Is Swansea the UK’s most ambitious city?

LISTEN Swansea Council confirmed Urban Splash as its development partner on a £1bn regeneration of the city earlier this month. Here, Urban Splash’s Jonathan Falkingham and David Warburton lay out their plans for a levelled-up, liveable city in what might be their biggest test to date. Over the past 12 months, Swansea has been positioning itself as one of the UK’s most ambitious cities. Setting out its regeneration programme, it has delivered a new, state-of-the-art arena and invited partners from as far afield as New Zealand to join the party. Now it has turned to Urban Splash to help take forward its ambitious plans. Can a developer associated with some of the UK’s most notable regeneration projects in places such as Manchester, Sheffield and Plymouth repeat its success in Wales? Can Swansea level up and become one of the UK’s most liveable cities? The 20-year partnership agreement includes transformation of the iconic 23-acre, seafront Civic Centre site (pictured) into a new city waterfront district for Swansea. The former St David’s Shopping Centre site will house new office buildings, apartments and shared workspaces. The 7.5-acre riverfront site in St Thomas will feature family homes, apartments, new public spaces and a new terraced river walk providing direct access to the river for the first time in more than 150 years. “We have done large-scale regeneration projects in lots of places around the country, but we have never really looked at city scale,” says co-founder Jonathan Falkingham. “This is the first time we are working with the city as a partner. So rather than just looking at one area, we are actually looking at the whole city narrative and how and where that can go and how we can help shape that.” For all that it’s a first for Urban Splash, Falkingham sees parallels with Liverpool, where he and Tom Bloxham made their names transforming disused areas of the city in the early 1990s. “If you take Liverpool as a specific example, its foundations as a place and its incredible growth and success up to the Victorian period was in very large part down to its relationship with the river and the sea. That’s what really drove the economy and drove it as a place. And Swansea is very, very similar. It’s got a really big river, it’s got the port infrastructure and it’s got the coastal access.” Reconnecting the city and the water in Liverpool helped set the foundations for Liverpool’s subsequent success. “I think there’s a very, very strong parallel there. I think Swansea has already embarked on this journey of reconnecting to its water’s edge and it’s made some really good moves there, but there is still lots more to do and probably the single biggest thing that Swansea’s got, unlike Liverpool, is a four-mile beach. There is a real opportunity for the city to really make a lot more of that.” Land director David Warburton says Urban Splash’s work in Swansea is already under way. “We are engaged with the city on the long-term revitalisation of the city, a journey which it has already started. We will be working hand-in-glove now with the council over those next couple of decades.” And, given the scale of the project, Urban Splash will be working with other parties too. The head of New Zealand’s Skyline Enterprises was in Swansea earlier this month to progress plans to build an outdoor adventure park in the city. Warburton was there too. But now the hard work begins – with the community without short-term fixes. Sustainably in every sense. “The ambition here is to level up for good,” says Warburton. To send feedback, e-mail damian.wild@eg.co.uk or tweet @DamianWild or @EGPropertyNews Image © Swansea Council