Barnsley has had it tough before and its leaders are confident it can grit its teeth and bear whatever hardship the recession brings. Julie Hayes reports.
It has been a five years since Barnsley hit the headlines with ambitious plans, drawn up by Will Alsop, to transform the former mining town into a Tuscan hill village.
Anyone who has visited the medieval fortressed citta of Lucca – birthplace of Giacomo Puccini, which Alsop’s plans are based on – is unlikely to see the similarity.
But visitors to Barnsley are unlikely to see the similarity of today’s town to the cloth cap and whippet-inhabited stereotype that befalls the birthplace of Dickie Bird and Arthur Scargill.
While Barnsley is not without grade II-listed buildings of the Victorian kind, its design is much more modern than its Italian counterpart.
You wouldn’t find a transport interchange nicknamed Teletubby Land in Lucca, nor would you be able to hold meetings there, base your office there or go to the chemist.
The Tuscan hill village theme has been dubbed fairytale, hyperbole to attract press attention – and ridicule – and good ol’ Barnsley tongue in cheek.
But Carol Cooper-Smith, director of Barnsley Development Agency (BDA) defends the aspiration, albeit with a smile.
She says Barnsley is a hill town set in beautiful countryside with very interesting topography.
Either way, the people of Barnsley like the fact they are aiming high.
Mark Wilcockson, relationship director at Lloyds TSB Corporate Markets in Sheffield, says: “The Tuscan hill village is good.
Whether it will ever come to development I don’t know, but it shows that the council is open minded and isn’t saying: ‘We can’t do something like that’.
They’re saying: ‘Let’s have a look at it.’”
David Gordon, partner at law firm Atteys, says it has already been successful in terms of raising Barnsley’s profile. “It was a great way to get Barnsley on the global map, and by God it worked,” he says.
And whether the town believes Alsop’s vision or not, it knows something is afoot and that Barnsley is changing dramatically.
Ever straight-talking and gritty, Barnsley is determined to get there, and Gordon says: “If Barnsley says it is going to reinvent itself, step outside and say that was wrong.”
One of the main aspects of Alsop’s plan focused on Lucca’s walls providing a gateway to the town – so you know you’ve arrived.
Cooper-Smith says: “You need that hub, that sense of arrival so you know when you get into the town centre.
In Lucca you’ve got the walls and that’s how the market towns of Tuscany work.”
In Barnsley’s case there are also plenty of gateways, with six main routes in and out of the town.
The BDA’s aim is to mark each of these with a gateway development.
The most aptly-named of these is Quest and Landmark Developments’ £70m mixed-use scheme Gateway Plaza, entering the town from Dodworth.
The first floor of the 96,000 sq ft grade A office space has been let to a housing ALMO (arms length management organisation) for 20,000 council homes in the town on a ten-year lease.
The scheme also includes residential, retail and leisure, a hotel and parking around a plaza environment.
Matthew Stephens, development director for Quest, says another 30,000 sq ft of office space in the development is shortlisted for tenants, and there is a lot of interest in the office because the speculative grade A office building is a first for Barnsley.
“We are getting some good interest in the office from people not already in the town and people who are already here because they really don’t have much choice,” he says.
And it’s not just Stephens selling his own scheme – most others agree.
Cooper-Smith says: “We have never before had an offer for that.
Investor-interest companies want to look around and we have only been able to show them a plan and say: ‘We’re thinking of building here.’
“Now they can actually look at premises, which makes a big difference.
We may need a bigger range of product, but that will come with time.
It is the first time we have had speculative office space built in Barnsley and it is a step forward for the town to attract a lot of business.”
Guy Gilfillan, head of Lambert Smith Hampton’s Sheffield office, says there have historically been few transactions greater than 2,000 to 3,000 sq ft of good quality office space in Barnsley, mainly because there hasn’t been any stock.
And since trying to get across what is happening in Barnsley, latent demand is coming out.
He said he expects places such as Barnsley to benefit in the economic downturn from businesses relocating to cheaper premises. “When the economy is down, companies in the South East may be looking to cut costs and move north,” he says. “Barnsley ticks a lot of boxes in that respect.”
Andrew Corbett, managing director of Smiths Chartered Surveyors, says the town’s rents compare favourably with those in Leeds and Sheffield, which can reach £25 per sq ft, whereas Barnsley’s headline rents at Gateway Plaza reach £14.75 per sq ft, and out-of-town space at Capitol Park reached £14.95 per sq ft.
