St Mary le Port: a Bristol planning case study
Political interference, specialists sidelined and developer power: office block scheme at the historic heart of the city reveals important insights into Bristol's planning and development regime
“The determination of a planning application is a formal administrative process involving:
- the application of national and local planning policies
- reference to legislation, case law and rules of procedure
- rights of appeal and an expectation that the local planning authority will act transparently, reasonably and fairly.”
Local Government Association and Planning Advisory Service, ‘Probity in Planning’
“The bombing destroyed much of the old town north of Bristol Bridge, now laid out as Castle Park, and great swathes of inner Bristol…the physical and psychological effects of the bombing cannot be over emphasised and possibly still informs the apparently passive approach to development today. There is a strong sense of the Bristol that was lost that can never be re-created, which excuses indifference to the pernicious impact on the cityscape of deregulated capitalism over the last 30 years.”
Adrian Jones, Towns in Britain: Jones the Planner, ‘Bristol Fashion’
“Some have raised concerns that we have got involved in planning. We have. We’ve been elected to shape the city and the outcomes we want cannot be left to the chances of a developer aligning with an out-of-date Local Plan and a quasi-judicial process.”
Marvin Rees, Mayor of Bristol
There is increasing public anger at the way the planning system has been operating in Bristol. This has been brought to the fore in recent months by what’s become known as the ‘Broadwalk scandal’ - the reversal of a unanimous decision by a cross-party planning committee to refuse plans for a ‘hyperdense’, 12-storey mixed-use scheme in Knowle that provided less than 10% affordable housing. This reversal was facilitated by sudden U-turns from the three Labour councillors and a behind-the-scenes collaboration between the committee Chair, the Head of the Mayor’s Office and the scheme’s developers. It’s led to public demonstrations from the local community outside City Hall, the early stages of legal action and the resignation of a Green councillor from the planning committee in protest. It also helped inspire a petition which received over 3500 signatories stating that they had lost confidence in Bristol’s planning system, which meant the subject was debated at a meeting of Full Council.
Planning can be seen as dry and technical but it has a profound impact on shaping the places we live and how they in turn shape us. It also provides an insight into the forces that are in control of shaping those places. Despite the planning system’s status as a ‘quasi-judicial’ process, planning is by its nature deeply political. And because land and property are key motors of wealth accumulation and economic growth, is powerfully influenced by vested financial interests. This means the planning system also acts as a window on the efficacy of the legal and democratic frameworks that are supposed to protect the public from concentrations of power and provide some accountability over what happens to the places in which we live.
Some of the problems with the planning system in Bristol are issues that are affecting local authorities nationwide. Many local authority planning departments are under severe strain across the country after over a decade of funding cuts from central government. They struggle to retain good, experienced staff. Long backlogs have built up. This has been particularly acute in Bristol.
But the Broadwalk controversy has brought to wider public attention issues around planning and development in Bristol that are specifically about political influence. In large part, these concerns are related to the mayoral system that was brought in to govern the city in 2012. They focus particularly on the current mayor Marvin Rees’ perceived lack of concern with good design and placemaking, in his creation of an environment in which developers hold sway, that sees behind-the-scenes sweetheart deals, local communities ignored, and the undermining of statutory planning processes that are supposed to ensure the democratic legitimacy of decision-making and controlled, policy-compliant development.
In an important sense, mayoral systems are designed to do this sort of thing. Rather than acting to devolve power to local communities and strengthen local democracy, as they’re often sold as, their main function is to provide a stable governance model that will encourage inward flows of capital. Developers and investors like it. With a long history in America, it’s a model whose most persistent advocate in Britain has been former Conservative Cabinet Minister Michael Heseltine - the member of the Thatcher and Major governments who privatised more industries than any other. For Heseltine, city mayors act as a way to drive economic growth and circumvent the messiness of local politics. First instigated by New Labour with the Mayor of London role, it was the Localism Act 2011, introduced by David Cameron’s coalition government, that saw referendums for city mayors take place across the country the following year. In the end, however, the only core cities to decide to take up the option were Liverpool and Bristol.
In Liverpool, a major corruption scandal saw the mayor Joe Anderson arrested along with several senior council officers. A damning report by government inspector Max Caller exposed an unaccountable bullying culture, the handing out of dubious contracts and dodgy deals over land and property. It led to commissioners being sent into the council to take over functions such as highways, property and regeneration. Not unrelatedly, a wave of crass development on the historic waterfront that happened during this period also led to UNESCO removing the city’s world heritage status. The council voted to scrap Liverpool’s mayoral position in July 2022.
The same year in Bristol, a citywide public referendum brought about by opposition parties (most crucially the Greens, who came to have as many seats on the council as Labour following the 2021 local elections) was won with a 59% majority voting to replace the mayoral model with a committee system. Rees had previously said that he would step down at the end of his second term in May 2024, but the mayoral system he has long promoted as the best form of city governance, now goes with him.
Rees’ administration hasn’t been implicated in the level of malfeasance exposed in Liverpool, but part of the reason for the referendum vote going against the mayoral model was the maximalist approach he took with it. After initially claiming that he would govern in a similar style to predecessor George Ferguson - the first elected mayor from 2012-2016, who ran as an independent and put together a cross-party ‘rainbow’ Cabinet - after 18 months, Rees replaced all councillors from other parties with pliant Labour loyalists. The One City approach, established at the outset as the central policy apparatus of the administration, and codified in 2019 with the One City Plan, has also sought to create a governance model that sees large institutional ‘partners’ such as the universities, along with the business community, “coming together to agree the city’s priorities; manage and deliver them together”.1
The sidelining of democratically elected councillors under this system was publicly criticised by several departing Labour councillors at the end of Rees’ first term in office. This included experienced Cabinet member for housing Paul Smith, who said in 2020 that “more checks and balances” were needed on the Mayor’s power and that he “would hate to come on the council as a backbench councillor now because the amount of authority they are able to exercise is incredibly limited.”2
The powerful central command of the Mayor’s Office over the running of the council has gone alongside a PR operation that seeks to establish the authority of the mayor through slick social media content and managed, set-piece public appearances. An effort to attack and denigrate local journalists has run alongside a culture of secrecy that’s aimed to frustrate scrutiny and democratic oversight from both councillors and the public. Between 2020 and 2022, Bristol City Council had the second most complaints to the Information Commissioner’s Office of any local authority in the country about the handling of Freedom of Information requests, and has now received a formal censure from the regulator.
Following the referendum, a further blow came for Rees in August 2023 when his attempt to become an MP was thwarted by local Labour party members in north-east Bristol who voted to select an alternative candidate. As the first directly-elected European mayor of black African descent, in a city with a shameful history of involvement in the slave trade, and as a local man who’d grown up in difficult circumstances, there had been significant goodwill towards him at the outset. A willingness to align himself with the hopeful rhetoric of the new Corbyn project had also ensured enthusiasm and a large turnout on election day in 2016. But along with concerns around local democracy and development, a high-handed and rather charmless personal style has left Rees without much warmth of feeling across the city as his time in office draws to a close.
Technocratic and dogmatic, inclined towards the portentous cliché, his public utterances often seem pulled straight from a business management presentation or a Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership seminar. It’s a style that doesn’t appear to have connected in any meaningful way to the public beyond the professional managerial class that have some direct investment in the city’s governance - and who hear in him a man who speaks their language. For those that take an interest in what happens in the council chamber, the often desultory and condescending manner he engages with opposition councillors and members of the public has further eroded his standing.
The time Rees has spent on the international circuit or working for other organisations has also become a source of grievance. Between September and December 2023, he could be found at various times on conference platforms in New York, Kigali, Geneva and Dubai. These trips are justified - both in time away from running the city and in fossil fuel emissions - as ‘putting Bristol on the world stage’ but the benefit is often judged to accrue primarily to the mayor himself. The fact that there is now a West of England metro mayor for the wider region, with a confusing overlap of authority, only added another reason for scrapping a position that many had come to feel concentrated too much local power in a single ego.
The broader political and economic context of the mayoralty, however, has been over a decade of savage funding cuts to local authorities from central government. A 27% real-terms cut in core spending power since 2010, while demand for key services such as adult social care have risen, has left councils across the country struggling to provide their basic set of statutory services. For all the executive power granted to a city mayor, the constraints of austerity mean there are many things they are largely powerless to affect, let alone improve. The desire to be dynamic and re-shape the city, focuses instead on working with the private sector to bring about investment and regeneration.
But whereas in other areas the executive struggles with a lack of financial resource, with planning and development it finds itself constrained by law. The Local Government Act 2000 is the piece of current legislation that sets out the separation of powers between a council’s planning department, acting as the Local Planning Authority (LPA), and its executive, which in Bristol under the mayoral system is the Mayor and his Cabinet. The LPA is responsible for carrying out the planning functions of the city under the Town and Country Planning Act. And by law their determination of planning applications - with delegated powers to councillors on cross-party committees for major, or particularly controversial, applications - is dictated by the local development plan, the statutory documents that set out the policies specific to the city, and the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), the national set of standards produced by central government. These are the material considerations all new development proposals are assessed against.
In his first State of the City address in 2016, Rees told a story about his entry, as a newly elected mayor, into what he called “the weird and wonderful world of planning in Bristol”.3 He had apparently been surprised and dismayed when council officers told him that planning decisions weren’t down to him but directed by a combination of national and local policies, “that sits above all of us, our managers and our elected politicians.” It led to the following conclusion:
“My first port of call is to overhaul the local policies to make sure it delivers for Bristol…it’s become clear to me that this is how you start to draw your own picture of the city.”
This was put into action a few months later in early 2017 with the start of a review of Bristol’s Local Plan. And although it hadn’t been a talking point during his campaign to become Mayor, he went on to say in that first State of the City address:
“I want Bristol’s skyline to grow. Years of low level buildings and a reluctance to build up in an already congested city is a policy I am keen to change. Tall buildings built in the right way, in the right places and for the right reasons, communicate ambition and energy.”
There was no further detail about this new policy in the speech beyond the vague aspiration to “communicate ambition and energy.” But it soon became aligned with the housing crisis, with housing identified as a key political priority from the outset of Rees’s administration. In 2013, house prices in Bristol had started to rise more rapidly than the national rate, which was itself, already rising fast. With the city constrained by Green Belt to prevent urban sprawl, the logical argument put forward was that increased densification on centrally located brownfield sites was the way to increase the supply of much-needed new housing.
This also fitted with a consensus view about the sustainability of cities in an age of climate change. City centre living is seen as key to moving away from car dependency, with walking, cycling and short journeys on public transport becoming the natural alternative. Despite the well-documented higher embodied carbon of tall buildings, and the fact that they often don’t make the most efficient use of land in terms of densification, they were equated with meeting the challenge of a growing city - as well as acting as a visible signal to investors that the city was open for business.
Whatever the governance model, running such a complex city, riven with stark divides on economic, cultural and racial lines, that map equally starkly onto the geography of the city, is certainly far from straightforward. In one sense Bristol is, as Adrian Jones says, “very definitely a southern city with a dominant bourgeoisie and middle class sense of entitlement”. Its lively arts scenes, bars, restaurants and nightlife, combined with its dynamic topography, human-scale cityscape, and proximity to attractive countryside, pulls in professionals from London and elsewhere. Outside London, it has the highest rate of graduates wanting to stay where they studied. With a diverse economy that has been able to adapt relatively successfully to the UK’s post-industrial settlement, its strength in high-value sectors such as advanced engineering, financial services and digital tech, mean that of all the core cities it has the highest average weekly earnings, the highest employment rate, and the highest productivity measured in Gross Value Added (GVA) per hour.
The city famously has a strong alternative culture, wreathed in weed smoke, which tends to unduly shape its image to outsiders. And there is a substantial liberal, ‘green’ middle-class. Many lower-middle and working-class communities are getting by in relatively decent circumstances. But there is another side of the city that the tourists visiting its regenerated harbourside, and the moneyed inhabitants of Clifton and Stoke Bishop, rarely encounter. Around 15% of Bristol’s residents (roughly 70,000 people) live in the most deprived 10% of areas in the whole of England. This includes recent international arrivals in its ageing inner city tower blocks and longer established communities in Victorian neighbourhoods that are under attack from gentrification. And on the northern, and particularly the southern fringes of the city - where three neighbourhoods rank in the lowest 1% for deprivation in the whole of England - a left-behind, largely indigenous underclass live as far from the bright lights as you can get. The average life expectancy for a man in Hartcliffe is around 8 years less than those who live in the affluent inner suburbs that spread across the limestone slopes north of the city centre.
