It has been a while coming, but ambitious plans to develop Nottingham’s Waterside area are finally coming to fruition, with residential leading the way
Residential, so often a white knight in regeneration schemes, is riding to the rescue of Nottingham’s plans to link its city centre with the River Trent.
Local developer Blueprint is behind a £100m edge-of-city-centre, riverfront residential scheme – Trent Basin – which is at the forefront of wider plans to regenerate Nottingham’s 250-acre Waterside area.
Blueprint, which has about 15 of those acres to play with, is a property development partnership between Aviva Investors’ Igloo Regeneration Fund and Nottingham City Council (see below). It is already well advanced on phase one of Trent Basin: creating 45 new homes – predominantly three- and four-bedroom flats and houses ranging from £225,000 to £395,000. The plan is to hand these over in the autumn.
Subsequent phases will bring the total homes built to 500, with a target date for the scheme’s completion of 2020.
Separating the city centre from the River Trent, the wider Waterside site is situated on post-industrial land which the city council and its regeneration advisers have long desired to turn into something in tune with Nottingham’s aspirations.
At its heart was a former inland port which in its pre-war heyday served Trent water traffic. This is where the basin development is now under way.
It is fair to say that Waterside – a vision dating back the best part of two decades – has struggled to get going.
Blueprint chief executive Nick Ebbs – one of the best-known property faces in the city, having previously been a co-founder of local agent Innes England – says: “A lot of developers have hovered around, but there was no single big lump of land they thought they could develop.
“It has been hard to achieve land assembly and there has been a multiplicity of ownership.”
There was also the recession, which caught out local developer Kevin Riley, the first housebuilder to put a spade in the ground at Waterside.
He built 128 flats at River Crescent. The high-profile development included Nottingham’s first £1m apartment and was home to former England football manager Sven-Goran Eriksson during his improbable spell as manager of perennial strugglers Notts County (whose Meadow Lane ground falls within the Waterside area).
Riley Holdings finished the flats in 2008, coinciding with the global financial crash, and the firm went bust.
A different economic climate exists today and, according to Ebbs, Blueprint has received an “amazing” response following the phase-one homes being put up for sale in March.
“We have ploughed through 300 expressions of interest and I think we will get most of the homes reserved,” he says.
Blueprint has a reputation for sustainability – “people, place and planet” is its ethos – and innovation, and there is no shortage of green bells and whistles on this scheme.
It is looking at a car-share initiative using electric vehicles – though keen cyclist Ebbs would prefer people to cycle – and it planning for the development to be self-sufficient in energy terms.
Trent Basin will also provide purchasers with a say in the type of building they are buying through a custom-build’ offering on some of the homes.
There is no PRS element in the first phase of Trent Basin, but there will be homes for the private rental sector in subsequent phases, most probably in a 150-flat scheme.
A development of this scale will almost certainly have an impact on land values and house prices in the area.
“Land values will go up a lot once the location is established. The more astute developers are hovering already,” Ebbs says. “House prices will also go up. At our scheme in The Meadows [also in Nottingham], houses were sold for £175,000. After three years they are selling for £225,000.”
Often when such a large development is designated for residential use there are mutterings from the wider commercial property community, but this scheme would seem to have a good deal of support locally.
Matthew Smith, lead director in the Nottingham office of JLL, said: “The river is quite disconnected from the city centre. This scheme will help us to enhance the features we have.”
Blueprint
Blueprint was formed in 2005 and is a specialist developer of sustainable homes and workplaces. The firm is structured as a limited partnership and includes partners Aviva Investors’ Igloo Regeneration Fund and Nottingham City Council. The partnership is managed by Igloo Development Managers.
Projects to date include No 1 Nottingham Science Park, Phoenix Square Leicester (cinema /workspaces, flats) and multi-phase low-energy housing in The Meadows, Nottingham (ongoing). The firm has built around 300,000 sq ft of commercial and residential space since its formation and has a development pipeline of around 500,000 sq ft, which includes Trent Basin and Trent Works (The Meadows, Nottingham).
Its pipeline of opportunities has a gross development value of more than £150m.
The firm’s geographical focus includes the East and West Midlands and South Yorkshire.
No profit or turnover figures were available. However, Blueprint says that 2015 was its most profitable year to date.
Waterside
Milton Keynes-based housing developer McCann Homes is hoping to win approval to build 88 flats on land close to Trent Basin.
Plans for a riverside residential and retail development on three acres of land in Meadow Lane near Notts County’s football ground have already been approved. The application was submitted by 5plus Architects on behalf of Meadow Land Regeneration and the Canal & River Trust.
The proposal is to build 95 new homes, with a convenience store and café.
