Castle has begun converting a former BT building in South Shields into a 125-bed purpose-built student accommodation scheme. As Place North East reported, construction is under way.
Conversion rather than demolition
A former telephone exchange or BT office is an awkward building. They were built for equipment and cabling rather than people, often with deep floorplates, heavy floor loadings and few windows in the wrong places.
Student accommodation handles that better than most uses. Rooms are small and repeatable, communal space can absorb the parts with poor light, and the heavy servicing a telecoms building already has is useful rather than a problem.
Elsewhere in this briefing Newcastle is demolishing Hadrian House for 507 student beds and Sheffield converted 94,000 sq ft of offices into an ambulance hub. Reuse, convert or knock down, and the building decides which.
South Shields
South Tyneside failed the Housing Delivery Test last month, delivering 505 homes against a target of 949, a score of 53%. That’s the worst result in the North East and it means the presumption in favour of sustainable development now applies to housing applications in the borough.
Student beds don’t count towards that target in the way family housing does, so this scheme won’t fix the delivery problem. What it does is take an empty building off the market and put people into the town centre.
The thing to watch
Student accommodation depends on student numbers, and those have become less predictable as policy on international recruitment has shifted.
South Shields is not a university town in its own right, so this scheme presumably serves students travelling to Newcastle or Sunderland. That’s a longer commute than most students choose, which makes the demand case worth scrutinising more closely than it would be for a site next to a campus.
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