And in the centre, a rapidly expanding student population from its two large universities is increasingly having an impact. In the five years up to 2021/22, university student numbers increased by a third and there are now around 44,000 full-time students in the city. About a quarter of these are foreign students and it’s a percentage that’s set to rise as both universities increasingly look to that higher fee-paying cohort. It’s been a major factor in Bristol having the second highest population growth of all the core cities in England and Wales over the last decade, growing by an estimated 45,800 people.4
Following decades of population decline in the second half of the twentieth century, and a plateau in the 1990s/early 2000s, Bristol now has more inhabitants than ever before at around 480,000. And though there had been a marked decrease in the rate of population growth since the Brexit referendum in 2016, the 12 months to mid-2022 saw the second highest jump since records began, with a net increase of 7,700 people. The council’s data shows that this was largely driven by international inward migration, much of it non-EU students.5
This all means that the national crisis of house prices and rents outpacing earnings is particularly acute in Bristol, which now has the worst affordability ratio of all the core cities. Over the last decade, average house prices have increased by almost 90%, compared to a national average in England and Wales of 51%. In the last five years rents have soared by 41%, compared to a national average of 14%. There are now over 20,000 households on the waiting list for social housing and every night nearly 3,000 people are homeless according to the charity Shelter, with many dozens sleeping rough across the city centre.6
Marvin Rees’ election pledge in 2016 was for 2000 new homes a year, 800 of which were to be ‘affordable’, and there was strong political pressure to reach those targets. In order to get developers building more quickly a new ‘threshold’ approach to viability assessments - the test to establish the financial viability of developments to deliver affordable housing - was introduced in 2018, meaning that a proposed residential development in inner city areas with 20% affordable units wouldn’t have to undergo a viability assessment. The previous target had been 40%.7
This change went together with the introduction of a new Supplementary Planning Document (SPD) called ‘Urban Living: Making successful places at higher densities’.8 It replaced a 2005 SPD on tall buildings that had set out rigorous criteria for assessing the quality and siting of new proposals. With the laborious process of creating an entirely new local plan a work of many years, this new document was the method by which new material considerations used in the assessment of planning applications for tall buildings could be quickly introduced. Tasked with overseeing its creation, and given the spatial planning portfolio in Marvin Rees’ Cabinet in 2017, was new Labour councillor, Nicola Beech. Beech had come straight from working for developers in the planning process at the lobbying and PR company JBP.
These changes have led to a development boom, with developers and investors already attracted by Bristol’s economy, now given greater leniency and full encouragement to come and build - and build up. But what this has been providing in terms of housing is largely expensive market-rate flats (increasingly limited to Build-to-Rent, rather than for purchase) and purpose-built student accommodation. Building tall buildings is much more expensive in terms of construction costs, meaning that these developments rarely end up providing many affordable units if the developer can show it isn’t viable for them to make a healthy profit margin - often after they’ve paid very large sums for the land in the first place. They also rarely have many aesthetic qualities, with developers knowing that the need for housing will trump what are considered to be less important considerations.
Rees’ administration almost reached their target of 2000 homes of all types a year but in 2022/23 only 309 ‘affordable’ units were built across the whole city, following a peak of 474 the previous year.9 Even before you contest the real meaning of ‘affordable’ here (80% of a hugely inflated market rate), it’s a long way from the 800 a year promised in the election campaign of 2016. And though part of a bigger story of national failure, while the housing crisis has been declared the key priority of Rees’ administration, all of its measurable impacts in the city have got worse during his eight years in office.
Meanwhile, the developer-friendly push to ‘build up’ has begun transforming the city centre. The first major statement on the skyline of this new approach was Castle Park View, a residential development built on council-owned land that included a 26-storey, Build-to-Rent, high-rise tower, making it the tallest building in Bristol. The developers were apparently encouraged by the administration to add ten storeys to their original plans to create what they called a ‘landmark’ building. A video posted on the mayor’s official social media accounts in April 2019 shows an enthused Rees in hard-hat and hi-vis on the building site as the first piling work is being done. He says to camera:
“An amazing morning here for us. A hugely symbolic morning…Getting this site moving, some iconic buildings coming up. But not just in terms of buildings but in terms of getting things done and bringing forward this site that the city’s been looking at for years. And my hope is it really is a symbol of the momentum we have going now in Bristol.”
“Getting things done” (or “getting stuff done”) has been the continually repeated mantra of Rees’ administration. And while services continue to be cut, one thing that certainly has been happening is big new developments. Bristol currently has over thirty high-rise schemes recently built, permitted, or going through the planning system.10 These include proposals for high-rises over twenty storeys on the former Premier Inn and Debenhams sites beside St James Barton roundabout; to replace the Galleries shopping centre on the northern edge of Castle Park; and over a recently installed heating network energy centre on the park’s southern side. Other major schemes on the horizon are Western Harbour, by the iconic Avon Gorge view of the suspension bridge, and Temple Quarter, one of the largest regeneration projects in the whole of Europe.
This all represents a profound challenge to Bristol’s historic character as a low to mid-rise city. The most vocal defender of that character has been the previous mayor Ferguson, an architect and former RIBA president, who first came to prominence in the city during the battles over the development of Bristol in the 1970s when he was a Liberal councillor. This was a previous period of disenchantment with the planning system documented in the 1980 book, The Fight for Bristol: Planning and the growth of public protest. It traces the reaction to the changes being imposed by the city planners during the decades following the Second World War. As in many towns and cities across Britain, this meant a wave of road-building, road-widening, modernist architecture, and the mass destruction of historic neighbourhoods. In Bristol there were also proposals to concrete over parts of the harbour and a boom in speculative office developments.
Central to the rise of resident and amenity groups in that period, together with concerned elements of the architectural profession, was the sense that the city’s unique history and identity were under attack. There was a powerful desire to protect what remained from going the way of other British cities with their increasingly generic and soulless appearance. An admirer of the human-scale form of European cities such as Amsterdam and Copenhagen, Ferguson has long championed a vision of the city that protects what remains of its architectural heritage and thinks about place-making in a holistic sense. This has included promoting policies to reinvigorate the docks, repurposing old buildings and keeping new high-rise office blocks away from the historic centre and segregated in particular areas such as Temple Quay, by the train station.
Possibly informed by his formative years living in North America as a young man, his successor has had a very different attitude. Throughout Rees’ time in office there has never been any sense that he has any personal enthusiasm for the architectural inheritance of Bristol. Similarly, arguments for the economic and social benefits of human-scale urbanism and its impact on quality of life and mental health, as well as tourism, have never been seriously addressed in his discussions about the city. In fact, there’s been a clear hostility towards Ferguson and his fellow campaigners, and an attempt to frame their criticisms as manifestations of “privilege”.
Something of this can be seen in a pointed exchange between the two men on Twitter in early 2022. Rees’ laconic responses appear to be insinuating a resistance on class and racial grounds to the idea of a shared inheritance of the city’s history and built environment, and Ferguson’s right to speak to it:
An earlier divergence from Ferguson’s vision of the city was a feature of arguably the most contentious single development issue of Rees’ whole time in office: the cancelling of long-held plans for a city centre arena. Bristol is the only core city without a major arena and a key policy of Ferguson’s mayoralty had been to use vacant publicly-owned land next to Temple Meads train station to get a project realised that had first been talked about as far back as 2003. In April 2016, a planning committee finally approved plans for a 12,000 capacity arena on the site, in what turned out to be Ferguson’s last month as mayor. Rees came into City Hall the following month promising to deliver the project, as he had done during the election campaign, but negotiations with the appointed contractor over costs had broken down by the end of the year.
Crucially, discussions with Bristol University had also been taking place during 2016 for the sale of a neighbouring tract of council-owned land, a former Post Office sorting depot, for a major new campus. This whole area had been designated as an Enterprise Zone by government in 2012 and the emerging ‘Temple Quarter’ project, which includes the upgrading of Temple Meads train station, and the regeneration of 130 hectares of brownfield land immediately to its south-east, is one of the biggest regeneration projects in Europe. This particular piece of land had been earmarked as the car park for the arena and its sale seems to have been the turning point when alternative options for the arena were explored in earnest.
The senior council officer overseeing the campus deal, Barra Mac Ruari, Strategic Director for Place, was also the council’s lead on the arena project. In April 2017, following the sale to the university in March, and as Rees made increasingly sceptical noises publicly about the arena scheme and commissioned a KPMG value-for-money report, YTL Developments UK - the UK arm of a Malaysian infrastructure conglomerate - contacted Mac Ruiari with an offer. Would he like to discuss the possibility of the arena being built instead at the former airfield they owned in Filton11. The idea had already been flagged to the Mayor, they said.
This land, on the city’s northern border with South Gloucestershire, had been bought from BAE Systems in 2015. The postwar Brabazon hangars, where Concorde was built, sit beside the disused runway in a nightmare Ballardian landscape, surrounded by car dealerships, new build estates, a giant shopping mall and sterile business parks containing some of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers. All overlaid with the constant white noise of the nearby A38 flyover and M5 motorway.
The following month, Mac Ruiari announced that he was leaving the council to take up a role as Chief Operating Officer with YTL and work on their project at Filton, which was already progressing as a large residential development, with or without an arena. Another senior Bristol City Council director, Robert Orrett - who’d also been working on the Temple arena project - then left in September and stepped in to the role of property director at YTL.12
Welcoming them into the fold was Colin Skellett, CEO of YTL UK, and also the long-time Chief Executive of the local water company, Wessex Water. Under the perverse logic of Britain’s privatised utilities, Wessex Water, which had previously been owned by the scandal-ridden US group Enron before it collapsed into bankruptcy, is now owned by the Malaysian property company. In fact, Skellett had been arrested in a dawn raid shortly after the takeover in 2002, suspected of receiving a near £1million bribe, but was later released without charge. An active figure in the region’s business circles, he had also been the chairman of the Local Enterprise Partnership when it had agreed to provide £53 million for Ferguson’s original arena scheme in 2014.
Another key turning point came in December 2017 when, following a trip to China where he was meeting with investors, YTL paid for Marvin Rees to fly on to Kuala Lumpur and put him up at the Ritz Carlton hotel. Meetings were had with YTL executives. Three days later, his recently installed Executive Director for Growth and Regeneration, Colin Molton, met with the pension fund asset manager and property investor Legal & General in London.13
They now had to deal with the ‘sequential test’, the stipulation in planning that prioritises city centre sites for major infrastructure rather than out-of-town ones. This meant that the Temple Island site needed to be offloaded and made unavailable if YTL’s plan at Filton was to progress. The deal that was ultimately struck - avoiding public procurement rules - was for Legal & General to get a 250-year lease on the site and build a conference centre, 345-room hotel, 550 apartments and two office blocks. Bristol City Council, as well as securing £32 million of public funds to prepare the land, agreed to guarantee rents on one of the office blocks for 40 years. Bristol University owns the northern portion of Temple Island and has outline planning permission for a 20-storey student accommodation block for its new ‘Enterprise Campus’, that will fuse lab research and business development, with a focus on new technologies.
In another twist, Mac Ruiari left YTL in May 2018 - once planning permission for the Brabazon development’s initial masterplan had been delivered - and went to work for Bristol University on the new campus, and he remains their Chief Property Officer.
Rees made much of a further report from KPMG (who were also YTL’s auditors) that specifically compared the merits of the two arena schemes, claiming that a private venture on the edge of the city was better for economic growth as well as making financial sense for the taxpayer. In September 2018 - against a background of loud protestations from sections of the public and opposition councillors - he formally approved the new plans for both sites, subject to planning consents. Since then, the arena has been used as the justification for improved transport connections to YTL’s Filton site, paid for from the public purse, including a new train station. This will now connect the ever-expanding Brabazon residential development, already coming to market, increasing its value, while construction work on the proposed arena - almost eight years after planning permission was granted for one in the city centre - is yet to begin.
