Middlesbrough Council is to consider a strategy for overhauling its town centre, including Capital&Centric’s 2,000-home scheme and a major theatre development. As Place North East reported, the strategy goes before members shortly.
Why 2,000 homes in a town centre is the right instinct
Middlesbrough’s town centre has the problem common to most Teesside and Lancashire towns: it was built for a retail economy at a scale that no longer exists, and it empties at six o’clock.
You do not fix that with more shops. You fix it with residents. People living in a town centre use it every day, support the food and drink businesses that survive when retail does not, and provide the footfall that makes ground floor units viable. Two thousand homes is a genuinely transformative number for a centre of Middlesbrough’s size.
The developer matters here
Capital&Centric is a name worth knowing, and we covered its approach in detail earlier this month when Weir Mill completed in Stockport with 253 homes and seven of eight commercial units let to independents.
Joint managing director Tom Wilmott was unusually candid about the method: the firm treats ground floor commercial “as a bit of a loss leader”, taking conservative rents and paying generous fit-out contributions to secure quality independent operators rather than maximising rental income.
That is the opposite of standard practice, and it is precisely why so many new residential schemes across the North sit with hoarded-up ground floors three years after completion. A developer with that instinct working on a 2,000-home town centre scheme is a considerably better prospect for Middlesbrough than one that will chase headline rents and leave the street dead.
The theatre
Cultural anchors in town centres divide opinion, often for good reason. Plenty of towns have built venues that struggle to fill their programme and become a permanent revenue drain.
The case for one here is that it gives people a reason to be in the centre in the evening, which is exactly what a residential-led strategy needs alongside it. The case against is that the operating subsidy has to come from somewhere, and capital funding is far easier to secure than the annual revenue that keeps a venue programmed. That question should be answered now, not in 2031.
The Tees Valley context
This is the fifth Tees Valley item in our coverage this month, after the £33.3m brownfield housing fund targeting 1,085 homes, the £350m loan framework for South Tees Development Corporation, Stantec’s appointment to write the 20-year spatial development strategy, and the ongoing Teesworks programme.
There is a lot of money and a lot of strategy moving through the Tees Valley at once. What has been less clear is how the pieces relate: whether the town centre strategy, the brownfield fund and the spatial strategy are one plan or several running in parallel.
The spatial development strategy is meant to be the document that answers that. It arrived after the funding decisions rather than before them, which is not ideal. A town centre strategy landing at the same time is at least a chance to line them up.
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