One of Sheffield’s darkest hours came on a Thursday in 2010.
As part of a series of massive cuts to address the national deficit, the coalition government reneged on long-standing promises to fund a rejuvenation of the manufacturing sector and back a city centre redevelopment.
“One of my members called it Black Thursday,” said Sheffield Chamber of Commerce chief executive Nigel Tomlinson.
“I am reeling. This is clearly worrying news for Sheffield, especially the manufacturing and retail sectors.”
Tomlinson was right to be concerned. In the years that followed the situation for the city centre hardly improved.
Shopping centre giant Hammerson, which had rejuvenated Liverpool with a new “retail quarter”, pulled out of £500 million plans to repeat the trick in Sheffield.
By that point the project was already the subject of considerable frustration having been scaled down and delayed for years.
It didn’t seem like it at the time but the failure of that flagship scheme would turn out to be very much to the Northern city’s advantage.
“It was a blessing in disguise,” explained Andrew Davison, Project Director at Queensberry, the development partner for the regeneration scheme which replaced the Hammerson project called Heart of the City.
“About a million square feet of the city was basically going to be knocked down and a new retail quarter was going to be created.
“This was at the tipping point of when the big retail demise really started to happen, where building big shopping centres wasn’t viable anymore.
“The council really needed [something to happen] because the city centre had really dropped off and there were gaping holes on street corners.”
The council began seeking a different development partner to help breathe new into the city, which is when Davison and Queensberry entered the fray.
They told the council its approach would not be retail-centric, the vision was to have offices, hotels and residential properties mixed in with the traditional shops, restaurants and bars people expect in a central location.
“We said what we’d like to do is try and invigorate the city centre to attract people back in the city from the outer suburbs,” Davison explained.
“[The strategy to think differently about city centres] came pre-Covid and it was probably more luck than judgement [we pre-empted it by realising] we needed to do something to entice people back.
“Our plan was to do mixed-use across the board so residential, office, leisure, food and beverage, everything in one place and all within a very concentrated area.”
In 2016, an opportunity arose for the developers to secure a major employer with a large workforce to become a flagship tenant of the regenerated centre.
HSBC had an office in the city for years but were considering moving unless an upgraded facility could be secured.
Davison added: “We bid on a purpose-built office space [and won]. Basically they took on 140,000 square feet and that was kind of the catalyst, we built the first building which is called Grosvenor House.
“We are due to complete [the entire project] in June this year and [the units are] about 70% let. The amount of money the council has put in also attracted big names. For example, the Radisson Blu is going to open in June, which is a 154-bedroom hotel.
“I’m not quite sure how true it is, but apparently the food hall [we’re opening will be] the largest in Europe, about 25,000 square feet.”
The wreckage Covid-19 caused to retail-heavy town and city centres across the country has left many local authorities scrambling to draft plans to rebuild and rejuvenate like Sheffield has done.
But with so much competition for funding and the spiralling rates of inflation, such projects are harder to do than ever before.
All of which makes the £450 million sunk into the Sheffield regeneration look a snip compared to the costs of building today.
Although, as Davison explained, the success of the scheme was far from a given when the council took the plunge on the investment.
“A lot of the contracts were procured around 2018-19, so we missed the massive inflation that occurred. To do it today would be north of £600 million,” he added.
“Sheffield really put their best foot forward and have taken a significant financial risk.”
But by successfully delivering an ambitious city centre regeneration, Davison believes the city has reestablished itself as one of the North’s most prominent.
He said: “Sheffield is a massive city but it really was punching well below its weight. It had been overtaken by Manchester and Leeds, they were the two big ones.
“[But] now office rents are up they’re up there with the Manchester and Leeds rents.”