This extraordinary stitch-up that played out across the first years of Rees’ administration established some of its core working principles. The Bristol business establishment had backed Ferguson for mayor - a public school former Merchant Venturer and, behind the colourful exterior, something of a shrewd businessman himself - but the arena saga showed that his successor was a man willing to take public flak to work for their interests and their vision of the city. There was a willingness to operate at the edges of probity, to get his hands dirty, to “get things done”.
This wasn’t lost on Sir Edward Lister, Boris Johnson’s notoriously compromised right-hand-man, and at that point, chairman of the government’s housing and regeneration agency Homes England - who were already providing funding for the Temple Quarter project. The Thatcherite former leader of Wandsworth council held directorships and consultancy roles with various development companies during the period he moved between the Deputy Mayor and planning brief at London’s City Hall; Homes England; and being Johnson’s chief of staff in Downing Street. One of these arrangements (£480,000 in fees between 2016 and 2019) was with the Malaysian property developer EcoWorld, with whom Rees had also met with while on his YTL-paid trip to Kuala Lumpur.
Lister’s public backing for the arena decision had been eagerly sought by Rees during 2018 and the mayor personally sent a pre-written statement for Lister to pass off as his own, praising the approach taken. The text released in July 2018, and reported on by the Bristol Post, was an edited version. Some of its lines - whoever wrote them - had the ring of truth:
“We see evidence of a commitment to the pace and scale of delivery that is winning the interest of Government and the private sector alike…Bristol is at a pivotal moment where impending decisions will affect the City’s future for generations to come.”
St Mary le Port
In order to better understand the forces that are shaping the current and future development of Bristol, this investigation looks in detail at how the planning process for a single major development in the historic centre of the city unfolded. This is the imminent office-led scheme at St Mary le Port that was first approved by Bristol City Council’s Development Control Committee A in December 2021. Following an unsuccessful request from the Bristol Civic Society for the government to ‘call-in’ the decision and refer it to a public inquiry, it was finally granted planning permission in September 2022.
Well over a year has passed since permission was granted but still no demolition or construction work has started on site. I’ve been told by a council source that a potential anchor office tenant pulled out, which may have delayed plans, though the planning permission also specified a long list of pre-commencement conditions that had to be fulfilled. High inflation and construction costs mean the investors and developers may have also been waiting for market conditions to improve before making a start.
Despite the move to home-working, demand for Grade A office space is still deemed to be strong in Bristol and rents are high - the highest of the UK’s “Big 6” regional office markets in 2022. A recent report by CBRE identified Manchester and Bristol as the UK’s highest growth cities across multiple real estate sectors over the next ten years. And when I spoke to the PR company representing the developer in late November 2023, I was told that work would be beginning on site in early 2024.
Using Freedom of Information requests and other sources of evidence in the public domain, this investigation looks in detail at how the St Mary le Port planning process unfolded. As the city becomes increasingly transfigured by bland high-rise blocks, contrived ‘quarters’ and privately-owned pseudo ‘public’ space, this is an attempt to lift up the bonnet and look at how the mechanics of its planning and development regime has actually been working; to get a sense of some of the key actors involved, the relationship between developers and the local authority, and the professional networks that are creating the new city.
It reveals a variety of troubling aspects around this particular scheme: design and heritage specialists being sidelined within the council; political interference from the Mayor’s Office; apparent pressure on senior officers in the planning department to back proposals they don’t believe to be policy compliant; those officers misleading councillors on a planning committee; as well as bogus community representation. It also exposes some of the unhealthily close relationships between local politicians, the development industry, PR firms and the local media.
St Mary le Port is where Bristol began, more than a millennium ago, and was at the beating heart of the city from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century. The area suffered brutal destruction from Nazi bombs and then had to endure further indignities at the hands of post-war planners and architects. The way in which the decision was reached for such an important and sensitive site in the city - and the wider context in which that decision was made - is worth reflecting on.
An Ancient Place
The precise dating of Bristol’s origins is contested but the ridge of high ground between the river Avon and its tributary the Frome, where the city began, was undoubtedly settled in late Saxon times. Coins were being minted on the site from at least as early as the 1020s – sign of an established market town. Here was a crossing point of the Avon that also provided safe harbourage, ideal for inland trade routes as well as offering good access across the sea to Wales, Ireland and beyond.14 The crossing gave the settlement its original Saxon name, Brycgstow: the place by the bridge. The loop of waters surrounding on three sides made it a highly secure and defensible location.
Before the Normans built a castle on the eastern land approach of this favourable peninsula, the crossroads known today as High Street, Broad Street, Corn Street and Wine Street was already established at the core of the town. The timber Saxon bridge lay just to the south, most likely on the site of today’s Bristol Bridge. This layout may have first developed as one of Alfred the Great’s burhs, the defensive settlements that he and his descendants built to repel Viking attack, as well as to create market towns and administrative centres. It was after all a strategically important site on the border of the kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia, well-placed for commerce, and on a river that the enemy’s longboats would be likely to glide up. Perhaps it was Alfred’s formidable daughter Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians, ruler of this place in the early 10th century following the death of her husband, who first gave the order for the grid layout of the new town.
The four streets mark out the ancient divisions of the borough: the parishes of St Mary le Port, Holy Trinity (later Christ Church), St Ewen's, and All Saints. St Peter's, a later iteration now standing as a ruin in Castle Park, is generally thought to be the earliest church, but didn’t lie within the borough. It was the parish church of the royal manor of Barton Regis, which Bristol became part of, and the church was absorbed into the town as the building of the castle extended its boundaries beyond the early Saxon fortifications.
St Mary le Port, 150 metres to the west, has a fair claim to be the site of the first church of Bristol. Archaeological excavations in the 1960s revealed that the lost thoroughfare of Mary le Port street, immediately to the north of the church, ran along a Saxon hollow-way. The building historian Jean Manco has even suggested that the church’s origins may lie with a royal fort established by King Offa of Mercia, as far back as the late 8th century:
“An almost circular mid-Saxon fort could have been enlarged to take in St Mary-le-Port, which might explain why this church was not aligned with the street frontage. By contrast the churches of St Werburgh, All Saints, Christ Church and St Ewens respect the street lines of the late Saxon burgh. They are all placed prominently on or near cross-roads and were probably founded early in the process of settlement.”15
Until the 15th century, the church was referred to in documents as “Blessed Mary” or “St Mary in Foro”, reflecting close proximity to the town’s market (forum in Latin), rather than to the docks, as the later mutation of the name to “Port” suggests.16 A monumental market cross, Bristol’s High Cross, stood at the crossroads from the early 15th century to the 18th, and a cross of stone or wood is thought to have stood there since Saxon times.
The Second World War brought terrible destruction to this ancient place. On the evening of 24 November 1940, a bombing raid by the German air force destroyed much of the historic centre of Bristol, which had become the city’s bustling shopping and entertainment district. In a few hours, many of the tightly packed streets and alleys, with their half-timbered late medieval buildings, were reduced to rubble and charred embers. And most of what remained standing would soon be pulled down. This included Castle Street, running in from the west of today’s park to St Peter’s church, that would be humming with life on a Saturday night, filled with huge numbers of Bristolians out for a good time. This was a place of pubs, cafes, hotels and cinemas, as well as shops, homes and churches.
But as the Lord Mayor at the time, Thomas Underdown, said: “The City of Churches had in one night become the city of ruins.” Both St Peter’s and St Mary le Port were badly damaged, their roofs lost. The famous 17th century timber-framed ‘Dutch House’, on the corner of Wine Street and High Street, was destroyed by fire from incendiary bombs. And the human cost of this and later attacks was immense. During the ‘Bristol Blitz’ between November 1940 and April 1941, there were six bombing raids that resulted in 1,299 people being killed and 1,303 seriously injured.
After the bombs came the reconstruction. It's a well-worn trope in Bristol that the post-war planners did more damage to the city then the Luftwaffe. While some of that post-war transformation was motivated by a genuine and admirable desire to improve people’s living conditions - and was constrained by a lack of money, of course - today the city has to live with the terrible planning decisions inflicted on it by architects, developers and the city council.
Together all these destructive forces, from home and abroad, succeeded in obliterating huge swathes of the extraordinary city that J.B. Priestley had marvelled at in the 1930s17. In its place we have the anti-human grimness of St James Barton, Lewin’s Mead, Broadmead shopping centre, and the exiling of faded Old Market Street to the outer dark beyond the Temple Way Underpass. So much of central Bristol is marked by twentieth century place-making failure. For all its surviving charms, to walk around the city centre with this knowledge is to feel a powerful sense of loss and maltreatment. Nowhere more so than the current site at St Mary le Port, with its drab 1960s and 1970s office buildings wrapped around the remains of the medieval church.
The significance of this particular site is also rooted in the fact that for much of the medieval and early modern period it was the heart of England’s most powerful and influential city after London, often referred to as the country’s ‘Second City’. For good and ill, Bristol’s status as a global trading port, the role it played in the Plantagenet dynasty taking the English throne, John Cabot’s ‘discovery’ of America and its later colonisation, Methodism and the dissenting tradition, as the birthplace of English Romanticism, for the evil involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, for Brunel’s engineering and much else besides, all combine to make its origin, at the historic centre of the city, a site of national and international importance.
But perhaps most significant of all are the innumerable and unmarked human lives that have passed through this place over the course of more than a thousand years of continual settlement. This makes the historic heart of Bristol, to my mind, not just an ancient place but a sacred one. While clearly subject to the commercial demands of a prominent city centre location, it is a site that you would expect the city authorities to treat, at the very minimum, with a robust sense of diligence, care and respect.
The Site
The 1.15 hectare site permitted for development sits on the north-western corner of Castle Park and is bordered by High Street to the west, sloping down to Bristol Bridge, and Wine Street to the north. The three empty and largely derelict former office buildings that currently stand there, surrounding the church tower on three sides, are Norwich Union House, Bank House and Bank of England House. The site is located in the City and Queens Square Conservation Area.
All that remains of the church from the destruction of November 1940 is the 15th century tower - with its three corner pinnacles and a crocketed spirelet above the stair-turret, in the local style – plus low-standing fragments of the church walls. Surrounded by the concrete facades of the abandoned and graffitied buildings, with their windows boarded up, the church tower stands out of public reach behind a fence and is on Historic England’s ‘Heritage at Risk Register’. The abandonment of the buildings has created a shabby, half-hidden zone at the edge of the park. The buildings have been squatted at various times and there was a fire at Bank of England House in 2017. Though the Twentieth Century Society have made efforts to spare the buildings from the bulldozers, very few people have suggested that the site isn’t in need of demolition and redevelopment.
Directly to the west, on the other side of High Street, is what remains of the Old City and its dense concentration of Georgian and Victorian listed buildings. As you currently look across the site from Castle Park you see the grouping of historic churches, with the spires and towers of St Nicholas, All Saints, Christ Church St Ewen and St Mary le Port forming a distinctive skyline, still visible from vantage points across the city.
The site has a chequered and contested post-war history. In 1947, as plans for reconstruction were taking shape, a public referendum organised by traders voted overwhelmingly (13,363 to 418) to rebuild the heart of the shopping district around Castle Street, Wine Street and Mary le Port Street rather than move it to a new site at Broadmead.18 The council’s planning committee, swayed by the big national retailers, ignored the result. Instead, the area was used as a temporary car park with land on the western side being leased to the Bank of England and Norwich Union Insurance Company for office buildings built in 1962 and 1963.
There was a large public protest at the time opposing the Norwich Union Building, with a petition receiving over 11,000 signatures.19 Again it was ignored. In the mid-1970s, an additional building, Bank House, was built alongside Bank of England House. And in 1978, Castle Park finally opened directly to the east of the site, with long-held plans for a series of civic buildings, including a new museum and art gallery, abandoned.
Bristol City Council maintained the freehold of the buildings through the entirety of the site’s operational use. Norwich Union and the Bank of England vacated their buildings in the 1990s but attempts to redevelop the site this century have floundered. In 2006, council leaders blocked a £150 million scheme proposed by architects Aukett Fitzroy Robinson because of its impact on Castle Park. Instead, the council selected Deeley Freed as its preferred developer for the site. They proposed a mix of apartments, shops, cafes and offices.
