A long-abandoned site next to York station and double the size of King’s Cross Central, is being transformed through a private-public partnership that derisks the project for joint venture developer McLaren Property and Arlington Real Estate, thanks to £135m of public sector infrastructure investment
Sitting right next to York station is a site that is 60% of the size of the old, walled city centre. It has been empty and largely unused since the glory days of steam power.
Just a five-minute walk from the city walls, what makes the fact this site has been abandoned for so long all the more remarkable is the city is desperate for somewhere to build in order to meet demand for more commercial premises and housing.
This site extends to 45 hectares, which is double the size of Argent’s Kings Cross Central development in central London, and would go a long way to providing the space to meet that demand. Like Kings Cross Central, this site belongs to Network Rail and was used for storing coal, housing water tanks and a place to park railway rolling stock.
Not for much longer. Work has started on preparing the ground to transform this site into a new city quarter which will include up to 3,000 homes and 1.4 million sqft of commercial space. Called York Central, the site has outline planning permission, with the reserved matters application, which defines the detail of the first phase of the scheme, going in last week.
The development is a good example of how the public and private sectors can work together to unlock sites such as York Central. The scheme is a public-private partnership between Network Rail and Homes England, and a joint venture between developers McLaren Property and Arlington Real Estate.
Homes England, York council and the West Yorkshire Combined Authority have invested £135m into the infrastructure needed to make the site more accessible and secured outline planning.
The reason why the site has lain abandoned for so long was because the only access was via a narrow, height-restricted bridge on Leeman Road under the railway lines at the south-eastern corner of the site near York station. Homes England has provided the funding for the construction of a new bridge over the East Coast Main Line, which will link the other end of the site to Water End and the A59.
While this bridge has yet to be built, the road linking it to the site is finished and in use, with access to the city currently under the height-restricted bridge. There will also be a new pedestrian bridge.
Other improvements include closing a section of Leeman Road in front of the National Railway Museum, which is adjacent to the old bridge. The museum will provide a cultural element to the development, broadening its appeal. It is undergoing a major reorganisation, including new buildings to provide more space and a better experience for visitors.
Traffic will be diverted onto the new road to access the other end of the site, allowing a new public square complete with cafes to be created in front of the museum. Homes England has also provided funding for Hudson Boulevard, a pedestrian and cycling route through the site which will feature attractive landscaping.
This public sector investment and outline planning takes much of the risk out of developing such a scheme, making it a much more viable proposition than one where the developer has to take planning risk and pay for all the upfront costs of infrastructure before getting any return on investment. This made it very appealing to the JV, as non-executive director and advisor Edward Twiddy, who is the co-founder of Atom Bank and advisor to the Treasury, explains:
“This is a strategic site for Homes England and Network Rail, so there is an opportunity for us to look at how to make sure the site remains viable – and they get the return that they are looking for, while also balancing off the price that we have to present that to the market,” he says. “We have got a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a site next to a railway station on a publicly owned site with public infrastructure already in the ground.
“This presents us with a wholly different equation than in other places where people are dealing with sites that have not yet been provisioned and are having to wait for electricity connection – or whatever it is that’s giving them additional costs – before they can start onsite. Fortunately, that’s not the situation for us.
“The JV is basically there to build on top of a substantial investment by the public sector in the land and in the infrastructure that’s required for us to get the site away.”
Another big benefit for the developer is the JV buying the land from the landowners plot by plot as they develop the site, which means they don’t have to pay interest on loans to purchase a whole site that could take decades to build out. The JV takes the risk on the reserved matters application, issues in the ground and getting funding and general development risk such as market conditions.
The JV was appointed as developer with the masterplan already in place, as this was necessary for outline planning. Drawn up by Allies and Morrison, the architect was retained by the JV and has refined its masterplan to match their aspirations.
Two multi-storey car parks which were included for commercial occupiers have been removed, allowing the commercial element to be increased by 40% from 1 million sqft to 1.4 million sqft. Allan Cook, the managing director of Arlington Real Estate, says the long development time of York Central means the masterplan can flex according to changing circumstances.
“This is going to be delivered over a number of phases,” he says. “If we are wrong, and need more parking, we’ve still got the flexibility in later phases to incorporate it.”
The total number of homes has also been increased from 2,500 units to up to 3,000 units. There is a S106 20% affordable housing requirement but Tom Gilman, managing director of McLaren Regeneration, says the JV – and the public sector partners – would like to increase above this regulatory minimum.
“We have an aspiration, which is shared by Homes England and the council, to increase the amount of affordable housing,” he says. “Through negotiation with Homes England, we’re trying to push the amount of affordable housing up to 40%, although that is clearly dependent on the commercial deal we do with Homes England as a registered provider.”
The extra costs of additional affordable housing will be met by mechanisms which could include reduced land prices or a direct grant from Homes England.