Corbett says rent levels at other out-of-town developments are about £12 to £12.50 per sq ft and town-centre space has remained static at between £10 and £11 per sq ft for the past ten years.
“Before everything started happening in Barnsley five years ago, and it got momentum, there was equilibrium,” he says. “There were a few vacant shops and no speculative office developments.
Capitol Park made a big difference and has been a major success.”
Sterling Capitol’s 36-acre business park Capitol Park is a £60m mixed-use development including office and industrial space, a hotel, and park and ride.
Boosted by the newly completed Dodworth bypass, the first phase of speculative hybrid space has been completed and mostly let.
The Toby Inn hotel is also up and running, and the One Capitol Park phase – a joint venture with Priority Sites – is home to the new Business Link Yorkshire.
Corbett says the development is attracting interest to the town in general, with interested businesses able to take up ready and waiting space in other developments.
Corbett says: “These are funny old times, but there still seems to be a good level of activity with so much happening and so much in the pipeline.”
He says the town has generated a lot of publicity with developments such as the interchange and Barnsley Civic and Gateway Plaza.
Enquiries that may be too small for Gateway Plaza, he says, are finding a good alternative in Queen’s Court, the refurbished Victorian hotel that can offer 40 sq m to 1,500 sq m offices, including fully serviced.
The McLintocks building, the old quilt factory conversion that was refurbished by Magna Holdings in 2004, also sits opposite Gateway Plaza development and consistently maintains occupancy rates of more than 75 per cent.
The next development to come online is Barnsley Civic, the former theatre, which is being refurbished to create retail space, workspace and exhibition and performance space.
The first phase has already been completed and houses the council’s service centre Barnsley Connects.
Fergus Justice-Mills, director of the Civic, says the project is part of the reinvigorating of tired space in Barnsley, although they were not able to get funding to refurbish it as a theatre, because it was not viable.
By creating a hub for design and creativity, the regeneration of the site can go ahead with European and lottery funding to create a central piece of public realm.
The centre is designed to connect different parts of the town centre and create a public haven in the Mandela Gardens, with a wall of water as its main feature.
The retail element will be open plan to suit a department store or many independent retailers that choose to also take workspace in the centre.
The old assembly rooms have been refurbished – all plasterwork has been recreated and replaced and the space will be used as a venue for shows, exhibitions, private functions or corporate events.
There is 250 sq m gallery space for smaller exhibitions, which can also be used as a reception area, and workspace units of between 90 sq ft and 100 sq ft.
The workspace units will be used for creative and design companies, which may include silversmiths, joiners or architects, and provide much-needed grow-on space for certain companies that have been incubated in the Digital Media Centre.
The Digital Media Centre is hitting its targets, says Cooper-Smith.
It is one-third full with 22 businesses located there.
But she says there are nearly 1,000 creative and digital companies in Barnsley – the fastest-growing sector in the town – so they would like to grow more of them.
While becoming undoubtedly more commercial, Barnsley has a little way to go on the Tuscan hill village plans, in particular the centrepiece retail scheme Barnsley Markets.
The relocation of the town’s markets by development consortium 1249 has been put on hold because of funding difficulties.
Chris Wyatt, Remaking Barnsley manager at the BDA, says the earliest the scheme could be brought back online would be summer 2009.
The development agreement remains in place until May 2009 and many end occupiers, including anchor tenant Debenhams, remain committed, he says.
“It is fair to say that the credit crunch has not helped, and many of the retail-based construction projects throughout England have been hit.
We have still got the development agreement and we have still got the end occupiers, but we can’t buck the national and international trend in Barnsley.
We’re the same as every other retail scheme in the country.”
Meanwhile, Cooper-Smith says they will find other ways of keeping up confidence in Barnsley, such as animating the town centre with cultural events and seasonal markets, enhancing the public realm with money they can get, and doing what they can to get sites ready for when they can go ahead.
“We will keep investing and moving the place forward,” she says. “Things will keep happening in the town centre, even though we won’t be doing the big stuff.”
Wyatt says the delay on the markets project doesn’t affect the long-term vision for Remaking Barnsley, which is a 30-year programme, and the programme has had a good start, investing more than £4m in half a sq mile in five years.
“We realise that you can’t do regenerate a place overnight,” he says. “It is a long deliberate process and we know we will have setbacks occasionally.
“The programme is from 2003 to 2033; not 2008.
And to have done as much as we have in five years is phenomenal.
The people of Barnsley ought to be extremely proud of what we have achieved.”
Also in: October 2008
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