In response there was an attempt to register Castle Park as a ‘Town or Village Green’ by the newly-formed community group ‘Castle Park Users Group’, in order to see off this development proposal. This went to a public inquiry and though the attempt was unsuccessful, the wider public reaction and the delay created - which pushed things into the period of the global financial crash and a consequent squeeze on construction - meant these proposals were eventually withdrawn. In 2013, the ‘Castle Park Users Group’ re-formed to successfully oppose a site allocation in the draft Bristol Central Area Plan that they felt encroached on the park.
Lloyds Banking Group continued to operate in Bank House before finally moving staff into their main headquarters on the harbourside in October 2020. At the same time as Lloyds closed their operations in Bank House it was announced that, for the first time, the three leaseholds were under single ownership and development proposals would be coming forward. The US-based global investment manager Federated Hermes had bought up all three buildings on the site between October 2018 and February 2020.20
Federated Hermes, BT Pension Scheme, MEPC
Federated Hermes is a global investment manager with around $700 billion worth of assets under its control at the time of writing. It makes money by providing investment opportunities in equities, credit, infrastructure, private equity, private debt and real estate. In 2022 it made an annual profit of $239 million. It came into being in 2018, when Federated Investors – an investment manager founded in Pittsburgh in the 1950s - completed its acquisition of a 60 percent interest in Hermes Investment Management, a London-based entity set up during the financial deregulation of the 1980s to manage the newly privatised British Telecom Pension Scheme (BTPS).
The biggest two shareholders in Federated Hermes are The Vanguard Group and BlackRock, with 10.10% and 8.58% stakes respectively at the time of writing.21 These are the two giant investment firms of corporate America and the largest in the entire world. Between them they have almost $20 trillion of assets under management, across a wide array of global industries including the largest stakes in the biggest companies in media, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, Big Tech, banking and weapons manufacturing.
BTPS is the biggest corporate pension scheme in the UK and one of the largest in Europe, with, until recently, assets of around £57 billion (they lost about £10 billion of that during the market turmoil following Kwasi Kwarteng’s infamous ‘mini-budget’ in September 2022). Around 9% of its assets were invested in property in 2022. It’s a mature pension scheme that closed to new members in 2001, with an average member age of 68. By 2034 almost all of its 270,000 members will be retired.22
The purchase of the three leaseholds at St Mary le Port and the planned redevelopment of the site has been carried out by Federated Hermes in conjunction with BTPS as the investor, with whom they have a longstanding and interwoven commercial relationship. In May 2022, Hermes GPE (a wholly owned subsidiary of Federated Hermes) was awarded a $1 billion private equity mandate by BTPS called ‘Horizon III’, the third $1 billion deal between the two since 2015.
With BTPS as the investor and Federated Hermes (previously Hermes GPE) as the manager of their money, several very large commercial developments have been built in the UK over recent years. These include Silverstone Park, a 130-acre technology and research business park next to Silverstone Circuit in Northamptonshire; office blocks for Paradise Birmingham, a £1.2 billion regeneration scheme in the civic centre of the city; Milton Park, a 250-acre technology and business park in Oxfordshire; NOMA in north Manchester, a mixed-use residential, business and entertainment development that is currently the largest regeneration project in the North West of England; and Wellington Place, an office-led scheme that included the biggest ever office pre-let in Leeds’ history.
For all these developments – and for St Mary le Port in Bristol – MEPC has been the developer and ongoing manager of the sites themselves. They are also now a wholly owned subsidiary of Federated Hermes, having been bought in January 2020 – from the BT Pension Scheme.
So to be clear: for this development we have Federated Hermes (investment manager and leaseholder of the site), the BT Pension Scheme (investor), and MEPC (developer and site manager, owned by Federated Hermes). The applicant for planning permission was ‘SMLP BRISTOL GP’, a joint venture General Partnership incorporated on 12 September 2018 and registered at Federated Hermes’ offices in the City of London. As with most major developments in Bristol, Savills acted as an agent and conducted much of the formal pre-application correspondence with the council.
Roz Bird: Commercial Director
With vacant possession of the site’s final building imminent, in August 2020, MEPC’s Roz Bird was brought in to oversee the planning application process. Since 2014, Bird had been Commercial Director at Silverstone Park in Northamptonshire, running MEPC’s expanding development of the high-performance technology park (advanced engineering, electronics and software development), that sits next door to the famous motor racing circuit.
She had also become the leading voice advocating for the area around Silverstone Park to be recognised as a ‘technology cluster’ within the emerging region of high-value science and technology companies identified by government and business as the ‘Oxford to Cambridge Arc’.
From 2016 she was Chair of the newly formed ‘Silverstone Technology Cluster’. The membership page on its website offers a description:
“Silverstone Technology Cluster (STC) was founded to help companies in and around Silverstone make money, increase their profits and grow. STC is an integral part of the Oxford – Milton Keynes – Cambridge Super Cluster and, through our members, we increase the value of the local economy.
Join our community to meet like-minded people and be part of a critical mass of high-tech and business activity in the local area which attracts the attention of government, the finance community and large corporates.”
In a 2021 interview, Bird reflected on her time as Chair of STC: “When we’re thinking about our brand essence, and what we exist for, it is about creating a sense of ‘community’ – for the companies to feel part of something where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; where they can get inspiration from each other and where there’s a chance to collaborate and win new business.”23
Architects of ‘Paradise’
The architects appointed by MEPC to design the St Mary le Port scheme were Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios (FCBS). Established in Bath in the late 1970s, they’ve picked up a large number of RIBA awards over recent decades for what the firm describes as “sustainable, democratic, and socially responsible design.”24 Early pioneers of green, energy-efficient buildings, with an affinity for the Arts and Craft movement, they have developed into a much larger and more conventional practice, but one well-placed to capitalise on the current corporate focus on Net Zero and sustainability. While working across the UK, FCBS have been involved with some of the most significant developments in Bristol in recent years, all strongly supported by the current mayoral administration. They have designed buildings for Bristol University’s Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus, the residential scheme for YTL that forms part of their Brabazon development at Filton and the ill-fated ‘Boatyard’ apartments on Bath Road.25
While they were completing work on the design of St Mary le Port in late 2020, they also won a competition to work with Federated Hermes and MEPC on a 10-storey office block at Three Chamberlain Square in Birmingham, part of the huge ‘Paradise’ regeneration development in the city centre. Grant Associates, the company working on the landscaping and so-called ‘public realm’ for the St Mary le Port scheme, are also working on Three Chamberlain Square.
Plans for the scheme inspired the memorable headline in the Birmingham Mail: “'Big brown turd' that will tower over Birmingham town hall leaves residents unhappy”. Construction is currently underway after it was approved unanimously by councillors in June 2022.
As at St Mary le Port, the council is the freeholder of the land, but here large amounts of funding from the public sector has also facilitated the wider regeneration project. Located within the Birmingham City Centre Enterprise Zone, Paradise Circus Limited Partnership (PCLP) was established as a joint venture between Birmingham City Council and the BT Pension Scheme (managed by Hermes) to deliver much of the project, which includes ten new office buildings, a hotel, shops and restaurants.
Funding was received at the outset from the Greater Birmingham and Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership to the tune of £87.79m for demolition and infrastructure works prior to construction. This was to be spent over three phases. However, in 2018 it was revealed that all the money had gone after phase one. Other than abandoning the project, the local authority had little option but to accept the developer’s demand for more money. And in January 2019 a further £51.28m million was taken by Birmingham City Council from the Local Enterprise Partnership for the scheme, to facilitate phase two of public realm, demolition, infrastructure work and costs associated with the liquidation of the previous contractor Carillion. This is money the council has to pay back from business rates, which they are now projected to be doing until the mid-2040s. Meanwhile, the council has ceased all non-essential spending on services after declaring itself bankrupt in September 2023.
Before returning to St Mary le Port it’s worth noting that the planning and development consultancy Turley worked with MEPC to deliver the planning applications for phase two of ‘Paradise’, including Three Chamberlain Square. The current Labour Bristol City councillor Marley Bennett is now employed as a consultant by Turley. Bennett sits on the council’s Growth and Regeneration Scrutiny committee, directly concerned with planning-related matters, and was also recently made a Cabinet member by Marvin Rees, taking the portfolio for Climate, Ecology and Waste. He also sat on the planning committee that deliberated on the St Mary le Port application and personally voted to approve it. While that happened prior to his employment with Turley, it illustrates the interwoven relationships of these development companies, as well as the inevitable conflict of interests of local politicians who are in their pay.
Making Plans
According to MEPC’s planning statement, submitted as part of their planning application, an interest in the site was first expressed by Federated Hermes in response to the council’s ‘Call for Sites’ exercise undertaken in March 2017. This was the start of the review of the Local Development Plan instigated by Rees’ administration and called for developers with aspirations for sites within the city to make their representations.
MEPC’s Design and Access Statement - which formed part of their planning application and contains a timeline of the scheme’s evolution - states that the St Mary le Port design work began in March 2019. This was around five months after Federated Hermes had bought the leaseholds of the first two buildings and six months after ‘Bristol SMLP GP’, the joint venture General Partnership that would ultimately apply for planning permission, was incorporated. The final building, Bank House, was purchased in February 2020.
A draft Planning Performance Agreement (PPA) - a framework agreed between the LPA and the applicant about the process for considering a major development proposal - had evidently been worked on by both parties in 2019. And on 6 April 2020, following a period when land ownership and site acquisition negotiations were going on - and at the end of the second week of the first Covid-19 lockdown - Savills emailed the two most senior officers in the council’s planning department, Zoe Wilcox and Gary Collins, stating their client’s desire to move forward with development plans.
Dear Zoe and Gary,
I hope you are well and keeping safe in these challenging times.
It is a little while since we were last in contact regarding St Mary le Port, but I am sure you will be aware that there has been a focus on site acquisition which will allow a comprehensive approach to be adopted.
We are now keen to move forward again into engagement with the regulatory teams and this is really a courtesy email to highlight this.
We made good progress last year on a draft PPA. I have updated this and will send to Gary. The differences from the previous version are in terms of process (we will proceed as EIA development) and in terms of a target programme.
We had discussed the likely quantum of resource payment last year. Hopefully we can get to a settled PPA relatively soon.
In terms of a “catch up” on the scheme then we would like to diarise this in week beginning 11th May if it is possible for Gary to coordinate with colleagues in planning, urban design and transport. We can organise via a video conference facility and agree the format closer to the time. I am very grateful for your cooperation and I fully recognise the difficulties which planning departments are experiencing.
I look forward to working with your teams on this important site, and I know that Hermes Federated (as investor/leaseholder) and MEPC (as development managers) are very enthusiastic about the opportunity.
Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.26
Gary Collins, Head of Development Management, replied:
Thank you for your e‐mail.
It is good news that the wider site is being assembled and that your clients are keen to progress the scheme.
We are very keen to keep the development pipeline flowing and are happy to meet up via video conference.
I’ll coordinate the colleagues that you mention and will come back to you with availability during w/c 11th May.
Regards
Gary
On the 23 April, an ‘Introduction Meeting’ took place between Federated Hermes/MEPC and the council’s Executive Director for Growth and Regeneration, Stephen Peacock and Director of Economy of Place, Nuala Gallagher. This had been scheduled back in February as an in-person meeting at City Hall, but with the onset of the pandemic, it was done online.27
The meeting in May with the planning department did happen according to MEPC’s planning application documents. And there were also two meetings with Historic England over the summer. Historic England is an executive non-departmental public body of the government, that as well as generally championing historic buildings and places, has a statutory role in the planning system. Local authorities must consult them and consider their advice when assessing planning applications that might impact designated heritage assets or their setting.
According to the Title Register of Bank House, a deed of variation on the leasehold agreement was signed between Bristol City Council and Federated Hermes on 24 June 2020, with “the benefit of the legal easements granted…for a term of years expiring on 19 October 2163”.
On 25 August, Bristol City Council entered into a contract with CBRE, the commercial real estate services and investments firm, for £22,500. According to the council’s list of published tenders for that quarter:
“The purpose of this brief is to appoint an external consultant with the expertise and experience to support the Council in bringing forward this important site. The external consultant needs to bring ideas and commercial expertise to ensure the agreement with Hermes maximises revenue returns to the Council and benefits to the City.”
