Pendle Council is appointing firms for the renovation of Trafalgar House and moving to sell its Innovation Centre, pushing two Nelson projects forward together. As Place North West reported, the council is taking both to appointment stage.
Two opposite moves, one strategy
What makes this worth a look is that the council is doing two contradictory-looking things at once. It is investing in one building and disposing of another.
That is not inconsistency, it is portfolio management, and it is something councils are frequently criticised for not doing. Local authorities accumulate property over decades, often ending up holding assets that no longer serve a purpose while under-investing in the ones that do. Selling an innovation centre to fund or enable work elsewhere is a rational allocation of a limited balance sheet.
The question that should be asked, and usually is not, is what happens to the businesses currently in the Innovation Centre. These buildings house small firms on flexible terms, which is exactly the kind of space the private market does not provide in smaller towns because the margins are thin. A sale to an operator who continues that offer is one outcome. A sale to someone who converts it to something more profitable is another, and it removes a rung from the ladder for small Pendle businesses.
Nelson’s position
Nelson is a Pendle mill town with a strong Victorian core, significant heritage assets and the economic difficulties common to east Lancashire textile towns. It has had Townscape Heritage funding and sits within the wider Pennine Lancashire regeneration effort.
Towns of this size rarely attract a single transformational scheme, and waiting for one is how a decade passes. The realistic model is a sequence of smaller interventions, a restored building here, a repurposed site there, that compound over time. It is less satisfying to write about and it is what actually works.
The Lancashire picture
This fortnight Lancashire also has Persimmon appointing a land director for the county, and Barrow’s Majestic Hotel winning consent just over the Cumbrian border. Earlier this month Kier was named preferred bidder on Blackburn’s £45m Star Square, backed by £2m from the Lancashire Combined County Authority.
That new combined authority is the thing to watch here. Lancashire has historically been fragmented, with a county council and a dozen district councils, no mayor and correspondingly little weight in national funding decisions compared with Greater Manchester or the Liverpool City Region. A functioning combined authority is what turns a series of separate town projects into a programme with money behind it.
What we do not know
The published detail does not include values, timescales or the specific end use for Trafalgar House. For a council-led renovation those are the accountability numbers, and they are worth asking for before contracts are let rather than after.
The North is FU7URE’s briefing on the people, capital and infrastructure reshaping the North of England. Subscribe to the free newsletter to get it in your inbox.
Leave a Reply