The redevelopment of South Bristol’s biggest shopping centre will go ahead – but local residents are claiming victory after the developers agreed to scale back their plans.
A battle over the controversial plan to knock down the Broadwalk Shopping Centre in the centre of Knowle and build more than 800 flats in its place had been due to go to the courts this month, but an eleventh hour deal has been struck between the developers and a campaign group of local residents who had forced a judicial review.
The property development company that bought the ailing shopping centre has now agreed to scale back their plans, which would have seen three 12-storey blocks of flats and other residential blocks built on the large site between the Wells Road and Redcatch Park – and in return the leader of the residents’ campaign group that was challenging the scheme in the courts has agreed to drop the judicial review.
It means the ‘Redcatch Quarter’ will now go ahead, but on a reduced scale, after a three-year campaign by a group of local residents who raised thousands of pounds to challenge a series of controversial decisions by council planners over the course of 2023. The campaigners said they weren’t opposed to the principle of knocking down the 54-year-old shopping centre and creating large-scale residential development there, but what was proposed was too big and imposing and dropping potentially thousands of new residents in an area like Knowle would have too much of an impact on local traffic, healthcare and schools provision.
Laura Chapman, the chair of the Broadwalk Redevelopment Community Group (BRCG), whose name was on the Judicial Review, said: “As we have stated from the start, our actions have always been driven by pragmatism and focussed on securing the best outcome for Knowle. We have negotiated extensively and – after much soul-searching – we feel that the new scheme is the closest we are going to get to a mutually acceptable solution.”
Laura told Bristol Live her decision to drop the judicial review, in return for developers Broadside Holding scaling back their plans, was not a change of opinion about the controversial way the scheme was dealt with in the summer of 2023. She thanked the members of the public in and around Knowle who supported the community group’s actions – they raised thousands of pounds to take the council to a judicial review after the scandal of last summer’s planning U-turn.
The plans were initially refused unanimously by councillors on the planning committee at the start of the summer of 2023, but when they met again six weeks later to agree on the reasons why, the Conservative chair and Labour councillors announced they now wanted to approve the plan – which passed on the double casting vote of Tory chair Richard Eddy.
Bristol Live then revealed Cllr Eddy and Kevin Slocombe, the then head of the Labour Mayor’s Office, had met separately with the developers in between the two meetings to talk about how to get the plans approved.
The controversy triggered a row at the planning committee for months afterwards, and ultimately a legal challenge from outraged local residents, which was due to be heard by a judge this month. But throughout 2024, the leaders of the Knowle Neighbourhood Planning Group had been meeting with the developers to thrash out a compromise for a smaller scale development – and that has now happened.
Cllr Ed Plowden (Green, Windmill Hill), who resigned from the planning committee in protest at what happened during the summer of 2023, said it was a victory for people power. “This is a major victory for the local community in South Bristol,” he said. “I am hugely impressed by the work of local residents Laura and Helen who have been so courageous and determined, crowd-funded and supported by their neighbours, to challenge the power of the developers and the misuse of power and procedure at City Hall by the previous administration.
“The former local Knowle councillors failed their residents by too readily accepting the developer’s claims that there was no viable alternative to the over-dense development originally proposed. I was then forced to resign from the committee after the former chair forced this through in a very underhand way, which led to the legal action against the council.
“This shows what can be achieved when people stand up for their neighbourhood, and credit is also due to the developers for recognising how unwelcome their plans were with local people.
“I look forward to working with the local community, the new local Green Councillors Cam and Toby, and the planners to make sure that we continue to strive to get the best possible deal for Broadwalk, but also to see the Green Party’s vision for gentle density to start to be embraced across the city,” he added.
Broadside Holdings will now put forward a fresh planning application to revise their original scheme. The firm’s development manager Francis Hilton said: “In February of this year we publicly pledged to work diligently alongside Laura’s BRCG group and other stakeholders to agree a pathway from outline consent to detailed design, committing our best efforts to reduce the scale of the scheme.
“We have worked closely with Laura and Bristol City Council to engineer a deliverable solution that addresses all major stakeholder concerns. The backdrop of Bristol’s acute housing shortage has only worsened during the course of 2024 and we now look forward to progressing the revised designs to bring forward the much needed homes, commercial and community space that Knowle deserves,” he added. Public meetings will be arranged to reveal the new, scaled-back plans, to the community.
Bristol City Council were invited to respond to the announcement of the deal, but declined.