The first official ‘Pre-Application 1’ meeting between representatives of Federated Hermes and Bristol City Council planning officers took place on 27 August 2020. And on 14 September there was a Bristol City Council online Cabinet Member briefing, with a presentation given to councillors by representatives from Federated Hermes and Savills.
After Federated Hermes took control of the final building from Lloyds on 9th October, Roz Bird met with the council’s Executive Director of Growth and Regeneration, Stephen Peacock, and the Head of Regeneration, Abigail Stratford, at the site on 13th October. Bird wrote to them afterwards:
“It was great to meet you both on site today. Thank you for your time and for a good initial discussion about the potential issues and opportunities on the site.
As you know, we’re working on plans for pre app 2 at the moment, which I believe is set for early November, and we’re also sending out a press release, with a link to a SMLP website, this week.
As suggested, it would be good to have short catch‐ups throughout the process to ‘check in’ and confer on the design as it progresses.
Our intention is to bring forward an exciting, policy compliant scheme, with clear references to key stakeholder feedback, in order to provide a place that works well with the surrounding activities and breathes life in to the site.
I look forward to working with you both. Please do not hesitate to contact me with further thoughts, and questions, as they arise.”
MEPC and Bristol City Council put out a joint press release later that month, covered by local media outlets. Roz Bird was quoted as saying:
“The site has huge potential, and with the acquisition of all three buildings complete, and control of the site under one ownership for the first time in decades, we are now in the position to take forward proposals to transform this historic location.
We will work in partnership with the public sector, and local communities, in order to create a great place - combining heritage, culture, education and commerce – which will provide sustainable financial returns and positive societal and environmental outcomes.
We are extremely sensitive about the responsibility for redeveloping such a pivotal and historic site in the centre of Bristol and have therefore appointed Feilden Clegg Bradley, as our lead architects, given their expertise. We are excited about what is possible at St Mary le Port.”
Labour councillor Nicola Beech, Cabinet member with responsibility for Spatial Planning and City Design, was also quoted in the press release:
"I am really pleased to see the acquisition of these three buildings.
I look forward to working with Federated Hermes and MEPC to deliver a high quality redevelopment of the site, with a focus on transport improvements and excellent areas of public realm.
We will be working closely with MEPC to ensure that St Mary le Port has a much brighter future.”
Though no designs for the scheme were unveiled publicly with this press release, the essential shape of the scheme was already established. By February 2020 it had been decided that the scheme would be three blocks, echoing the layout of the existing buildings rather than four blocks forming a square, as initially worked on. This is from MEPC’s planning application:
“Further land dealings had influence over the areas selected for development. The masterplan was then adjusted to only include 3 building plots all sitting within the development boundary line and not building into the park…3 buildings plots were established and giving the 4th quarter back to Castle Park and retaining trees, was the approach the Applicant felt was the most appropriate for this significant Site and for Bristol, but with this adjustment the mass that previously sat in the 4th quarter needed to be redistributed across the 3 buildings to ensure viability of the development.”28
In the days following the press release, an MEPC employee - I assume Roz Bird herself as the address on the emails is Silverstone Park - can be seen in correspondence released through this FOI request, trying to set up a meeting with parks officers. They respond saying that they are working through an internal council process so can’t meet. Bird then writes to Nicola Beech in frustration on 23 October:
“Hi Nicola,
Please see the email string below.
As we discussed, when we were on site, I have tried to arrange a meeting with [REDACTED] but to no avail. Please see email string below, anything you can do?
I have also emailed [REDACTED] but have not heard back from him, I’m guessing this is also stuck?
I think we all want the same thing - a great new development on the site - but maybe there is a difference of opinion about how we go about it?
As there are so many detailed conversations to have, on so many fronts, I need to meet with individual specialists, on their topic, and focus on their issues one by one, so full understanding is gained and the ‘puzzle pieces’ can be brought together. Meeting up as one homogenous group to talk at a pre app meeting, for the first time, won’t get the job done.
I hope that makes sense, and again, apologies for bothering you with this.
Kind regards
Beech forwards to Stephen Peacock:
Hi Stephen
Here we go again. I’ll go back politely but I have to say this playing off each other is really frustrating.
Nic
Peacock replies:
I’ll send you a note I just sent her - you were next on my list!
Proposals
The design proposals were made public for the first time by MEPC on 8 April 2021, as they announced a ‘public consultation’ on the plans, which were reported on in the local media. Two public online presentations took place on 21 and 22 April 2021.
It can be seen from the notes for Pre-Application Meeting 4, which took place 11 March, that MEPC were at this point already fixed on a May submission for their planning application – just a few weeks after the planned consultation meetings:
“Consultation next month
Appln due 1st half of May”
This was clearly always going to be far too short a timeframe for any feedback to have any meaningful impact on the proposals. And the window for consultation was only open for 18 days, until 26 April. In the end, there was just five weeks in between these public presentations and the submission of the application on 28 May.
The scheme they were revealing was for three very large new office buildings with retail or food and drink premises at ground floor level. The office blocks consisted of one nine-storey building and two eight-storey buildings, with their commercial floor dimensions making them substantially taller than if they had been residential buildings with the same number of storeys.
Other elements to the plans included alterations and repairs to the church tower and ruins as well as the High Street Vaults - medieval wine cellars that lie beneath the site and have Scheduled Monument status. There was hard and soft landscaping and new ‘public realm’, as well as the re-establishment of three street lines lost during the Bristol Blitz: Adam and Eve Lane, Cheese Market and part of Mary le Port Street.
What is immediately striking about the buildings is their jarring and dissonant appearance within the context of the Old City. They have a domineering presence, with their great height relative to their surroundings and their squat proportions. The three buildings seem to have little cohesive identity, with each one going off in a very different referential direction. While the materials and design make various claims of local distinctiveness, the overriding commercial demands, coupled with the bland styling of contemporary architecture, mean that they could have been dropped in from anywhere in the world.
Block A, on the High Cross corner of the crossroads, takes its jettying structure from the lost Dutch House. But the parodic office block is not fooling anyone that it’s doing anything other than maximising returns on floorspace.
Block B, to the south, has been given a terracotta colour that is supposed to be a reference to the historic brick warehouses along Redcliffe Wharf across the floating harbour, as well as nodding to the Bristol Byzantine style. But Redcliffe is an entirely different conservation area, with a very different history, grain and appearance to the Old City immediately across High Street. The building jetties out here too, giving it a domineering presence. The building also looms over the southern side of the church tower, claustrophobically close. At the top, a discordant jumble of terraces produces a strangely unbalanced view from Bristol Bridge.
Block C, the tallest of the buildings, sits closest to the park and presents a sheer cliff face to it.
The lost Old City was densely packed, but buildings of twice the height create a completely different, bullying effect. The busy vertical grids on the buildings are an attempt to mitigate their bulky form but the Bristol building they’re most reminiscent of perhaps is the modern Bristol Royal Infirmary hospital.
And as we’ll see, the plans being made public had been subject to severe criticism from specialist officers within the council for many months, and this was unresolved and still ongoing.
Planning Policy Context
When Marvin Rees became mayor in 2016, the local development plan in Bristol had been a framework of documents made up of a Core Strategy, adopted in 2011, Site Allocations and Development Management Policies, adopted in 2014, and the Central Area Plan, adopted 2015. A variety of supplementary planning documents and other planning guidance also existed to inform decisions.
As previously mentioned, although much of this framework had been approved by the council relatively recently, an early priority of Rees’ administration was to review the local plan with a view to replacing it with a new one. And a primary motivation for this was to encourage an increase in densification - largely seen as being achieved through tall buildings.29
Adopting a new local plan is a laborious and time-consuming process; so time-consuming that Bristol’s new local plan will only come into effect after Rees’s departure. Delayed by a failed West of England Spatial Plan that tried to establish new housing provision across the region’s local authorities under a single regime, consultation for a Bristol-only local plan began in 2019. The full document has only recently been approved by Full Council and it now needs government approval before coming into force.
With this slow process playing out, it was important for Rees and his administration to bring in what planning documents they could to help shape development in the city. This was achieved through a Supplementary Planning Document (SPD), ‘Urban Living: Making successful places at higher densities’, adopted November 2018, and a spatial framework called the City Centre Framework, adopted June 2020. Though meant to be given less weight than the local development plan policies, they are both a material consideration in assessing planning applications.
The ‘Urban Living’ SPD would replace a 2005 SPD on tall buildings that stressed the great caution required in siting new proposals appropriately within Bristol’s cityscape.
The initial draft consultation document, published in February 2018, opened with a foreword by Marvin Rees that didn’t appear in the final approved document published later in the year. Although it repeated the idea that he wanted “Bristol’s skyline to grow”, it struck an an emollient tone that was never to be heard again:
“I acknowledge that higher density development - particularly tall buildings - is an emotive subject both for and against; advocates suggest tall buildings represent ambition and meet growth requirements, while those against often cite the need to protect the unique character of the city, and voice concerns that we do not repeat the mistakes of the past.
Both positions are valid. Bristol has a unique context, and with more heritage assets than any other UK Core City, is more sensitive to the impacts of higher density development. Meanwhile Bristol’s reputation as one of the most liveable cities in the UK is helping to attract people and investment, which places significant pressures on land use to fulfil the city’s ambition and meet growth requirements.”30
This foreword was replaced by one by Nicola Beech that didn’t dwell on this conflict. And the rest of the document ignored the results that had come back from the public consultation. The more than 600 respondents were overwhelmingly hostile to tall buildings. For example, in response to the statement: “New buildings should be allowed to be significantly higher than those around it”, 66.5% strongly disagreed, and 15.51% disagreed.31
The new ‘City Centre Framework’, approved 2020, again sought to create a easier policy environment for tall buildings. This was a spatial framework that provides detailed guidance about the city centre, layout and design of new developments. The difference between the draft produced in 2018 and the final version shows the evolving approach in terms of tall buildings and other priorities.
The Bristol Civic Society’s response to the draft version in 2018 had said:
“In particular, we strongly support the proposal to keep the building height at the prevailing city scale close to the Old City, eg at the St Mary le Port site, and do not see the approval of a tall building on the ambulance station site at the opposite corner of the park [‘Castle Park View’] as a valid precedent for the St Mary le Port site.”
This referred to a map of the city centre titled ‘Development Form’, which showed potential development sites colour-coded with the appropriate height range. The St Mary le Port site is coloured yellow, meaning: “Prevailing City Scale (4-6 storeys) with appropriate height within this range being established through pre-application.” The map also identified the churches of St Mary le Port, All Saints, Christ Church and St Nicholas as “existing focal building(s) where existing key views require protection/enhancement”. This map did not feature in the final published version.
It seems likely the softening of the language between the draft and the final version in relation to the Old City and the St Mary le Port site may have been shaped in part through discussions with Federated Hermes. They had bought the first two leaseholds in late 2018.
For example, the draft says:
“The spires and towers of the historic churches particularly within Old City create a significant skyline that should be protected when considering the form of new development.”32
There isn’t a single mention of spires in the final version.
The draft says:
“In the right place, well-designed tall buildings can make a positive contribution to urban life, however ill-considered proposals can have a disproportionate impact on the character, appearance and enjoyment of the city.”
This entire sentence was removed from the final version.
The draft says:
“Aim 16: Protecting important views and vistas
"The framework identifies a number of important existing views that will require protection and possibly enhancement. These tend to be short and long range views to historic church towers and along key movement corridors which help the wider understanding and legibility of the area particularly by pedestrians.”
There is no mention of “historic church towers” in the final version. Though it does talk about requiring:
"The enhancement of important views in areas where significant historic building fabric and street pattern remains.”33
In MEPC’s timeline of the evolving design in their Design and Access Statement, it says towards the end of 2019, “Design paused due to Land Ownership discussions.” And then for January 2020:
“After the restart of the design process the New City Centre Draft Framework document was released by Bristol City Council.
Description of a shared ambition and opportunity for Bristol and St Mary le Port.
Scene setting for changing context in Bristol and shift in focus of the perceived City Centre.
