by Tim Heal
For many years the city of Gloucester suffered from a degree of inner urban decay which detracted from its many assets as a growing centre for tourism. The assets include a magnificent cathedral and an award-winning shopping centre that in its heyday was considered to be a model for other retail centres, but despite having many individual attractions, the city has lacked a single focus to bring the package together. All this is to change, according to Phil Cooke, deputy director of leisure services in Gloucester, and the reason is Gloucester Docks.
“Within two years we will have a tourist attraction to rival any in the South West,” he says. “And local people will have a major new waterside leisure attraction for their city that they can be proud of.”
The city deserves credit for making the most of its assets, even if three years ago you would have been looked at incredulously if you had suggested that the docks were an asset. To the casual observer it was a decaying industrial site with dereliction slowly gnawing away at what had once been a busy inland port. Designed to take ocean-going vessels so that cargos could be off-loaded as far inland as possible, the docks had gone into decline with the demise of the canals as Britain’s major transport arteries.
A closer look at the site, however, revealed a wealth of possibilities. Although in a poor state of repair, Gloucester Docks was unique, being the last great Victorian inland port with most of its original buildings still in existence. Thirteen listed warehouses and other buildings, including the picturesque Cotswold stone Mariners Chapel, stood proudly, if tattily, against the Gloucester skyline.
The city of Gloucester was keen to build on its record of attracting major companies that were heading for the West Country — added to by the recent decision of the Bank of England to take substantial offices overlooking the docks scheme — and to make the city a major tourist attraction. British Waterways were looking for the opportunity to take advantage of development possibilities on the waterfront land, which at that time was not generating significant income.
Converging from different directions, the city and British Waterways found themselves heading on a parallel course — the need to to make Gloucester Docks a commercially viable focal point for both the local community and the tourist trade.
Enter Pearce Developments, the commercial development arm of Crest Nicholson. Their vision of integrating the listed buildings in a scheme designed around the Victoria Dock Marina, providing a social as well as commercial and retail centre for the city, met the needs of the city planners and the BWB.
The £35m scheme will provide a total of 300,000 sq ft of retail, office, studio workshop, residential and leisure accommodation, along with 1,280 parking spaces. Pearce’s philosophy acknowledges the importance of leisure in the retail mix and the Gloucester Docks scheme sets out to exploit the waterfront nature of the site. Shopping will be fun — based on what the Americans call “festive retailing”.
The scheme incorporates a pedestrian circuit which guides the visitor around the development, across floating pavements and up wall-climber lifts, through market terraces and shopping malls to waterfront cafes, restaurants, brasseries and public houses — taking advantage of the visual attraction of the water at every opportunity. Food retailing and the provision of eating houses will play a major part in the scheme.
Gloucester Docks is the home of the National Inland Waterways Museum, opened by HRH Prince of Wales last summer and already attracting 250,000 visitors a year. The museum takes visitors back to the times when the canals were the motorways of the day and has a wealth of exhibits from restored barges to a huge Shire horse similar to those that plodded up and down the towpaths of this country in years gone by. The Gloucestershire Regimental Museum is receiving a major facelift as part of the Gloucester Docks scheme, with a substantial financial contribution coming from the developers. The museum gives an insight into nearly 300 years of the famous regiment’s history.
Also making Gloucester Docks its home is the Robert Opie Collection of advertising and packaging, with over a century of posters, enamel signs, packs, tins and bottles allowing visitors to trace the history of commercial art in Britain. The Gloucester Antiques Centre on the docks attracts over 150,000 visitors a year to its warehouse and is bracing itself for greatly increased numbers of visitors once the docks scheme nears completion.
But it is not just a matter of making Gloucester Docks a permanent home for static entertainments and leisure facilities, although this is an important factor in the development. “It is crucial to maintain a regular programme of events in the docks,” says Clive Walford, manager of the Gloucester Docks Trading Co set up by Pearce Developments to promote and manage the docks. “Our aim is to ensure that there is life in the docks at all times — not just from nine to five. We will be putting major emphasis on open air entertainments for local people and tourists alike, such as art exhibitions, brass band concerts, musicians, jugglers, morris dancers — and we intend the docks to be a social focal point for the city.”
Gloucester Docks will be playing host to an increasing number of major events, beginning with the Inland Waterways Convention in 1990, and an annual folk festival looks likely to assume increasing importance over the next few years — the first has already attracted more than 10,000 visitors.
Designed around the Victoria Dock marina with permanent berths for up to 60 boats, the scheme will offer major retail facilities in Mariners Pavilion and Southgate Gallery, with space for national traders as well as smaller scale units for local and speciality traders. The speciality and local trader will also be well catered for in Merchants Quay and Vinings Warehouse.
In addition, the scheme provides over 90,000 sq ft of offices, and studios and Gloucester City Council has already taken occupation of its new offices in North and Herbert warehouses and on the upper floors of Kimberley and Phillpotts warehouses.
The scheme as a whole presented a host of problems. None was too serious and mostly posed interesting questions which Pearce Developments have answered with a combination of sympathetic refurbishment and modern architecture. The integration of the listed warehouses, built in the main for the grain industry, required a high degree of flexibility to provide attractive multi-usage space.
“We have made a conscious decision to involve ourselves in waterfront development,” said John Allen of Pearce Developments. “We see Gloucester Docks as an important scheme to get under our belt, and we’re very happy with the way things are going.” He said this shortly after handing over £40,000 to fund an archaeological dig on the site of Southgate Gallery, adding: “We just hope they don’t find a Rose Theatre….”
