Gallery demolition plan heralds new Bristol city centre

A plan to demolish The Galleries Shopping Center and create a new part of Bristol city center has been formally submitted to the council.

Developers have submitted a master planning application to demolish the 34-year-old shopping center and its multi-storey car park and in its place create what will essentially be a new town center for Bristol, with 450 new homes, shops, leisure, restaurants, health and community spaces, a new hotel and accommodation for 750 students.

Those behind the scheme say it will open up the rest of the town center to connect with Castle Park and create new streets between Broadmead and the park lined with bars, cafes, shops and restaurants.

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The Galleries shopping center remains open for now. Bristol Live first revealed that bosses of individual stores in it were given two years’ notice of the plans at the start of June 2022, but the shopping center is expected to remain open until 2025, while first the outline and then the detailed planning application. go through the processes at the City Hall.

The plan was proposed by the landowners, developers Deeley Freed and LaSalle Investment Management. “We are delighted to have submitted this planning application after a lengthy pre-application process,” said Max Freed, of Bristol-based Deeley Freed. “This is a vital scheme for Bristol and we are very grateful to everyone who has been involved in the four-year consultation,” he added.

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“This is a once-in-a-generation chance to reinvent, revitalize and modernize such a large part of downtown. Our vision involves the complete transformation of this 1980s shopping center from the inside out, making the site more diverse, safer and greener. The development opens up the city center to Castle Park, with a real focus on addressing Bristol’s priorities around housing, health and wellbeing, climate, ecology, tourism and the economy,” he added.

“In response to feedback from the planning process, we increased the public open space, incorporated more community space and reduced the height of the tallest element,” he said.

The galleries first opened in October 1991 and were seen as the future of retail in Bristol, alongside the regeneration of nearby Broadmead. Its status as Bristol’s premier shopping center was knocked down first by The Mall at Cribbs Causeway and then by Cabot Circus, but the long-term future of city center shopping – for both Broadmead and The Galleries – was the most affected by people choosing to shop online instead of visiting the center regularly.

So developers have drawn up a scheme that will be “mixed use”, adding to other plans to create hundreds of new homes in the city centre. The plans include up to 450 new homes, of which 20% – just under 100 – will be classed as ‘affordable’ in planning terms, around 10,000 sq m of ground floor space for ‘retail, leisure, food and drinks, health and community’. uses’, and then around 40,000 sq m of office space above.

There will also be a 250-room hotel, or ‘aparthotel’, and purpose-built student accommodation for 750 students, with a full acre and a half of the site dedicated to “high quality public realm and green space”. .

Developers say they listened to concerns about how tall the tallest buildings proposed would be and reduced the heights of the tower blocks, as well as scaled back the plans overall.

In 2022, developers have talked about a 300-room hotel – now it’s 250 rooms – a purpose-built student accommodation block for 800 students – now it’s 750, although the number of new homes that could be built there seems to have increased from 240 to 450.

Renderings produced in 2022 also showed that the development’s flagship building – a 28-storey block of flats – would be on the south-east corner of The Galleries site, on the corner of Newgate and Fairfax Street, where the footbridge across Castle Park to the shopping center is.

In February this year, the developers produced renderings showing that this proposed tallest building had been reduced to 22 storeys and moved to the south-west corner, further along Newgate, at the corner of Union Street, where is the main entrance to the Galleries. from the Castle Park.

Developers will be hoping Bristol City Council’s new planning committee can decide on the scheme this year, with work likely to start next year.