Concerns addressed over future of city centre shopping in Coventry
Construction work is starting on a massive regeneration at the heart of Coventry
Concerns over the future of city centre shopping have been addressed as construction work starts on a massive regeneration at the heart of Coventry.
The council was forced to pivot City Centre South from its original concept of a retail-led scheme centred on one big chain store, because of the huge growth in online shopping.
It’s now a residential-led development of more than 1,500 homes but will still include more than 50 new shops and restaurants in the first phase.
Dubbed “one of the most significant and important ever investments in the city centre”, the £450m project will cover 6.4 hectares, or 15 acres, the equivalent of nine football pitches, including Bull Yard, Shelton Square, Market Way and City Arcade.
Delivered by The Hill Group, the redevelopment will see thousands of new residents living in the city centre and include restoration of the listed Coventry Market.
But with key questions over the shopping element, city council chiefs say they believe Coventry’s retail offering will thrive as it shifts to a far more modern and attractive layout of smaller and more niche local stores.
They add that the city centre’s vacancy rate is “very low” and that there’s been no sudden drop in rental income from clearance of land for the regeneration because leases have been gradually coming to an end, reducing the need for buying up existing premises.
Concerns have been raised by a number of councillors. Cllr Charles Phillips (Reform, Sherbourne) put several questions to the council at a meeting of the Business, Economy and Enterprise Scrutiny Board.
Cllr Phillips said: “There’s obviously opportunities for more than 50 new shops and restaurants within this. What’s the plan for those? Are the buildings being sold, are they being leased?
“Who’s responsible for the management of that and what incentives are going to be put there to fill those up with businesses because it’s all well and good having the space but if you can’t get people in…”
Richard Moon, the authority’s director of property services and development, responded: “The retail space will be owned by Hill, who are the developer, they will be responsible for leasing that space. And they will obviously be offering market levels of rent and market levels of incentives to occupy that space.
“The units within the scheme are relatively small. We anticipate that the majority of new traders in the city will be relatively small local businesses rather than big national chains, because retail is changing. The days when every city wanted a Zara and all these other brands is changing.
“I genuinely believe we will end up with really interesting, smaller, niche local shops and restaurants within the city centre.”
He added: “If you walk around the city centre now, our vacancy rate in terms of a city centre that is open for business is very low, because basically people have moved out of the areas that have been demolished, and we have very, very few empty shops in our core retail area because people have moved out.
“We anticipate that when the units are let, we will be bringing new people into the city, and probably a number of them will be new businesses. Some of them of them may be market traders who, trading well, want to expand and go from a market stall to a small unit.
“I can’t tell you who they’re going to be because I don’t know yet and we’re still a number of years away from those units being occupied. But I think it will be a really interesting adjunct to the existing city centre, which is more akin to the national high street. I think the City Centre South area will be more niche, smaller, interesting local traders.”
Cllr Ed Ruane (Lab, Henley) then asked: “How much do you expect your rental income to drop, obviously we’ve given the land over to Hill. Over the next five or 10 years, what sort of impact will that have, particularly as we’re now renting shop space in the city?”
He pointed out that the council, despite being “revenue-poor”, had sold off land worth millions, denying itself the right to future rental income. “I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have done it, but it’d be interesting to know that how much it’s dropped off,” he said.
Mr Moon said: “The reality is it’s dropped by nothing in the last couple of years because we’ve been actively managing that space empty. So over probably the last five years or so, we’ve had a lot of complaints from people saying half the city centre’s empty, there’s no shops.
“That was a deliberate decision to manage the city centre down so we weren’t having to effectively buy people’s businesses, as leases came to an end and people moved into different parts of the city that weren’t going to be affected. So the income dropped off over a long period of time.
“And as we said earlier, we started looking at this in 2010-2012. So, yes, we lost income, but that’s all been accounted for and there’s not some sudden drop-off this year in our accounts, that income has gone because it’s been diminishing over a long period of time.
“We were compensated for it. As I said, £27 million of the overall WMCA grant was given to the council to compensate us for our land interest, and we chose to reinvest that in the scheme. That was a decision that went through full council.
“But effectively, we chose to reinvest that in the scheme and it’s levered in £450 million of private sector investment.
“In terms of the rest, we still own a lot of retail in the city centre. I anticipate in time that the value of that will go up, because if you’ve got more people living in the city centre, more shoppers in the city centre, more footfall, those shop units should become more valuable and will increase in value and generate more rent over the coming years.”