More than eight acres of prime redevelopment land close to Temple Meads station is up for sale, after landowners worked with city planners on a ‘development brief’ for the entire area.
The sale, which could be the biggest single sale of land in the city centre for a generation, sees 8.53 acres of the industrial estate at the bottom of the famous hillside that has Totterdown’s coloured houses at the top.
Bristol City Council and the Temple Quarter regeneration project team have already put together a ‘development brief’ for the land, with tower blocks, student flats, cycle paths and as many as 1,500 new homes planned for the site.
The site is being marketed to development firms and property investment companies as one of the biggest opportunities in the country. Cushman & Wakefield are handling the freehold sale, and described it as a ‘significant central Bristol freehold land opportunity with adopted Bristol City Council development brief for high density residential-led development’.
The existing businesses on the land at Mead Street include the Freedog indoor softplay centre, and electrical supplies firm, car rental firm Europcar and the Royal Mail, along with several already empty units. But all the businesses with units on the Mead Street estate have leases that end at some point in 2025, 2026 or, in Freedog’s case, in 2029, but all have early termination options if the new owner wants to clear the site, level it and get building new homes.
Even if the new owner did nothing and kept it as an industrial estate, it would net an income from the firms that have leases there of more than half a million pounds a year, but Cushman & Wakefield are marketing the land as somewhere for a developer to make huge profits, and said the council is already backing the idea of a high-density development there.
“The site represents around 66 per cent of the Mead Street Development Brief area, for which Bristol City Council is seeking owners to deliver around 1,500 new homes and employment space,” the agents said, adding that other sites around have already been given planning permission for large-scale developments, including the University of Bristol ’s Temple Quarter site on the other side of Bath Road, and the former Robins & Day Peugeot garage site, which has been given planning permission for a build-to-rent flat development.
The agents are also highlighting the need for student accommodation in the area, despite a large number of Purpose-Built Student Accommodation (PBSA) developments around Temple Meads in recent years.
“Bristol remains one of the most under-supplied PBSA markets in the UK having witnessed a near 15,000 increase in student numbers over the past five years whilst less than 2,000 PBSA beds have been delivered,” the agents said. “Bristol’s residential market is also considered one of the most expensive in the UK, with average house prices second only to London,” they added.
“In short, the Mead Street area is transitioning in planning policy terms from a safeguarded principal industrial/warehousing area to an integral part of the Bristol Temple Quarter mixed use regeneration area, identified for new workspaces, new homes and supporting infrastructure,” they said.
“The Mead Street area is enviably located at the southwestern edge of the 130-hectare regeneration area surrounding Temple Meads Station and also neighbouring the Whitehouse Street regeneration area to the immediate west.”
Among the options to attract property developers to spend millions to buy the Mead Street land, Cushman & Wakefield said: “Bristol is already experiencing significant housing challenges across all forms of residential delivery, be it private, affordable, build-to-rent, PBSA, Co-Living and all forms of senior or care housing,” before outlining the need in the city for PBSA, ‘build-to-rent’, the new Co-Living, private residential and industrial buildings.
The land up for sale now makes up two-thirds of the whole Mead Street site, and is the land to the south of Mead Street next to the railway line. Back in 2022, while the city council was working on its ‘development brief’ for Mead Street, developers put forward proposals for 900 new homes inside some very tall buildings, which sparked a campaign to ‘save the Totterdown view’.
Those plans never got as far as a planning application, although planning permission was awarded for a different part of the same area, the former BART Spices site on York Road. Development there hasn’t happened yet, because the developers have been at logger-heads with the council planners over changes to the agreed scheme.
The land to the south side of Mead Street is owned by a pension fund, and managed by DTZ Investors. The land being up for sale now means the landowner has decided to cash in now, with the development framework completed and the land poised for redevelopment, rather than redevelop it themselves.