On an area the size of 63 football pitches next to York’s Victorian railway station, work is under way on the UK’s biggest city centre regeneration scheme, which will expand the area by a third.
The £2.5bn project, called York Central, aims to transform a vast 45-hectare (111-acre) site – once a major railway manufacturing hub with iron foundries, signalling workshops and wagon stables, now mostly a drab car park – into housing and offices.
In the works are 3,000 homes beside a large park, a 200-bed hotel, a hub for business start-ups with a focus on rail, agricultural and media tech and biotechnology, and an expansion of the National Railway Museum. The scheme promises to create an estimated 6,500 new jobs, including 1,500 during construction.
It also includes a major new building for a government ministry. The tenant has yet to be confirmed, but the Guardian understands it will be the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), and an official announcement is expected in summer.
York is one of Defra’s four main hubs, alongside Bristol, London and Newcastle, and 854 civil servants will move from the current office on the other side of town into the new six-storey, 195,000 sq ft government building, which can house up to 2,600.
The state-of-the-art structure, which will have solar panels, air source heat pumps and a green roof, is due to be completed by 2028.
York Central forms part of the government’s plan for change that promises growth for every region, and its industrial strategy that names digital and technologies, and life sciences as two key sectors.
It “will see a ripple effect for the local economy”, Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister and housing secretary, said when she visited in February, adding: “What we’re really clear on as government, growth has to be across the whole of the UK.”
Stephen Hind, Network Rail’s head of business development for the eastern UK, says one of York’s biggest problems is an outflow of expertise from the city. “There’s not necessarily the space for those companies to grow.”
After previous failed attempts to remodel the site several decades ago, the landowners Network Rail and Homes England have teamed up with UK developers McLaren Property and Arlington Real Estate to get the new master plan off the ground. They are backed by £150m of public money, most of it from the government agency Homes England, with £30m from City of York council.
The project, bigger than similar regeneration schemes in the capital at King’s Cross, Battersea power station and British Land’s £5.6bn Canada Water in east London, is part of York’s 10-year growth plan, and should be completed about 2038.
However, local campaigners worry that the opportunity to do something different and build a “utopia” with walkable neighbourhoods in the spirit of England’s garden cities could be squandered.
“The opportunity this presents to York is huge. It’s very rare to be able to do things more or less from scratch,” says Jane Hustwit from York Central Co-Owned, which campaigns for a community-led mixed-use neighbourhood. “So if we repeat in York an off-the-shelf city development, making all the same mistakes again, it would just be heartbreaking.”
At the heart of York Central is the expanded railway museum with a big new square in front as the “cultural gateway” to the area. Rayner has confirmed a £15m injection into the institution from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government – without which the near-£100m museum revamp would have been in danger.
The rest will come from corporate partners, trusts and individual donors, with funding going towards a new circular central hall with a cafe connecting the museum’s two existing buildings – the North Eastern Railway’s 1873 goods office, which was used as a freight depot until the early 1970s and now exhibits royal carriages but is closed for refurbishment, and the Victorian engine shed.
The latter houses the museum’s collection of locomotives such the 737 featured in the movie Chariots of Fire, the Flying Scotsman, and the only Japanese bullet train found outside Japan.
The York Central scheme includes a new western entrance to the railway station and two new bridges over the East Coast line, while car parking will move to a multistorey car park on the other side of the station closer to the historical centre.
Tom Gilman, head of regeneration at McLaren, wants to avoid creating an “oasis of privilege” and insists the new neighbourhood will be “car light”.
However, campaigners have voiced concerns over the decision to close a section of Leeman Road to allow for the construction of Museum Square and the museum’s central hall, arguing this will cut a traditional working-class area off from the city centre. Residents will be forced to take a long route round when foot access through this space is limited during museum closing hours.
“Symbolically, it cuts that community off,” says Phil Bixby, a local architect and treasurer of York Environment Forum. “There’s a lot of feeling of ownership of the history, heritage of this place there, there are people whose families worked in the railways for generations.”
The museum insists that the local community will not be cut off, pointing to new alternative routes under construction.
The campaigners hope that the developers will listen to them. “The pandemic taught us a lot about what good neighbourhoods look like,” says Bixby.
Construction on the first lot of 1,000 homes is expected to start next year and people are due to move in from 2028. All homes are to be built to Passivhaus principles for energy and comfort, with heat pumps planned and potentially a deep geothermal system to provide heating and hot water.
There will be a mix of one and two-bedroom flats, about 60% of the total, as well as three- and four-bedroom houses. At least a fifth of the homes will be affordable but the developers say they are aiming for 40%. Of the affordable homes, the majority (80%) are slated to be social rent, with the remainder made up of discounted market rent and shared ownership, Gilman says.
David Skaith, the mayor of York and North Yorkshire, hopes the new homes could stem the tide of university graduates and other young people leaving the city because of high rents and house prices.
Tenants who rent privately in the city pay an average of £1,117 a month, up by 2.6% in March from a year earlier, according to the Office for National Statistics. In January, rents were still 5.9% higher year on year. The average house price in York dipped by 1.6% to £299,000 in February, while across Yorkshire and The Humber, values were up by 7.5%.
“To have such a large-scale site in a small historical city like York is quite unusual and much needed in terms of investment and housing,” Skaith says, adding that it would be transformative for the wider region, which needs better transport links from east to west, such as more frequent train services between York and Scarborough.
James Farrar, chief executive of York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority, agrees, saying “the worst deprivation is on the coast”. He says homes being rented out on Airbnb or other holiday home sites has worsened the problem: “Housing affordability is an enormous challenge across York and North Yorkshire,.”
Andy Shrimpton, founder of the Cycle Heaven bike shop in York, wants the developers to think big with their plans for the site, arguing that a failure to aim high could lead to a generic “estate devoid of any interest, amenity, community or joy”.
He adds: “We’ve done this long enough to know what works best in cities – dense neighbourhoods where we allow for, and mix up, all of life’s activities – work, rest and play.”
