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Bristol’s ageing Galleries shopping centre to be demolished
Developers have won permission to demolish Bristol’s ageing Galleries shopping centre and replace it with homes, offices and student flats.
Developer Deeley Freed was granted permission yesterday (Wednesday) to replace the circa 1991 mall with 450 homes – 90 of which will be classed as affordable – and student flats that can accommodate 750 people. The tallest of the residential buildings will be a sky-scraping 21 storeys.
The £550 million redevelopment plans also include restaurants, shops, a music venue, a hotel, and the pedestrianisation of the road running along Castle Park.
The new site will occupy 4.8 acres of the centre of Bristol, with units facing outwards towards Castle Park – a “missed opportunity” when plans for the Galleries were drawn up in the late 1980s, according to developers.
The proposals will see the demolition of the decked car park, which occupies 40 per cent of the current site. However, the basement and foundations of the existing shopping centre will be reused – leading to a reduction in carbon emissions created by the new development.
The shopping centre was heralded as the future of retail when it opened in 1991 on a site formerly occupied by the Co-op’s 1960s department store Fairfax House.
But the shopping centre has struggled since The Mall at Cribbs Causeway opened in 1998, pulling shoppers out of the centre of the city.
The creation of the adjoining 120-unit Cabot Circus retail zone in 2008 seems to have been the final nail in the coffin for the facility, which is partly occupied by an NHS walk-in medical centre and an assessment clinic for the Bristol Eye Hospital.
In 2011 the centre was sold by Capital & Regional and Aviva Investors to HSBC European Active Real Estate Trust for £50 million. By 2019, when it was sold by InfraRed Capital to LaSalle Investment Management, it was valued at just £32 million.
When the new development was first touted in 2022, footfall was 35 per cent lower than pre-pandemic levels.
The developers told Bristol City Council that the proposals represented a “once in a generation chance to re-invent, revitalise and modernise such a large part of the city centre.”
Image courtesy of Deeley Freed
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Read more16.02.2024