Central Square

Nice to see this depressing walkway now shut off in preparation for the demolition of Marland house...

End of an era! Shame about the trees as they are looking nice in the sunshine!

Good riddance. Marland house was the most dismal 1960s welcome to Cardiff. Should have been condemned years ago.

Now that looks like the 'hole digging' process is pretty much complete - looking forward to seeing progress in an upward direction soon Looks like we're going to get a new tower crane soon (and I presume at least another 1 for no.2)
This is a picture from today which you will need to scroll to see it all.

So much faster when the weather doesn't consist of horizontal rain for a month.

According to the civil service jobs website,HMRC are starting the recruitment process for their new regional centre. The advent says there are 480 jobs to fill, but the candidate pack says they are recruiting as part of plans to open 13 new centres. So I'm not sure whether these 480 jobs are spread over all sites or limited to Cardiff.

All roles are in customer service with salaries up to £20k. It looks like the new starters will be recruited into existing offices and then be expected to move to the new centres when they're up and running.

Other snippets:

- All 13 regional centres will be in new developments or close to transport links (hopefully both for Cardiff)
- The Wales hub is expected to open in 2019/20 so plenty of time to build something!

I can see it going to The JR Smart John Street site, purely because of a potential lower rent than Central Square.

I don't mind which one it goes to, and maybe Callaghan Square South is in the running as well?

The John St site is surely too small. If they are leaving Llanishen and are centralising other offices they'll need a pretty big site surely? South side Callaghan Sq seems the only option. I'm not sure they could go very high rise there though. 6-8 storeys maximum? Central sq would be less of an issue hough I wonder if the beeb would be happy to be next door to a considerable mid-rise keeping out all the sunlight?

JR Smart are planning on building the same sort of size of offices there (square foot wise) that Rightacres are planning at the Central Square Interchange site Frank.

What makes you think that 6-8 floors is the maximum for that site?

I think they'll build to at least 10-12 floors on that site and don't forget modern offices are designed to fit more people in them. The new Admiral building is a bit smaller that what JR Smart have planned and fits 3,000 staff.

Does the John St site include that peculiar tent thingy? What I was saying is that I'm not sure about a high rise above 6-8 storeys on the south side of Callaghan Sq.