Bus station redevelopment is catalyst for city centre regeneration
Published: 29 January 2021
Richard Marsh, Project Director for Exeter City Council’s Liveable Exeter, explains why the Council’s investment in a new leisure complex and bus station is an important catalyst for the wider regeneration of the city centre.
“The fantastic news earlier this week that Exeter’s new bus station and St Sidwell’s Point leisure complex are due to open in the summer, despite the challenges presented by the pandemic, demonstrates just how capable this city is in delivering high quality, low carbon development.
St Sidwell’s Point and the bus station are just the start of the journey that Liveable Exeter is taking the city on.
Liveable Exeter is an ambitious 20 year programme that will see 12,000 new homes built across the city.
But it’s more than just houses - the programme seeks to strengthen communities, support investment in sustainable transport and deliver the infrastructure needed to make that work all with the goal of enabling healthy and active lifestyles for all citizens.
CityPoint is the next step in that journey and it’s a really exciting step for Exeter, its businesses and its residents.
What I believe to be a real positive of multi-use development such as CityPoint is that they give cities an opportunity to deliver flagship mixed-use developments in the heart of the city which will allow the city, its businesses and residents new office space, retail and new homes.
The pandemic has forced forward some of the structural shifts we’ve been seeing in city centres for decades. And to prevent our cities from becoming empty places, mixed-use developments like CityPoint, where people work and live will support the creation of a vibrant city environment and facilitate an economy which runs in to the evening.
Liveable Exeter sites are committed to being built around garden cities principles that include health and wellbeing for all citizens and a commitment to the city’s carbon neutral goals.
As such CityPoint has been designed to capture the best of modern thinking in terms of place-making design and development. This means making the best of its location within the city and that does mean that it will be a taller building and have higher density. It needs those two elements to deliver 850,000 square foot of floor space!
Within the 850,000 square foot, CityPoint is expected to have:
- new office space to attract businesses and jobs to the city
- flexible work space
- up-scale and mid-scale branded hotels
- commercial leisure, culture, and retail uses
- new homes for sale and rent
This variety of space in addition to the leisure centre at St Sidwell’s Point really will begin to provide Exeter with the type of city centre that will attract people, whether for business, retail, leisure, or tourism, to the heart of the city centre.
It opens up opportunity for Exeter to have an 18 hour economy, more vibrancy and diversity across the city-scape and a place that continues to grow in a post-Covid landscape.”
To find out more about the Liveable Exeter programme visit the website www.liveableexeter.co.uk or follow Liveable Exeter on social media for the latest updates
- Facebook @LiveableExeter (www.facebook.com/LiveableExeter)
- Instagram @LiveableExeter (www.instagram.com/liveable_exeter)
- Twitter @liveableexeter (www.twitter.com/liveableexeter)
- Linkedin @LiveableExeter (www.linkedin.com/showcase/liveable-exeter)