UK: Nottingham City Council has approved a project to build a 522-bed student accommodation development near the city’s central railway station.
The two-building scheme in Traffic Street is to be constructed between the under-construction Vantage building and the Castle Rock Brewery. It was approved at the City Council’s planning committee last week.
According to the Nottingham Post, it hopes that the addition of more purpose-built student accommodation in the city will alleviate some of the pressure on areas with high density of students, such as Lenton.
The Traffic Street development is part of the proposed £2 billion Southern Gateway scheme between Nottingham city centre and the Meadows, and will look onto another ongoing student accommodation development in the neighbouring Vantage building.
Sally Longford, deputy leader of the council for Labour and planning committee member, voiced her support for the scheme at the planning meeting.
She said: “I’m really pleased to see this, it’s been a derelict site for a long time, and I welcome purpose-built student accommodation in the city, because hopefully it will reduce pressure on areas such as in my ward where there’s a high number of houses in multiple occupation with students occupying, and help us maintain the stock of family hopes that we have.”
The chairman of the committee, Councillor Michael Edwards, voted for the scheme but said: “I think the Traffic Street Project is not a great name for homes, and I hope very much we can find an alternative. I don’t think ‘projects’ has been used as a name for housing since America in the 60s, so I think we need a better name than that.
“In places like the Meadows we’ve seen the rents of private sector housing go up a lot recently, and we’ve seen some residents pushed out because of private landlords desiring to get higher rents by getting a change of tenant.
“So we think from a Meadows perspective, it’s very much we want to see places like this provided so we can reduce the pressure on the private sector rental market, so that would be a very strong reason for the Meadows supporting it,” he added.
The council presented its report on the plan at the meeting.
It read: “The site has historically been used for commercial uses, notably as a textile mill, warehouse, girder and timber yard and a car park. It is also understood that residential properties once occupied part of the site prior to this.
“The site was largely cleared of industrial buildings in approximately 2009, albeit part of an office building still remains in the north eastern corner of the site. The site is flat and partially covered in scrub vegetation with mesh fencing,” it added.
