Tesco: We will not bail out Carlisle's Viaduct estate
Last updated at 13:29, Monday, 08 February 2010
Tesco will not step in to bail out Carlisle’s Viaduct Estate after the University of Cumbria backed out of a scheme to build a new campus there.
The supermarket giant has planning consent for a 40,000 sq ft store in the Viaduct Estate, but was instead set to build a new store at Morton to free up the land for the university.
The plans are now in disarray. The university has all but backed out of the scheme, and the Northwest Regional Development Agency says it will not pay £3.8million to clean up the area until an ‘end-user’ is in place.
However, Tesco now appear unlikely to be that ‘end-user’, and will stick with its plan B of building a 50,000 sq ft store on land off Wigton Road.
A Tesco spokesman said: “We will have to get a full report of what’s going on at the Viaduct Estate, but our preferred option is still to return to Morton.”
Tesco won planning permission for a 40,000 sq ft store on the Viaduct Estate after a public inquiry in 2007. It had wanted to build a 70,000 sq ft store.
But the city council offered Tesco land at Morton to make way for the new university campus.
Tesco’s decision to relocate to Morton leaves the future of the Viaduct Estate – between the city centre and the River Caldew – wide open. It was identified as an early priority for redevelopment when Carlisle Renaissance was set up after the city’s 2005 floods.
Initial plans involved a waterside development of bars, apartments and offices.
The university hoped to open its £70million campus in autumn 2011, replacing its sites in Brampton Road and Paternoster Row with the new development, which was to include a theatre/arts centre for the city.
Mounting financial problems led it to scale back those proposals to a “phased development” beginning in 2013. Now the Venerable Peter Ballard, chairman of its board of directors, says the scheme may be scrapped altogether. In any event, nothing will happen before 2020.
The NWDA was to release millions in funding for the clean up of the site, a former gasworks which is still contaminated by toxic substances including arsenic, boron, benzene, napthalene and phenol.
That money will not now be released until another user for the site can be found.
First published at 11:25, Monday, 08 February 2010
Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk
Michael Owen: The site is not a public health hazard as it is, but if it was to be developed, the land would have to be cleaned up as part of the development.
The NWDA had more or less agreed to funding the clean up, as part of the development into a campus of the university.
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Thank heaven Tesco are backing out from the Viaduct estate scheme. The land is question has enormous historical, symbolic, and social value. It MUST be reserved for uses that will contribute to Carlisle's renaissance as a cultural and historical centre. There must also be some sort of guarantee that development of the site will add to the architectural lustre of the site. Development by Tesco would have only resulted in a tawdry misuse of this extraordinary property. Better that it lie fallow for now.
Posted by Allen Scott on 13 June 2010 at 17:46