Everything takes time in Hereford.
Many years after the county council began mulling over the need for wholesale city-centre regeneration, it has finally got a masterplan onto the drawing board. But there is still a long way to go — 20 years by the council’s own estimate, and that is without accounting for several potential stumbling blocks, including relocating the cattle market and diverting the main traffic flow through the city centre.
The site of the council-owned market is key to the whole regeneration plan, because this is where a substantial contribution to the funding will come from. The council is also hoping for finance from Advantage West Midlands, but the regional development agency has yet to pledge any cash.
The masterplan has identified a supermarket as the best use for the cattle market site because this will generate the most money. But moving the cattle market out of town is politically sensitive. Having vowed not to move the market to the preferred site of Burghill, close to an estate of executive homes, the Conservative/Independent administration now has to find an alternative site.
Tesco, which has a store on the edge of the retail core, has made no secret of its designs on the cattle market site.
But Geoff Hughes, the council’s head of community andeconomic development, says the retailer is not guaranteed success: “We will want to promote some sort of competition before we identify a preferred occupier for the site,” he says.
The masterplan’s proposals also outline a mixed-use scheme for the city centre, reopening the canal basin, and redevelopment of the railway station. Hereford United’s football ground would also get a facelift, and be linked with new leisure and commercial facilities connected with the Courtyard theatre.
But while Hereford waits for its transformation, occupiers are being left in limbo, not knowing whether to renew leases, and many landowners are reluctant to invest in upgrading their properties.
Glorified burger vans
John Turner of Turner & Co in Hereford says: “I feel especially sorry for Rockport DIY. It’s one of the busiest retailers in the city and it’s going to be buried under a new road as far as anyone can see at the moment.”
This is not helping the city’s comparatively poor retail offer — the result of Hereford’s geographical isolation, lack of large floorplates and a tawdriness that drives many shoppers to rival locations such as Worcester and Shrewsbury.
“Things are not helped by having a proliferation of glorified burger vans in the centre,” says Paul Hodgson of Cross & James inHereford, referring to the mobile stores in the centre of the city’s prime retail pitch. “We have got this open space and not enough is being made of it,” he says.
If many of the big retailers are still looking askance at Hereford, the city has not lost its allure for the supermarkets. Sainsbury’s and Morrisons’ Safeway both have a presence, Tesco has two stores, ASDA has just won consent for a 40,000 sq ft outlet and Waitrose has expressed interest in setting up operations in the city.
The decision by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister not to call in ASDA’s plans to redevelop an 8-acre flood-prone site to the south of the River Wye has stunned some agents.
In a joint venture with local developer Eign Enterprises, the retailer won consent this year for a £55m scheme comprising a 40,000 sq ft store, apartments and community facilities.
Council planners were opposed to the scheme, but councillors overruled the planning department and gave the go-ahead.
“I am astounded by the ODPM granting consent to ASDA on Belmont roundabout, which seems to me to set a precedent for out-of-town superstores on sites that flood almost annually. The general view of most property and planning consultants was that the site didn’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of getting consent. How wrong could we all be,” says Ian Thompson, retail partner at Hartnell Taylor Cook.
Hereford’s councillors may well have been swayed by ASDA’s agreement to contribute £2m to the Environment Agency’s plans to alleviate flooding that blights Hereford city centre most winters, and the rearrangement of the road layout at the entrance of the scheme.
But Hodgson believes the decision to approve the ASDA scheme could have a negative effect on the wider proposals for the city centre.
“This scheme is in danger of jeopardising all the aims of the planning policy that it is hoped will ensure the vitality of the city centre. The danger is that people will go to the ASDA store, but they won’t continue on into the town centre,” says Hodgson.
The scheme will occupy a riverside site that has stood derelict for several years, and which blights the southern entrance to the city.
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Herefordshire council and Advantage West Midlands are poised to launch the Leominster Enterprise Park on the edge of the market town of Leominster, some 10 miles north of Hereford. |
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AWM paid £100,000 per acre for the site back in 1998, and has invested several million pounds in drainage, infrastructure and the construction of a road linking the site with Leominster’s business park. |
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The aim is to attract hi-tech and office-based employers to an area where wages are historically very low. But Leominster is notoriously inaccessible, standing on the two-lane A49 midway between Gloucester and Shrewsbury and with a rail service that operates only north to south. |
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Julian Spencer of Allied Surveyors, agent for the park, says occupiers interested in space on the Leominster Park are mostly smaller businesses from the local area and businesses that want to access the mid-Wales markets. |
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“We have had interest in the whole first phase of the scheme, but nothing is in solicitors’ hands yet,” says Spencer. |
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The plots are quoted at around £140,000 per acre, compared with up to £160,000 per acre on Hereford’s Rotherwas Industrial Park, where there is little remaining space. |
