Appointment of Courthouse Car Park Developer

Regeneration opportunities, such as the development of key sites, can provide enormous value whilst enhancing the quality of the town centre environment, increasing footfall and encouraging economic success.

The Courthouse Car Park is one such key site offering an opportunity for development within the Town Centre. In particular, the 4 hectare (Ha) site provides a major opportunity for the delivery of town centre living and high quality public realm adjacent to the Barnsley Interchange. The scheme provides an opportunity to deliver aspirational housing that meets the requirements of residents who can make clear choices about where they live. These households could be new home makers as well as those actively down sizing. The site provides an opportunity to provide homes in a setting that enable these residents a life style of their choice, making the most of access to leisure, culture, retail, transport and all the benefits of this unique urban setting.
The site is owned in its entirety by the Council and houses the Digital Media Centre, a working environment designed to support the success and development of creative, media and digital businesses. The site provides the potential opportunity to expand the provision of the Digital Media Centre (DMC) through innovative proposals that provide for a range of lifestyle businesses as well as actual expansion space for the DMC. The bulk of the remainder is underutilised for a prime town centre site, providing surface level car parking. The Barnsley College Eastgate House Campus is adjacent to the site and there could be an opportunity to include the site within the opportunity for a range of complementary activity.
Recent soft marketing identified that the most viable form of development for the majority of the site would be residential. The site could accommodate high density, family housing, for either outright sale or purpose-built private sector housing, responding to recent trends to a return of town and city centre living. The preference is for high quality, traditional housing, centrally located with good connectivity and easy access to a wide range of facilities.

Central to the development will also be the reprovison of an amount of car parking space to replace the existing car parking lost by the development. This could be reprovided / retained on site or elsewhere in appropriate / sustainable locations within the town centre.

The Courthouse development will seek to deliver:

-An urban development that shapes the physical setting for life in the town centre, and effectively blends residential and commercial
-A sustainable urban housing offer
-Quality outcomes from a planning and community perspective
-Potential for extending the current Digital Media Centre offer of vibrant and affordable office and meeting space for creative, media and digital businesses
-Residential parking plans that promote good design and efficient use of land
-Safe, welcome and easy to use commercial car parking spaces

The Council is now seeking to appoint a developer to further its vision for sustainable town centre housing/commercial provision. The developer will work with the Council to fund and ultimately deliver the development.
It is envisaged that the developer will work with the Council to achieve:-

-A sustainable financial model and cost plan
-A development approach that supports the priorities and ambitions of the Council
-Provision of a funding and delivery strategy to ensure the scheme is developed