Work grinds to halt on £220m dream

4.49.13pm GMT Sat 21st Mar 2009

WORK is grinding to a standstill on a flagship £220m New Islington regeneration scheme in Manchester as the recession bites

WORK is grinding to a standstill on a flagship £220m regeneration scheme in Manchester as the recession bites, according to a recent report in the Manchester Evening News.

The massive project was to turn the city's dilapidated Cardroom Estate in Ancoats into New Islington - billed by developers as the `best place in Manchester'.

More than £20m of public money - and £200m of private investment - was pledged to the scheme, which is being led by New East Manchester, developers Urban Splash and a government regeneration body.

It promised to deliver shops, a school, park and canal space and a total of 1,700 homes.

But the huge building site is now looking deserted, with work on just one of 18 planned developments still going on.

Less than one tenth of the 1,700 properties are completed - seven years after the project was launched.

Earlier this month it emerged that developers Bryant Homes had pulled out of a 200-apartment scheme on the site, The Botanic.

The team behind New Islington say they are committed to bringing it forward `when the market is ready'.

Around 200 homes were bulldozed under a compulsory purchase order to make way for the scheme, with many families who lost their homes promised a right to return.

So far, 35 replacement properties have been completed.

Huge amounts of public cash from the government and the European Regional Development Fund - understood to have committed around £18m and £3m to the project respectively - have already been invested in work to create park space and improved waterways.

The delayed Chips apartment block, designed by award-winning architect Will Alsop, is due to be completed in the next couple of months, bringing the total number of homes to 179.

A total of five developments - including the park and canals - are complete and the team say a number of other elements are in design and planning stages.

City centre Liberal Democrat councillor Marc Ramsbottom said: "Serious questions should be asked about why huge sums of public money have been spent without the property actually being built to make use of it.

"Many local people who lost their homes in compulsory purchase were promised the right to return to the area. That now seems a shallow promise."