One of Bristol’s biggest music and arts venues faces being demolished as developers have unveiled plans to knock it down and build around 430 flats on the site. The Document complex is a creative hub, venue and art space in a former document storage facility on Pennywell Road in St Jude’s, and has become one of Bristol’s leading arts and music venues since the Covid pandemic.
But the site’s owners have now told Bristol City Council that they have plans to knock down the large former warehouse – which also includes a big kickboxing gym in the southerly quarter of the building – and redevelop it.
The developers have submitted a preliminary request to council planners asking if it needs to do an Environmental Impact Assessment – a precursor to a formal planning application. The developers plan to build around 430 new homes which will be in four separate blocks.
Three of those blocks of flats will be six storeys high, but the largest would go from six storeys up to 12 and 18 storeys. The development, if given planning approval, looks set ultimately to mean the end of Document, which was set up by the team behind nightclub venues Motion and the Marble Factory to ‘continue their passion for building underground communities and scenes in former industrial spaces’.
“Breathing life into the former 90s document storage facility, its rebirth as Document is like nothing else on offer in Bristol,” a spokesperson for the venue said. But the large site is owned by a company called Orangestar Capital (Globe Bristol) Limited. This company has instructed Pearce Planning to put forward a new plan for the entire site.
The plans will see four separate residential blocks of flats, between six and 18 storeys high, which will be around 430 ‘build-to-rent’ flats. A total of 20 per cent of them – so around 86 – will be classed as ‘affordable’ in planning terms.
As well as the 430 flats, there will be as much as 500m² of ‘shared amenity spaces’ on the ground and around 670m² of space on the ground floor level which could be used for anything from cafes and gyms to shops, offices or health centres.
There will also be a ‘linear pocket park’ with a walkway on Pennywell Road, to retain the trees that line the area in front of the present Document building, and a ‘residential mews street’ connecting Vestry Lane, as well as new pathways and a pedestrian and cycle route which would connect with other development sites in the area.
Last year, Bristol Live revealed that developers had plans to build 350 new ‘build-to-rent’ flats on the saw mills site that lies right next door to the Document building, on the banks of the River Frome. This week, those developers formally submitted a planning application to Bristol City Council for those 350 flats.
In April last year, planning permission was also granted by city council planners to partly demolish Globe House, next door to the Document building on the corner, and build 68 flats in that smaller site.
The Document development is set to be the biggest single development in the St Jude’s area, which is about to undergo a major transformation as something called the Frome Gateway – with light industrial warehouses and factories being knocked down to be replaced by tall blocks of flats and student accommodation, from Pennywell Road all the way to the M32 and Cabot Circus on either side of the River Frome.
The decision to seek permission to redevelop the Document site is another blow for the owners of Motion and the Marble Factory. The same forces that are seeking to rapidly transform and redevelop St Jude’s are also at work in St Philips where the Motion site has been put up for sale by its owners, with the future of the iconic nightclub now in serious jeopardy in the next year or so.