Other tweaks included reducing the height of some of the housing blocks from 20m to just under 18m to remove the potential delays of going through the Building Safety Regulator gateway process. Gilman says this was easily accommodated as it meant losing just one floor from some of the blocks, which could be made up elsewhere.
Who will live and work at York Central?
York is a beautiful city in a great location with plenty of cultural activities, shops and restaurants. This makes it a popular – and expensive – place to live.
York Central will boost the availability of housing in the city and, if the developers and public sector backers achieve their aspiration of 40% affordable housing, should help the lower paid to find homes, especially as 80% of that figure is social rental.
“One of the things that we agreed was we don’t want this to be a little island of privilege that the people of York don’t really think is for them,” explains Arlington Real Estate’s Allan Cook. “This needs to be for anybody and everybody in York.
“We think the affordable housing element is the critical piece that should make it affordable for someone leaving university or leaving school, or somebody who’s selling up in London to move back home again.”
York is also short of commercial space, with Edward Tiddy citing research commissioned by York Central that this is holding the city’s economy back. He says that York is unusual in having a highly skilled population with a skills base comparable to Cambridge. Yet York’s gross value add per person is on a par with Sheffield or Newcastle, not Cambridge.
“One of the key things we found is that the central business district in York is, frankly, non-existent,” Twiddy says. “Business activity and the commercial property offer is dispersed and lower quality and quantity than other northern cities.
“This has actually fallen as a proportion of the city’s built environment over the last 15 years. Consequently, it appears that the planning constraints of the medieval city of York have been a barrier to its growth – not the people, which is normally the case.”
The new business district at York Central combined with the dark fibre network, data centre and excellent transport connections should hopefully change that.
There will be plenty of public space. Hudson Boulevard forms part of a linear park running through the site as far as the National Railway Museum. The old railway lines used for moving rolling stock also extend this far and will be retained, allowing attractions such as the Flying Scotsman steam locomotive to be exhibited at the museum.
The new square by the museum will extend up to the railway station and will be built over the existing station car park. A new multi-storey car park is being built as part of Network Rail’s York station improvements.
The commercial elements of the scheme are clustered around the station end of the development, with the residential parts of the scheme focused on the Water End part of the site. The commercial district will include a hotel, an innovation centre and the Government Property Agency is taking space too.
Gilman hopes the scheme will also include a data centre, because Network Rail’s largest operating centre is located in York and sits over a dark fibre network which is an ideal location for a data centre because of very fast internet with low latency.
“We are looking at a local data centre network in this location, which can then help businesses tooperate here,” he says. “It’s a big tick in the box for occupiers.
“But what it also does is provide heat. We can use that heat, for heating homes at a reduced cost from the open market value of gas.”
Gilman is sufficiently confident about the data centre that the scheme is being designed to take advantage of the waste heat, which will also help the sustainability credentials of the project.
The scheme will be built out in phases with the ambition to complete the whole project in the mid to late 2030s. The first phase comprises 30% of the overall plan.
The museum square and Government Property Agency building, which was designed by Sheppard Robson, already have planning. The new application covers the rest of the first phase including the hotel, which has been designed by 3D Reid, the public square by the station, the Allies and Morrison-designed innovation hub, and 1,000 homes which will be split between build to rent and market sale, including S106 homes.
The homes have been designed by Corstophine & Wright, Cartwright Pickard and Haworth Tompkins. Grant Associates is responsible for the landscaping and Arup, Buro Happold and Gardiner & Theobald are also working on the scheme.
To ensure that York Central does not get bogged down by planning delays, the JV has entered into a planning performance agreement with the council which allows the JV to fund additional planners to deal with other applications, allowing the core team, who know the area, to focus on York Central. Gilman and Cook expect the planning process to take six months and expect to put spades in the ground in September 2026.
This gives the JV time to get funding and put build contracts in place with the aspiration to get this phase completed by 2029.
Could York Central be a model for other major developments? Twiddy doubts that it is a good model for new towns, but thinks it is ideal for other brownfield sites.
“It’s certainly a model for other sites on railway land, where you are looking at mixed development, and dealing with access, remediation and putting infrastructure into the ground,” he says.
“If you are dealing with a with a greenfield site for a new town, then I think a lot of the issues that York Central has had to deal with will be much less relevant.”
Similar schemes to York Central include Temple Meads Quarter, the area around Bristol Temple Meads station which is a partnership between Network Rail, Homes England, Bristol council and the West of England combined authority. There are aspirations to build 10,000 homes on the 135ha site.
Network Rail and Homes England are also using the York Central model in Newcastle to develop the Forth Good Yards site, which is part of the wider Forth Yards development and which will be built on the site of a former leadworks. The 50ha site has room for 2,500 homes and a developer is currently being sought to build the initial tranche of 1,100 homes.
While this model cannot deliver all the 1.5 million new homes the government wants, it is an great example of public and private sectors leveraging their respective resources and skills to build homes on forgotten, derelict land where people actually want to live.
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