By Kevin Gopal
You can also read this article on The Lead here

Bolton Council’s bold ambition to nearly treble the number of town centre residents could rely as much on people from Berlin or Belgium as Blackrod, believes developer Tim Heatley.

The Capital & Centric co-founder has plans to build 160 new one to four-bedroom homes on four plots around Bradshawgate and Breightmet Street. They won’t be cheap, they won’t go far to solve the housing crisis that afflicts Bolton as much as anywhere – but they could be key to reviving the town centre’s fortunes.

The council’s masterplan envisages adding accommodation for 5,000 people on top of the 2,000 or so already living in the centre. Following the town centre’s much documented retail decline, more residents, spending locally, are seen as a necessity. But the residential market is “currently in its infancy”, according to a report by Deloitte for the council last year, with an undersupply of residential units, particularly of high-quality rental product, with most being fully occupied”.

Enter Manchester developer Capital & Centric. Heatley believes its Neighbourhood: Bolton scheme, currently awaiting planning permission, could appeal to local people. But others figure highly in his thinking – those who’ve come to Manchester, from other parts of the country or overseas, to study, stayed to work and lived in the city centre.

“Often digital nomads, they can choose to live wherever,” Heatley, whose firm has been behind two million sq ft of commercial, residential, hotel and leisure development, mainly in the north, in the past 10 years, tells The Bolton Lead. 

“They’ve chosen Manchester city centre because they studied there. It’s got relatively low crime rates compared to other cities in the world, good access to healthcare, it’s LGBT plus-friendly, politically stable, got green ambition, culture, art and so on. 

“But when they flip into family mode, or they’re a couple and they want more green space, access to a car, a pet, they move into the suburbs, but they can’t all live in Didsbury and Altrincham and Chorlton.”

They might be easier to lure in than local people. 

“It’s making our towns attractive to those people in other locations that have no preconception about Bolton. They’re going to step off a train or a tram and see cool houses. Say that to a Bolton person and they’re sceptical why anyone would come from Berlin but that’s because they’ve got preconceptions.”

Eccles-born Heatley, known for appearing in the 2020 BBC documentary Manctopia about the city centre property boom, is confident about Neighbourhood: Bolton. He acknowledges Bolton will need to fill in some gaps to provide a city centre lifestyle – more co-working spaces, yoga centres, gyms and the like. And with proximity to the transport interchange a key attraction, there’s an irony in selling a place on the ease of getting out of it. 

“But if you create all that stuff and it’s available to them, then they’ll go: ‘You know what? This is half the price I was paying in the city centre. We know C&C – they own Kampus, the most expensive place you can rent in the city centre.’ But this is the same furniture, the same architecture - it’s the same.”

Other schemes are underway in the town centre and recent funding from the Greater Manchester Brownfield Programme could kickstart more. Public realm improvements such as the new Elizabeth Park are improving the surroundings. But developers’ characteristic bullishness is matched with a degree of nervousness, perhaps because of the recent past’s stalled schemes, perhaps out of concern for some of town’s current problems, maybe because the future housing market looks iffy.

The recent past involves Bolton Regeneration and Muse, property bodies that were the main repository of town centre living ambitions.

Bolton Regeneration was a joint venture between Beijing Construction Engineering Group International and Granite Turner that was to build 150 homes as part of the proposed Crompton Place Shopping Centre redevelopment as well as 144 flats on what was then known as the Trinity Gateway project near the train station. But in a “mutual agreement”, the two companies surrendered all their options in October 2021 and the council went on the hunt for new developers.

Muse was earmarked for Bolton’s big one – 300 homes at Church Wharf in the north-east of the town centre. Although planning permission was secured as long ago as 2019, the scheme never got off the ground.

This year there is renewed progress in the town centre though, with building work underway and brownfield funding to kickstart the stalled schemes. One of the most prominent of current schemes is Placefirst’s Deansgate Gardens – 167 homes for long-term rental opposite the former Beales department store and with the River Croal on the other side.

Construction started last year and Placefirst expects completion in summer 2025. Despite the progress though, no one from Placefirst would be interviewed for this piece.

A spokesperson said it would answer The Bolton Lead’s questions by email but didn’t reply in time for our deadline because it wanted to check the responses with the council.

Nor would anyone from housing association Bolton at Home be interviewed about another town centre project showing tangible progress. It is working with Manchester developer Step Places on a development of more than 200 homes on and around the old Moor Lane bus station site. Bolton at Home’s portion includes 82 homes at affordable rent – defined as up to 80 per cent of the local market average. None appear to be at social housing rent – usually a lower figure that takes into account local incomes.

FSG Moor Lane Developments – the joint venture vehicle between Step Places and Bolton at Home – is now constructing two of the four apartment blocks and the townhouses but applied to make cutbacks on the remaining two because the development is “currently facing viability issues because of the grant funding position and recent increases in construction costs”. A council planning committee earlier this month approved the removal of all balconies, the use of UPVC windows instead of aluminium frames and the removal of some decorative features in the brickwork.

Watching the Moor Lane development with interest is Fay Hargreaves, who has lived for more than 10 years in her housing association flat in a converted church five minutes away. Town centre living suits her in a perhaps unexpected way. She has PTSD from a serious car accident when she was living outside town, and anxiety about traffic and roads that was leaving her isolated. After talking it through with friends and family, she moved to her current flat – a “safe environment”, she says, and, before the Moore Lane bus station was demolished, only a five minute bus ride from her mum in Great Lever and her best mate.

The town centre is good for accessibility to shops and services, with plentiful pedestrian crossings to make getting there less stressful. She has no need for the posher shops that have deserted the centre.

She used to volunteer at Band, the community mental health service, which was only a stone’s throw away. Her boyfriend could walk to work at a nearby church. Since the bus station was demolished in 2018, the bus services are not much further away, in the modern interchange next to the train station. It all worked for Fay.