Further development of land uses, scale and massing and building plot zones set out in policy.”
And for February 2020:
“Due to the new policies set out in the CCF and land ownership configurations, Option 2 was now chosen for further detailed design.”
“Further land dealings had influence over the areas selected for development.”
“The masterplan was then adjusted to only include 3 building plots all sitting within the development boundary line and not building into the park.”
However, the key passage of the approved City Centre Framework did say that the St Mary le Port site should be redeveloped in line with a “restore” design approach, whilst stating that building heights could increase on what was currently there.
“Aim 20: Design Approach: Restore
"In historically rich areas, with strong character the design approach should follow the BCAP [Bristol Central Area Plan] ‘Restored City’ urban design approach. This requires the thoughtful and creative reinstatement of historic street patterns, building lines and public spaces and the enhancement of important views in areas where significant historic building fabric and street pattern remains. This generally requires development to respond to prevailing building height and form. This approach does not advocate pastiche, rather the contemporary design of new spaces and buildings that respond positively to the historic local context.
For example, a restore approach at St Mary le Port will involve development of the existing site, re-instating former street patterns and the construction of new buildings which may exceed the height of those currently on the site (see Bristol Central Local Plan Policy BCAP37 KS04).”
Aim 18, ‘Promoting appropriate building heights’, also contains this strong piece of policy:
“The framework proposes a height range of 4-6 storeys for buildings that enclose streets, creating human scale ‘base buildings’, with opportunities to increase heights within larger blocks. Greater building height could be considered where it would not be harmful to local character and distinctiveness and in particular the setting of valued historic buildings.”
The piece of policy in the existing local plan relating to the site is BCAP37. As well as saying that new proposals will be expected to improve connections between St Nicholas market and Castle Park, look at historic street patterns and make improvements to the church tower and vaults, it states:
“Sites within the High Street, Wine Street and Castle Park area will be developed for a mix of city centre uses as part of the wider enhancement of Castle Park and its setting. Development will be expected to safeguard and enhance Castle Park and its heritage assets as a large, publicly accessible city centre open space and to explore opportunities to restore the historic character of the Old City and reveal and enhance other heritage assets within individual sites.
…Development exceeding existing building heights that responds appropriately to the local context and respects important existing views will be acceptable.”
Other parts of the local plan lay down general principles about the assessment of new development proposals in historic areas of the city and Conservation Areas.
From the local plan’s ‘Site Allocations and Development Management Policies’, adopted July 2014, under policy DM31, ‘Heritage Assets’:
“Heritage assets, which can range from whole landscapes to individual items of street furniture, are a finite non-renewable resource that can often be irreparably damaged by insensitive development. Great weight is given to the conservation of designated heritage assets. As set out in the Core Strategy, the historic environment is important not just for its own sake, but also as an asset that can add value to regeneration and help to draw businesses to the city, acting as a stimulus to local economic growth.”
“Development that has an impact upon a heritage asset will be expected to conserve and, where appropriate, enhance the asset or its setting.”
“Development within or which would affect the setting of a conservation area will be expected to preserve or, where appropriate, enhance those elements which contribute to their special character or appearance.”
From policy DM26, ‘Local Character and Distinctiveness’:
“The design of development proposals will be expected to contribute towards local character and distinctiveness by:
i. Responding appropriately to and incorporating existing land forms, green infrastructure assets and historic assets and features; and
ii. Respecting, building upon or restoring the local pattern and grain of development, including the historical development of the area; and
iii. Responding appropriately to local patterns of movement and the scale, character and function of streets and public spaces; and
iv. Retaining, enhancing and creating important views into, out of and through the site; and
v. Making appropriate use of landmarks and focal features, and preserving or enhancing the setting of existing landmarks and focal features; and
vi. Responding appropriately to the height, scale, massing, shape, form and proportion of existing buildings, building lines and set-backs from the street, skylines and roofscapes; and
vii. Reflecting locally characteristic architectural styles, rhythms, patterns, features and themes taking account of their scale and proportion; and viii. Reflecting the predominant materials, colours, textures, landscape treatments and boundary treatments in the area.
Development will not be permitted where it would be harmful to local character and distinctiveness or where it would fail to take the opportunities available to improve the character and quality of the area and the way it functions.”34
Pre-Application Process
Before a planning application for a major scheme is submitted to the Local Planning Authority, there is a large amount of back-and-forth between the developer and the LPA as issues are worked through in order for the final proposal to have the best chance of being policy compliant and recommended for approval by officers. Within Bristol City Council, the role of assessing the design of major proposals during the pre-application process was at this time carried out by Development Management (the planning department) in conjunction with the City Design Group. City Design Group, which has since been disbanded by the administration, was made up of multi-disciplinary teams of specialists concerned with place shaping, urban design, engineering design and heritage.
There were four pre-application stages before the planning application was submitted, involving four official meetings between the council and the applicant and four official exchanges of correspondence.
Several Freedom of Information requests to Bristol City Council relating to the St Mary le Port development, from a range of different requesters, are in the public domain at the website ‘What Do They Know’. The two I quote from in this section are ‘Pre-application documents for St Mary le Port’ and ‘St Mary le Port interference’.
What they show is that all the way through the pre-application process, both in meetings with the developer and their representatives, and through formal written pre-application letters, the council’s officers in City Design and in Development Management made it clear for many months that the height, scale and massing of the proposed buildings was unacceptable on policy grounds because of the harm to heritage assets and their setting, as well as the impact on Castle Park.
This is documented as being the case all the way from the first written pre-application response from Development Management Team Leader, Alison Straw, in December 2020, to the final pre-app letter sent by the head of Development Management, Gary Collins, on 30 April 2021. Notes from meetings and design workshops that occurred through the pre-app process, confirm that the same lines were being drawn there too.
On 3 December 2020, Alison Straw wrote to the applicant’s representatives Savills, in response to Pre-App Meeting 2. The letter sets out the relevant policies of the Local Development Plan which the proposals are to be considered against:
“Height, scale and massing are a key issue that we need to further explore with you. The City Centre Framework, recently approved, identifies a much more considerate scale in this area where a restore approach is to be taken and was clearly informed by an understanding of the historic context. Whilst taller elements might be acceptable the proposals go well beyond this guidance. At the current time the proposed development is considered to obstruct and dominate the key views of the highly graded church towers; to be overbearing and inappropriate within this highly sensitive historic context.”
Straw refers to the attached comments of the City Design Group. While echoing positive points about certain aspects of the design such as the integration with the park and public realm, they state in their comments:
“Given the heritage context noted above, which is of national significance, CDG [City Design Group] heritage comments at this stage primarily focus on fundamental issue of height, scale and massing. As the scheme evolves and a more comprehensive submission is made additional focus will be given to more detailed aspects of the scheme.”
“The prevailing building height within the Conservation Area is 4-6 storeys. Where taller buildings are accommodated, excepting church towers, these generally have a poor contribution to the special character and, where they have obscured views of the historic church towers, have had a harmful impact.”“The scale of development identified in the City Centre Framework was fully informed by an understanding of the historic context with recognition of the CA [Conservation Area] designation. Within the area four to six storeys is appropriate with taller elements acceptable only where they can be accommodated without conflicting with the historic buildings and special character of the CA. As currently proposed the proposal would encroach and visually disrupt the cluster of church towers which as a visual grouping in the skyline contribute to the character and appearance of the CA. The proposed scale of the development also undermines their primacy both individually and collectively. It is advised that the development scale should be reduced to reflect the Framework, protect the nationally important CA, and prevent the harm to heritage as outlined above. As previously stated, this is a highly sensitive location within the historic city; development must reflect that sensitivity and prevent undermining the economic, social and environmental benefits brought to the city by its historic character and value. The site requires a more contextual and sensitive response to scale, grain and massing to be compliant with policy and supported in heritage terms.”
There is also a focus on the impact on Castle Park of the height, scale and massing:
“Many of the key urban design concerns are addressed within the heritage considerations as the heritage designations and framework policies necessarily guide the urban design assessment. In addition to the discussion outline above CDG would like to draw attention to the impact of the proposed scale and massing on Castle Park. While the redevelopment of the site has enormous potential to improve the park, it also poses risks if a comfortable height, scale and massing is not achieved. The height and massing and elevational treatment of block C facing east and south is critical as this block has the potential to fundamentally alter the character and even use of Castle Park. This portion of the development sits towards the central zone of the park so additional height and scale over what currently exists will likely reframe the perception of open greenspace.
Currently, there is a perception of a city park with a formal structure occupying a full city block. In effect this means that the development site sits within the body of the park. The existing scale of buildings maintains these perceptions by sitting comfortably below the tree line – a typical defining height feature for any urban green space. In consideration of these points the applicant has not demonstrated a sufficient understanding of the park and a rationale for how the scheme responds to it in relation to key matters of height, scale and massing. There is thoughtfulness demonstrated with respect to ground level public realm treatments, however a rationale for the overall building form in response to the park needs to be made clear.”
Their comments also raise the issue of park shadowing:
“It is important to acknowledge that the site sits at the western end of a park with an east/west orientation. This is critical as the sun sets in the west. If new development negatively impacts the quality of light and effectively blocks afternoon and early evening sunshine this could alter patterns of park use and reduce the park’s amenity value over its daily life-cycle. This could ultimately reduce the number of people the park serves. It is worth remembering that it is precisely these later hours in the day when urban parks typically come alive with activity.”
Almost two months later, on 29 January 2021, Alison Straw wrote again to Savills. This time in response to the third pre-app meeting. I focus here on the letter’s “primary concern” of height, scale and massing:
“Whilst it is recognised that progress has been made with regard to some elements of the scheme, particularly the architectural response and consideration of the treatment of and space around St Mary Le Port itself, I have to highlight that a number of fundamental concerns, raised by officers consistently throughout this process, remain unresolved. Of primary concern is the height, scale and massing of the scheme which is still considered to be unacceptable and requires significant amendment to achieve policy compliant development that responds to the sensitive historic context within which this site sits… With regard to the issue of height, scale and massing, without significant amendment beyond what we have seen so far, it is unlikely that officers will be able to support any scheme coming forward given the level of harm that will ensue.”
She also says:
“The Pre App 3 submission is silent on the issues that were raised in my letter to you dated 3rd December, the contents of which still remain relevant. Ultimately I am concerned that what is proposed relies heavily on the success of the ground floors and that the proposed office use at upper floors will not sufficiently contribute to the activity; vibrancy; vitality; security and general surveillance of the immediate area and Castle Park, over a required 24 hour period. Greater activity is required in order to achieve the objective of making Castle Park a truly safer part of the city.
The absence of a residential element or a high quality hotel for example within the scheme, which by their very nature will address these issues, is considered to be a missed opportunity in terms of the overall revitalisation of the area. This issue will of course have to be weighed in the balance in the consideration of the forthcoming application. It is hoped that at the very least any submission will clearly demonstrate that the proposals have been designed with adaptability in mind, thus providing a degree of confidence that the development could be successful even if the demand for office accommodation, upon which this development so heavily relies, waivers. Our concern is that extensive vacancies with the development would fail to deliver the safer environment that we are seeking to achieve.”
And under ‘Urban Design and Heritage Assets’:
The presentation material served to confirm to officers that what is being proposed, by reason of height, scale and massing, will cause significant harm to acknowledged heritage assets. This issue was raised at our first meeting back in August 2020 and again in our response to you dated 3rd December. Whilst it is appreciated that the architecture has developed in a positive and pleasing manner, ultimately this cannot disguise the harmful impact of the development given the quantum of development that is being promoted.
I can only reiterate the views expressed in my earlier letter to you; that the City Centre Framework, recently approved, identifies a much more considerate scale in this area where a “restore” approach is to be taken, and was clearly informed by an understanding of the historic context. Whilst taller elements might be acceptable the proposals go well beyond this guidance. At the current time the proposed development is considered to obstruct and dominate the key views of the highly graded church towers; and also to be overbearing and inappropriate within this highly sensitive historic context.”
Two days after this pre-app 3 response was sent from the council, Gary Collins wrote the following update to Stephen Peacock, Zoe Wilcox and Abigail Stratford, on 1 February 2021:
“Morning All
We continue to be in dialogue with MEPC & Hermes about this site, but I am alerting you to our latest pre‐application response. I attach the response for your information.
