director of Cyril Sweett, employer’s agent and cost consultant on the development, says it has been a “challenging” project to coordinate. “There have been tight timescales – from on-site in December 2005 to opening in September 2008,” he says.
“Probably a lot of projects in Bristol don’t spend in a year what we have been spending in a month. It puts into perspective what a massive amount of work has been done in a short time.”
And on top of that the development is environmentally friendly, becoming the first retail-led development to achieve the BREEAM ‘excellent’ rating.
Billed as the first of a new generation of mixed-use city centre urban regeneration projects, the million sq ft development combines retail and offices with owner-occupied and rented housing alongside affordable and student housing. Leisure is key, with restaurants, a hotel and a 13-screen cinema alongside heritage buildings such as the Quakers Friars former register office.
Adrian Griffiths, director of architecture practice Chapman Taylor, which produced the masterplan, says: “The vision was about creating streets and public spaces that were very much owned by the people of Bristol rather than feeling like privatised spaces.
“It’s also about bringing people back into the city centre, and having activity back in the city late into the evenings.”
The results have wowed visitors – impressed by the line-up of retailers and leisure names that have come to the city. Harvey Nichols, opening its sixth UK store, tops a list of arrivals that includes Raymond Blanc venture Brasserie Blanc and Showcase Cinema De Lux. Seventyfive per cent of the Cabot Circus retailers are new to central Bristol.
The ambition, says Bob de Barr, is to recover the ‘lost shoppers’ who would naturally come to central Bristol to shop but have been traveling elsewhere for more choice. He wants to see Bristol city centre become a top-10 destination.
After all, he says, Bristol is the UK’s eighth-largest city and has the highest GDP per head outside London.
So, in an age that is used to headlines trumpeting delays and fiascos, just where did Cabot Circus get it so right?
It all started in 1998 when Bristol City Council first identified the need to revitalise the Broadmead area – but the quest to protect it from the competition of out-of-town developments such as Cribbs Causeway started as early as 1994. That’s when city business group the Bristol Initiative set up a working group with the council. The following year this was formalised into a joint venture company, the Broadmead Board, which over the coming years helped smooth the way, providing a link between business and the local authority.
James Durie, director of the Bristol Initiative, says at first the Broadmead Board’s job was: “about making sure we didn’t lose retailers to out of town.”
At the time, as Paul Jelley, retail expert and lead partner at BDO Stoy Hayward in Bristol, says: “Broadmead was third-rate – it wouldn’t be somewhere you would choose to shop.”
Broadmead Board, whose directors include John Savage, executive chairman of Business West and city councilors John Bees, Simon Cook and Richard Eddy, has from time to time stepped in to ease the path of the development, reassuring retailers and developers.
Durie says: “The Alliance would not have done the deal with the council had it not been for somebody playing a role in between. There were some long and drawn-out negotiations.”
When Bristol City Council decided to run a competition for the job of redeveloping the area in 1998, Land Securities and its development partner at the time, Henderson Global Investors, were initially up against rival Hammerson. In 2000 they decided to combine forces in an alliance that also included Morley Fund Management. In 2004 Henderson and Morley sold their interests to remaining Bristol Alliance partners Land Securities and Hammerson.
But the initial decision to combine forces, and bring together different parcels of land, was important in the scheme’s success, says de Barr. “You couldn’t do one part of it without the other, and it became big in investment terms. When the scheme was broadened it incorporated Quakers Friars. People had been trying to do something with that for years but it never stacked up.”
From 2000, a team of architects, engineers and planners was pulled together to work towards the first hurdle – gaining planning permission. The outline application was submitted in August 2002 and just four months later a ‘minded to grant’ resolution was passed. This was confirmed after examination by the secretary of state, with outline planning permission granted in June 2003.
The negotiation of this area must be one of the key reasons behind the speed with which the development has been negotiated. Bob de Barr says that’s down to “extensive” public consultation, which went on for 18 months and included 200 stakeholders from 70 organisations.
The results fed into the masterplan, with elements such as a mix of open and covered spaces, the connectedness with adjacent areas of Bristol, such as St Paul’s and St Jude’s and the maintenance of views such as St Paul’s Church.
Once the masterplan had been approved, the developers still had freedom to change details, although the design of key issues such as the anchor store design still had to be approved as reserved matters.
That the developers could flex the scheme to suit the market was important, says De Barr: “These projects take a long time to deliver, and trends can come and go in that time. Since we started, retail has developed from a mall environment to open squares and streets. The roof gives the feeling of being outside but undercover – but it could be taken off at any time and we would still have a sustainable development.”
In February 2005 the anchor tenant was named – House of Fraser. Later in 2005 the news came that Harvey Nichols was to headline the Quakers Friars development.
The price of the scheme, says de Barr, was fixed when the main building contract was placed in January 2006. In all, seven contracts were placed, worth £350m.
In 2006 roads including Bond Street were diverted and the demolition work completed while the main buildings were completed in 2007. House of Fraser was handed over for refit in September 2007 and Harvey Nichols in December. And by September Cabot Circus was 90 per cent let.
Whatever your view on the final look of the development, there can be no denying the sheer physical achievement of creating Cabot Circus. But the final test is whether it is a financial success.
BDO’s Paul Jelley says: “Cabot Circus should give the town centre the boost it needs. But one of the main challenges is getting people out there and spending.”
House of Fraser manager Emma Simpson, however, believes her “spectacular” store will deliver. “We’re confident it is going to reach the targets we are aiming for.”
De Barr says the key to its success will be in customer service. “The public is our customer, too – they come on to our premises and we have to look after them just as much as the retailers do.
The alternative, he says, is clear. “They will stay home where the internet can be rude to them instead.”
