- Posts: 1040
- Joined: Wed Jul 30, 2014 12:28 pm
A couple of thoughts.
1. Does the number include the 'street food' style stalls proposed for the Market Hall in the base of the Ledger building? If so that could eat up (ahem) a bunch of the 50.
2. It could just be part of the marketing guff that accompanies any new development. Talk about mixed use, active street frontages, etc etc. The likes of DCfW, the council, hell, a lot of people on this board.. push for that kind of thing. So when building momentum behind a project you talk up these credentials. You then try to backtrack a little bit when you go through detailed planning permission. And as a developer you probably tolerate having a fair number of these units being empty if you can secure significant numbers of pre-sales of flats and pre-lets of office space. Why? Because you can probably increase your chance of planning permission, increase the return on the flats and offices... and its only later on people realise a lot of the empty units aren't going to be used, at which time you convert them into something else.
I'm actually more worried about the viability of the Market Place during the construction period. For quite a while you'll have basically one office building (albeit a large one) and a uni campus. I think compared to London, a lower proportion of office workers and students would eat out at lunch time. And the area will, at this stage, still be cut off from the wider city centre and office development at Central Square. So where will all the customers come from?