This highlights 3 main unresolved issues:
• Unjustified tree loss
• Lack of coordination with emerging major transport initiatives
• Height, scale and massing (supported by a detailed visual assessment provided by City Design)
We are also holding them to account to justify their proposals (or change the mix of uses), to ensure that the development contributes positively to activity in Castle Park beyond office hours.
If you wanted a more detailed briefing of the situation please let me know.
Regards
Gary”
Savills reply to the LPA’s Pre-App 3 response on 8 February:
"In response to your written Pre-Application Advice 3 response received on 29 January 2020, we are preparing a response which will be shared shortly. However, given the importance of height, scale and massing within your letter, we would politely request a Design Workshop be organised as a matter of urgency to ensure the core issues can be discussed and addressed. It would be helpful if this could be held during mid-February to inform the Pre-Application 4 meeting scheduled for 11 March 2021.
We suggest this should be a relatively focussed workshop perhaps attended your side by yourself, and if you can provide some dates/times for such a session we will try and be as flexible as possible.”
On 10 February, Savills wrote to the council with “an initial response to the Pre-Application 3 written feedback.” This is not included in the FOI releases.
The following day, on 11 February, Roz Bird wrote testily to Abigail Stratford about “current, and ongoing, concerns”:
Hi Abigail,
As requested, please see below and attached which was sent yesterday.
It would be good to have a chat with you.
The Highways Workshop went ahead this morning but was not managed appropriately by the council.
It would be good to talk you through current, and ongoing, concerns.
Kind regards
Stephen Peacock
A key figure that emerges at this stage in the pre-application discussions is Stephen Peacock. He had joined Bristol City Council around four months previously in November 2019 as Executive Director of Growth and Regeneration, taking over the role from Colin Molton, who had been in post since late 2017.35 With no background in placemaking or urban design, Peacock began his career working for oil and gas giant BP overseas, a 9-year stint covering most of the 1990s.
As well as their obvious role in fossil fuel created global warming, climate change denial, and environmental degradation, BP are also a company with long historical ties to the intelligence services. This can be seen going back to their early existence as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and their role instigating the MI6 and CIA-backed Iranian coup of 1953 that overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in order to prevent his plan to nationalise the country’s oil reserves. Always a powerful factor in shaping UK foreign policy objectives, former head of MI6 Sir John Sawers joined the company’s board as a non-executive director in 2015.36 And they were recently exposed as employing the services of a private intelligence firm, run by a former MI6 agent, to spy on environmental activists. What Peacock was doing for them over the first decade of his professional life is unclear. His LinkedIn profile simply states “various” for the roles he held at BP, and for skills employed: “Project Management. Leadership. Strategic Partnerships”.
Following his departure in 2000, Peacock took up a role as a Business Development Director at the telecommunications company Hutchinson 3G. According to his LinkedIn profile, he led a “team of commercial deal makers pulling together Europe's first pure 3G play; responsible for UK and international roaming business; investor relations with focus on Japanese shareholders.”
After a little under four years doing that, he moved on in 2004 to become Executive Director of Enterprise and Innovation at the South West Regional Development Agency (SWRDA). This was one of the nine regional quangos set up by the New Labour government. Their role was to distribute funds from central government and the EU to the local private sector in order to promote enterprise and economic development.
Peacock’s predecessor at Bristol City Council, Colin Molton, had been Director of Development at the SWRDA and later Deputy Chief Executive. There were also a couple of key Bristol business figures on the board of the SWRDA who remain active and influential. John Savage, the businessman who took over the running of the Bristol Chamber of Commerce in the 1990s and later founded the influential Business West.37 And Colin Skellett, the longtime CEO of Wessex Water and Chief Executive of YTL UK, we met previously through his involvement in the arena controversy. Both Savage and Skellett are former Masters of the Society of Merchant Venturers, the organisation made up of wealthy Bristol elites that has played an influential and secretive role in the city since the late Middle Ages.38 Skellett became Chair of Business West in 2022.
The regional development agencies were wound up by the new coalition government in 2010. According to an article in the Daily Mail, Peacock was “handed £113,701 in a taxpayer-funded deal” on his departure that year. The RDAs were replaced by Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs), which have also had access to central pots of money as well as a responsibility for managing ‘Enterprise Zones’, such as Temple Quarter in Bristol. These are areas designated by central government for regeneration where businesses receive incentives such as business rates discounts and simplified planning processes.
The current Chair of the West of England LEP is Richard Bonner, whose previous company, Arcadis, were made a citywide ‘Strategic Partner’ to Bristol City Council by Stephen Peacock in 2021. Their role is to act as a consultant on a range of infrastructure and regeneration projects. Bonner’s current company, Atkins, which he joined in 2023, are part of a large infrastructure framework with the West of England Combined Authority, who work in close partnership with the LEP. Bonner was also President of Bristol Chamber of Commerce and Initiative from 2017-2021, under Savage’s Business West umbrella organisation.
On leaving the SWRDA, Peacock founded a consultancy called The Real Economy: “Bridging the gap between the private and public sectors in the field of economic development.” And then in 2013 he joined Grant Thornton, the professional services accounting, auditing and consulting firm, and was responsible for the delivery of their ‘Business Growth Services’. This included being Director of Operations for their government-backed ‘GrowthAccelerator’ programme, set up to identify and support high growth businesses looking to rapidly expand.
Peacock left Grant Thornton in 2019 and joined Bristol City Council later that year on a salary of £165,00. Following the departure of the council’s Chief Executive Mike Jackson, Peacock moved into the role in September 2022. Initially appointed until the summer of 2024, that’s now been extended until the end of the year in order to provide some continuity as the council switches from the mayoral system to the committee system.
”Don’t want to get to a stalemate”: Pre-App Meetings
One of the Freedom of Information releases contains notes from the various meetings that took place before the application was submitted between Gary Collins, other senior council officers in Growth and Regeneration, the architects, and representatives from Federated Hermes, MEPC and Savills.39 The names of several participants have been redacted by Bristol City Council and there is also no information in these notes that would indicate who said what. They’re fragmentary and disjointed but the issues being discussed are fairly clear.
The first meeting covered is the requested ‘Design Workshop’, which ended up taking place on 1 March 2021. The notes include:
“fundamental issue remains of HSM [height, scale, massing]”
response raised some concerns on how policy was being addressed
On 8 March 2021 there was a meeting titled “high level meeting proposal”, which included Stephen Peacock. That morning Abigail Stratford had forwarded on to him the testy email that Bird had sent the previous month, with “FYI”, leading Peacock to reply “Can you please send me the letter we sent to them.” Stratford asks Gary Collins for the pre-app letter and he replies:
I attach our Pre‐app response 3, which was accompanied by the City Design Group comments (also attached).
For completeness I am also including Savills’ response to this.
Finally, I can confirm that a 2 hour design workshop took place on Monday last week.
The notes from the 8 March meeting include:
“HSM [height, scale, massing] remain a key question - sensitive location”
This is responded to from the developer side with:
“Policy approach has undermined scheme - use ‘selective use of policy by officers to undermine scheme’”
And then this curious detail:
“Highways too - being told to wait - want confirmation of this. Officers silent / complicit”.
Following this meeting, Roz Bird writes to Stephen Peacock on 9 March 2021:
"Thank you for your time yesterday. As promised please see the link below to the Pre App 4 presentation. This will be discussed at the Pre App 4 meeting this Thursday 11th March.
As you suggest it would be good for us to meet up a few times between now and the submission of the application in May. I have asked my PA to help set up those meetings.
I would be delighted to provide an overview presentation for you, for the Mayor, and others, as you deem appropriate. This would provide some of the background slides explaining the evolution of our design, and could also cover, in more detail, the work we are starting, over and above the planning application, including our Social Impact Strategy, Net Gain to the Natural Environment and how we might work to add value to the Bristol high‐tech ecosystem. Let me know if you would like this type of presentation.
Thanks again for your input yesterday and I look forward to working with you to achieve an inspirational scheme in the centre of Bristol.”
The Pre-Application 4 meeting was on 11 March 2022. These summarised comments must have been from Gary Collins:
“There remain concerns over height scale & massing which require changes to the scheme to address this issue”
“Overall H is still unacceptable, looking for meaningful reduction but see that massing has been amended. Changes don't go as far as we would like.”
“Need to be sure we don't separate Heritage from other design issues. When can we get VC model? Response comes across as a rebuttal and don't want to get to a stalemate.”
The “VC model” requested by Collins refers to ‘Vu-City’, a 3D city model software programme used in planning to see the visual impact of development proposals.
The final series of notes are for another “high-level” meeting that took place on 26 April 2021, just four days before Gary Collins’ final pre-app 4 response letter. This was over two weeks after the plans had been made public by MEPC and reported about in the local media. The day before the meeting, at 8.45pm on 25 April, Roz Bird wrote to Stephen Peacock:
Dear Stephen,
I hope all is well with you.
Apologies for not turning to this sooner but, as you probably know, we had our public consultation on Wednesday and Thursday last week and the whole team was focused on that until Friday when we then focused on the 360 walkthrough of the site!
I realise that the content of the last meeting came as a bit of a surprise to you. I apologise for that. I had assumed the details had been passed on.
Conscious that we’re meeting again tomorrow, at 10am, I thought that it would be wise to send you a brief summary of the remaining issues with our application. This is not meant to be an agenda, although we could do it that way if you like. Hopefully, at the very least, it’s a good background briefing note prior to meeting with everyone.
I should also clarify that anything that I mentioned at the last meeting, and the notes below, have come directly from my design team.”
This is curious: “I realise that the content of the last meeting came as a bit of a surprise to you. I apologise for that. I had assumed the details had been passed on.” I’m unclear what meeting this refers to or what the surprise was.
Bird goes on to lay out this potential “agenda”:
“Here are the main items I am managing on Bristol, at the moment, and a few notes as to where we have got to:
1. Planning process
a. Waiting to hear back, from BCC, on Pre App 4 advice
b. The meeting was on the 11th March
c. Our design team is in touch with [REDACTED]
d. There was a further workshop, on heights of buildings, following the pre app 4 meeting
e. The Vu‐City model was sent to BCC on the 18th March
f. In addition to the Vu‐City model, to help explain the scheme, almost all verified views are CGIs and we have provided a 360 walkthrough
2. Land deal
a. Waiting to hear back, from BCC, on final draft Heads of Terms
b. Detailed discussions with taken place in April, regarding social and environmental impact – agreed aligned objectives
c. There will be a percentage of ground floor retail at a discount to market rent
3. Archaeological surveys
a. Waiting to hear back from BBC ‐
b. Report required to confirm whether, as city archaeologist, he is happy with our approach so far
4. Deconsecration of St Mary le Port
a. Waiting to hear back from BCC ‐
b. Letter required to confirm Bristol City Council has no issues with deconsecration.
5. Public consultation
a. Not sure if any BCC officers were able to attend?
b. Took place on the 21st and 22nd April
c. Feedback from groups such as Friends of Castle Park have been positive
6. Business Community
a. Graphcore requested walkthrough imagery and discussions continue
b. Discussions taken place with Unit DX
c. Meeting booked with [REDACTED] regarding the Bristol and Bath Network
7. Social Impact Strategy – pilot projecta. Working with a wide range of stakeholders including BCC, BDP, FoCP, Lakota, TeamLove, DareShack, Creative Youth Network, the BID etc
b. Targeting meaningful work experience for 200 young people through outdoor art/events in Castle Park in 2021
8. Environmental Net Gain – pilot project
a. Working on a comprehensive ENG strategy
b. Linked to the NCC recommendations and the Environment Bill
c. Synergy with the Bristol One City Ecological Emergency
d. The ENG approach will be a first for MEPC ‐ very appropriate to pilot in Bristol
I appreciate your time, focusing on this scheme, and I look forward to our catch up tomorrow.”
Peacock forwards the message the following morning to Abigail Stratford at 9.21am:
Hi Abbie
See below - there seems to be a long list of stuff where we haven’t got back to them. Would be helpful to get our lines agreed before 10am if possible. Can you please look into it.
