“Untapped potential”: Capital & Centric’s ambitions for city living in Sheffield

Already known for their restorative work across
Greater Manchester, including at Kampus
and Crusader
Mill, Capital
& Centric are casting their
eyes across the Pennines. In
partnership with Sheffield City Council, the developer is working on
two sites in the city, Eyewitness
Works in the Devonshire Quarter
and Cannon
Brewery in Neepsend.

My
conversation with C&C co-founder Adam Higgins starts with a simple question: why Sheffield?

Adam
has a long-standing history with the city, he tells me, having
previously been involved in transforming the former Central Technical
College into Leopold Square in the early 2000s. He says his main
motivation for choosing Sheffield is its “untapped potential,”
citing award-winning public realm spaces like the Peace Gardens, the
strong culture of independence, a bustling music scene and an
industrial heritage locked inside its now-derelict city centre
buildings.

Our
conversation quickly turns to the challenges and risks associated
with trying to unlock this potential. Unlike C&C’s hometown of
Manchester, Sheffield does not have the same proportion of people
living or working in the city centre or the same history of major
regeneration, which means there is greater risk for developers and
less evidence on whether there is real demand for these schemes. Adam
tells me his company want to be at the forefront of this
change, setting the standard through good design, public amenities
and working closely with the Council to set out a vision for the
city.

But
what will this change actually look like in practice? Rather than
seeing cities like Manchester as somewhere for Sheffield to copy,
Adam says Capital & Centric believe we can take advantage of
being ‘behind the curve’ in city centre living and set the
standard for other cities to follow. Due to owning the Eyewitness
Works site, Sheffield City Council have been an active partner in the
project, working with the developers to agree end use and ground
floor commercial units and connect to its wider vision for the
Devonshire Quarter.

Sceptics
may question how a closer relationship between a developer and its
planning authority affects the balancing of commercial interests
alongside wider planning concerns. And whilst it’s true that the
business case will still ultimately be central, it demonstrates that
there is a role for councils within development which goes beyond
approval and towards actively shaping and promoting good quality
design as a vested partner.

Adam
tells me Capital & Centric believe that councils should feel
confident to assert this view more regularly and challenge developers
who do not meet their standards. In practice this has become far
harder over the last 10-15 years, as housing target pressures have
forced councils to focus on quantity rather than quality. As Adam
himself acknowledges, this is evident in the “identkit
developments” popping up in Sheffield and across the country, often
dull and lacking civic pride, with very little long-term thinking
about the homes people really want – and desperately need.

Given
Capital & Centric are known for attracting a certain kind of
20-something, often young professional clientele, who will these two
Sheffield schemes be for? Adam argues that, despite this perception
of his company, their projects are not aimed at one specific group
and that they hope to attract a range of people. With Eyewitness
Works offering one, two and three-bed apartments and town houses, he
tells me there is an ambition to appeal to young professionals,
families and older couples, who he believes still have a desire to be
in city centres. “Cities
don’t just need to be for young party people but can become their own
community, a sustainable mixture of groups.”

Despite
this aspiration, there will not be any affordable housing within
C&C’s Eyewitness Scheme; instead £83,000 will be contributed
via the Community
Infrastructure Levy to provide
new or improve infrastructure, facilities and services in the local
area.

An
independent
viability assessment conducted
for the Council found that, due to high build costs and a reduced
land value, it would not be viable for the site to provide the 10%
affordable housing stipulated in planning policy. I raise this
critical issue with Adam.

“Historic
spaces like Eyewitness Works are, in some ways, a massive headache to
restore. They throw up surprises and curveballs that maybe weren’t
anticipated, and you have to take a lot of care to both preserve and
celebrate the building’s history. That can take longer and end up
costing more than building new.

“There’s
not a one-size-fits-all answer. Sometimes there’s merit in taking
down buildings where you can do something better or where there’s
little architectural merit. But it would be such as shame if
buildings like Eyewitness were lost.”

To
make the site viable for development, Homes England loaned £3.5m to
assist in site remediation costs which will be repaid by Capital &
Centric once developed. Whilst the reliance on subsidies has been
necessary in the current economic climate to restore sites which have
been left to deteriorate, it also makes it difficult for developers
to create schemes that provide affordable housing – something C&C
aspire to do in the future, Adam says.

From
a commercial point of view this decision is of sound reasoning, but
it begs the question of how we provide the affordable housing
desperately needed in the city right now. If affordable housing is
determined from an assessment of cost and profit, it becomes harder
to provide this within private schemes given the benefit is often not
monetary but social.

Adam
seems optimistic that as more developers show an interest in
Sheffield, the supply of affordable housing will become more
feasible. But if the commercial market is currently not ripe for this
provision, is there an argument that agents like the Council need to
increase their role further and provide some of the homes required
now to address our housing crisis?

This
is by no means a new issue in British planning, as Sheffield City Council
will be well aware. The post-war boom saw a recognition that the
market cannot always provide all types of homes required, especially
as affordable housing is typically a public good which falls outside
a traditional consumer market. Yet since the Thatcher reforms of the
1980s and vanishing government grants under both Labour and
Conservative tenures, there has been an over-reliance on the private
sector to deliver all types of housing. This results in a system
where the development of affordable housing becomes a ‘nice to
have’ and not an absolute necessity. With around
21,000 people on waiting lists for social housing in Sheffield,
affordable housing cannot be an aspiration for the future – it has
to be something authorities address right now.

Eyewitness
Works demonstrates that a lot can be achieved when the public and
private sector work together to provide homes and restore some of
Sheffield’s lost heritage. The building’s central role as the
site of Channel 4’s current interior design contest, The
Big Interiors Battle, shows it’s
likely to provide the high-quality, desirable development required to
boost confidence, sustainable living and investment in Sheffield city
centre.

But
if the Devonshire Quarter is to provide the “range of occupants”
described in the Strategic
Vision for the City Centre, then
the Council needs the appropriate powers to develop and finance their
own affordable homes. This will allow them to create a mixed
community that can complement, rather than rely on, the work of
private sector developers like Capital & Centric.