People walking out of Temple Meads station can now walk straight between two eyesore derelict buildings and onto Victoria Street to head to the city centre – after 20 yards of a footpath was reopened for the first time in two years.
The wide path opposite Temple Meads was closed as part of the safety cordon around the Grosvenor Hotel, which caught fire two years ago in October 2022, and pedestrians had to walk all the way around the site using a narrow stretch of pavement on Redcliffe Way.
The reopening of the path was welcomed by the man in charge of transport in the city, Cllr Ed Plowden (Green, Windmill Hill) who said there were ‘complicated circumstances’. But there is no end in sight to the impasse between the city council and the building’s owner, Nimish Popat, over the future of the building, which still stands half-demolished in a prime location close to the city’s main train station.
Mr Popat’s firm Earlcloud carried out the demolition of the original Grosvenor Hotel in March this year, but left the rear 1930s extension still standing. Bristol Live understands the minimum was done to meet the requirements of a court order which required the building to be made safe enough to reopen the pavement and road at Temple Way in front of the hotel.
The footpath down the side of the hotel was the final part of the area around the hotel site to be reopened, and that has now happened. “Really great to see the Brunel Mile finally reopened past the old hotel at long last,” said Cllr Plowden. “Thanks to transport and building control officers at Bristol City Council for working behind the scenes in complicated circumstances to get this done,” he added.
Bristol City Council has said it intends to take out a Compulsory Purchase Order to buy the Grosvenor Hotel since at least 2016 but still hasn’t. There is a wide difference of valuation of the hotel site between the council and Mr Popat, who bought the building and drew up plans to restore and reopen the hotel on the basis that the arena would be built on Temple Island nearby.
When that didn’t happen, he then allowed an Indian businessman to market and sell student flats ahead of a redevelopment that never happened – and the businessman Sanjiv Varma spent millions of pounds from the sales before avoiding a prison sentence by escaping to Dubai.
The fire in October 2022 came when the building was already in a semi-derelict state, and Mr Popat steadfastly refused to make the building safe or demolish it, until he was ordered to by a court at the start of this year.
The half-demolition was enough to make the building safe, but still leaves the eyesore site as one of several that greet people arriving in Bristol for the first time coming out of Temple Meads station, along with a former petrol station on the corner of Redcliffe Way and Temple Meads that has been derelict for more than a decade, and the former George and Railway hotel on the opposite corner.
Bristol City Council has plans for the entire area, and in 2017 unveiled plans for what a new office, cafe and shops development on both sites would look like. Seven years on, and the sites are still derelict and empty.