Thanks
Stephen
Again, several of the participants’ names are redacted from the notes of this meeting but along with Stephen Peacock and Roz Bird, there were two other senior officers from Growth and Regeneration, an employee of Federated Hermes, and Gary Collins. I include these notes in their entirety. Each bullet point is a separate speaker, their identities were redacted in the FOI release:
Public consultation last week
Awaiting pre-app 4 response
Vu City sent acrossWalk through it together
Internal discussions
LPA Owner and also pro-development
Can see economics of the deal through [REDACTED]
HSM [Height, Scale, Massing] will always be an issue - does the viability require this
If so, need to focus on economic benefits
HSM - design & planning policy framework
Is it the right scheme for the location
Revolves around harm to heritage assets
Not substantial harm and benefits would outweigh this
Can't answer viability Q at this time
Can't start slicing storeys off but can discuss some changes outside of this meeting
[REDACTED] & [REDACTED] to discuss off-line to benefits case
Timescales?
Submission in May
Several things are striking. That Federated Hermes and MEPC are unable to “answer viability Q[uestion] at this time”, just a few weeks before they plan to submit their application to the council. That there is a blank refusal to lower the height of the buildings by reducing the number of storeys. That a discussion about the benefits case is to happen “off-line”. And that Gary Collins appears to be mantaining the position on height, scale and massing and questioning whether this is “the right scheme for the location”.
My inference is that it is Stephen Peacock talking about the Local Planning Authority being “pro-development”.
The final Pre-App letter was a response to the Pre-App 4, written this time by Gary Collins and dated 30 April 2021. This was originally omitted from the FOI release relating to pre-application correspondence that I requested from the council, but included after I raised the issue - I knew of its existence due to references in other FOIs. It’s worth quoting from at length, focusing on those sections that deal with the key issue of height, scale and massing:
“Your letter dated 9th March provided a detailed response to the Authority’s written feedback dated 29th January. At this stage in the process, with a submission imminent and few if any fundamental changes to the scheme likely in the interim, I don’t propose to respond in detail to all the points which were raised, which will no doubt form part of your planning statement in any event. I do however just set out where I think we are under the headings that you provided.
One of the outstanding issues remained that of the proposed height, scale and massing and the harmful impact that this has upon the heritage assets. It was previously advised that, without significant amendment beyond what we have seen so far, it was unlikely that officers would be able to support the scheme given the level of harm that will ensue.
With the benefit of the Vu City Model and the accompanying verified views document, officers have now had the opportunity to further assess the submission. Whilst it is acknowledged that there have been some amendments to the siting of buildings and some further consideration of the architecture with particular regard to the upper levels, it is unfortunate that the level of change that officers have been seeking with regard to this issue has not been forthcoming. The further information has if anything reaffirmed this Authority’s position on this matter and as such I am unable to come to a different conclusion.”
He goes on to write, under ‘Urban Design and Heritage Assets’:
“I note the contents of your letter dated 9th and your reference to various policies which you consider of particular relevance to the consideration of this issue. At this stage I would just refer you back to the policies identified in our letter dated 3rd Dec in particular, and those which relate specifically to Heritage Assets within the Site Allocations and Development Management Policies as well of course to the requirements of the NPPF.
I note that you state in your letter that a full Townscape and Visual Impact Assessment, to include key views, will be provided within the Environmental Statement. I assume therefore that your clients have undertaken their own detailed assessment of the significance of the identified views and have subsequently tested the proposals against such an assessment at key points in the development process. It would have been useful to have sight of this work during the pre- application process.
Notwithstanding the above, I would like to thank you for sharing the Vu City model which has provided my colleagues within the city design group the opportunity to carry out their own assessment of the significance of the views presented and ultimately the scheme as a whole. I have attached their assessment to this letter and I hope this provides your clients with further clarity on this matter.
Ultimately the view continues to be that by reason of height, scale and massing the scheme will have a significant and harmful impact on the conservation area and the setting of the group of listed towers in particular. This issue was raised at our first meeting back in August 2020 and again in our response to you dated 3rd December and 27th January and discussed in subsequent Design Workshops. Whilst it is appreciated that the architecture has continued to develop and that there has been a shift in Building C and updates to Building B with terracing added, the Local Planning Authority continues to be of the opinion that ultimately this cannot disguise the harmful impact of the development given the quantum of development that is being promoted. In addition it would appear that the TVIA [Townscape and Visual Assessment] views have not been produced in the required format or followed the required methodology, which is concerning at this stage in the process. I hope this matter is rectified prior to any formal submission, (or indeed any further meetings on this matter) in order that interested parties may accurately understand the nature of the proposed development and as such make informed comments.”
And finally, in conclusion:
“As before and despite the amendments proposed, the most significant issue continues to relate to the proposed height, scale and massing of all three buildings; they are considered to be excessively large and will have a significant and harmful impact on the Conservation Area and the setting of group listed church towers. The scale of this harm is likely to range from less than substantial to substantial.
Although I understand that there are legitimate viability issues in bringing the scheme forward, I would ask you to look again at the scale of the proposals in order to reduce this harm. Additionally, the public benefits of the proposals (including the economic ones) need to be clearly articulated and justified as the balance of harm and benefits will be crucial in establishing what the officer recommendation will be and ultimately what the DC Committee’s decision will be.”
There were no material changes made to height, scale and massing in the application that was submitted the following month. And yet the same officer – the Head of Development Management – recommended that councillors vote to approve the unchanged scheme six months later. Which begs the question: how and why did Gary Collins move from the position in April that “without significant amendment beyond what we have seen so far, it was unlikely that officers would be able to support the scheme given the level of harm that will ensue”, to recommending the unchanged scheme to councillors for approval at the Development Control committee meeting on 15 December?
This is how this whole process was re-framed in the applicant’s planning application:
The following summary below sets out the general feedback received after discussion during the BCC five thematic workshops and the final Pre-Application meeting 4 and one/two further meetings, with HE (up to 31 March 2021):
Summary Observations:
- Clearly very positive aspects of the proposals and has much to offer in terms of heritage benefits.
- Bringing forward development of this high profile derelict site in a comprehensive manner.
- Acknowledgement of the amendments to the siting of buildings and some further consideration of the architecture with particular regard to the upper levels.
- Scheme to be referred to the History (sic) England Advisory Committee (HEAC).
- Reduction in the height, scale and massing of the proposed new buildings could be considered further.
According to the Historic England website, the Historic England Advisory Committee (HEAC) “offers expert advice to staff and the Commission on Historic England's functions under the National Heritage Act 1983, and other relevant legislation, in particular on policy matters and casework (excluding London) where it is novel, contentious or sets a precedent.” Made up of distinguished specialists in the field, the committee discussed the St Mary le Port scheme at a meeting on 1 July 2021. According to the minutes, “A panel of HEAC members had received a presentation of the proposals from the applicants on 15th June.”
The committee concluded:
a)
that the proposed works would harm the character and appearance of the Old City and Queen Square Conservation Area, and the significance of the Grade I and II* listed churches of St Nicholas, All Saints, Temple, St Peters, and Christ Church;
b)
that the harm would be less than substantial in the terms of the National Planning Policy Framework; noting that this harm would nevertheless be contrary to the Framework’s aspiration that development should bring social, economic and environmental benefits. Furthermore, consideration should be given to some reduction in the scale of massing by means of stepping it back and reducing the height of each building
c)
that the heritage benefits offered by the scheme, although valuable, should attract limited weight in the planning balance, and would be out-weighed by the harm noted above; and
d)
that Historic England should object to the proposed development on heritage grounds.
On 23rd May, Savills wrote to Gary Collins:
Hi Gary
I trust you are well.
I attach a response to the BCC Pre‐App 4 letter. You will note this picks up on some procedural / technical matters (partic the townscape / views methodology) rather than scheme merits, which are addressed in the application itself.
We are targeting the submission later this week and we will let you know the date / time in the next few days.
Regards
This was also sent to Peter Westbury, the manager in the planning department who would be acting as the Case Officer for the application. Gary Collins forwarded it on to Stephen Peacock, Abigail Stratford and Zoe Wilcox, as well as four other people whose names have been redacted in the FOI release:
Dear All
Response letter from the developers for your info. Some issues to deal with during the imminent application submission.
Regards
Gary
The planning application was submitted to the council five days later on 28 May 2021.
The Case Officer’s Report
When a planning application comes to be assessed by councillors it is laid out in the Case Officer’s report. This is a document written by a planning officer assigned to a particular planning application, setting out the nature of the proposed development and providing a recommendation supported by policy evidence for approval or refusal. There’s likely to be contributions from other officers and in this instance it’s clear from internal emails that Gary Collins also wrote part of the report. For major schemes, the Case Officer presents their report to the councillors at the Development Control committee meeting and fields any questions they may have. The councillors then debate the merits of the application among themselves and vote to approve, refuse or abstain.
When planning decisions are challenged in the High Court, there is often a focus on the Case Officer reports. The Local Government Association (LGA) produces a ‘Probity in Planning’ document that says:
“As a result of decisions made by the courts and Ombudsman, officer reports on planning applications must have regard to the following:
Reports should be accurate and should include the substance of any objections and other responses received to the consultation.If the report’s recommendation is contrary to the provisions of the development plan, the material considerations which justify the departure must be clearly stated. This is not only good practice, but failure to do so may constitute maladministration or give rise to a Judicial Review on the grounds that the decision was not taken in accordance with the provisions of the development plan and the council’s statutory duty under Section 38A of the Planning and Compensation Act 2004 and Section 70 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990.”40
Peter Westbury has been an officer in Bristol City Council’s planning department since 2008 but became Team Manager for Major Applications in October 2016, five months after Marvin Rees came into office. His LinkedIn profile states:
“His key skills include steering complex (often controversial) applications through the planning process and delivering planning permissions that assist in the improvement of the City of Bristol.”
Westbury is also an ‘Elder’ and the Chair of Trustees at Hope Chapel, the Congregational church in the Hotwells area of Bristol that Marvin Rees attends. His report for St Mary le Port was inaccurate and misleading in several ways, and would surely have been exposed as such if it had been subjected to legal scrutiny in the courts.
Most crucially, the report misled councillors voting on the proposal around the comments from City Design Group; the council’s own design and heritage specialists who had provided most of the formal pre-application feedback to the applicant.
On page 20 of the report it states: “INTERNAL CONTRIBUTIONS. BCC CITY DESIGN GROUP. Design and Heritage comments are contained within Key Issue C.”41
But when we turn to Key Issue C (“Is the design of the scheme acceptable?”) - knowing what those comments from the council’s design and heritage officers were - we find that this is a deeply misleading statement.
Key Issue C neither mentions City Design Group nor relates their fundamental objection that the height, scale and massing of the proposal didn’t comply with policy, which, as we’ve seen, was repeatedly stressed at great length throughout the entire pre-application process. Their clear position that the design was not policy compliant is characterised merely as “concerns”. And rather than quote directly from their own specialist officers, the officers quote from external consultee Design West, a design and placemaking organisation based on Bristol’s harbourside, who offer a review panel service for developers (further exploration of their role later).
The case officer report says:
Scale and Massing
Particular attention has been paid to the scale and massing of the proposed office blocks and their relationship with their surroundings. The policy requirement is for the proposed development to respond appropriately to the local context. Through the pre-application process, in consultation with officers adjustments have been made to the massing and architecture. This is reflected in Design West discussions and subsequent letters (see above). These adjustments have helped address the monolithic quality of the office blocks. However, there remain concerns that the proposed development is over-scaled in relation to the site and local context. Of particular concern is the scale of Block B.
The report then quotes positive comments from the applicant and Design West. And finishes with these clumsily written sentences:
“To conclude on scale and massing, Members are being asked to weigh up the concerns of in respect of the scale and massing of Block B in particular, against the Applicants’ desire for a “brave and bold” addition to the city.
Your officers have reached the conclusion that on balance the design of Blocks A and C (including their scale and massing) are acceptable. For Block B, with the addition of planting at upper levels, and careful consideration of the materials to be employed in its construction, mean that the scale and massing is acceptable. The proposed development, whilst exceeding existing building heights, responds appropriately to the local context.”
As we’ve seen, City Design Group officers and Gary Collins himself had reached an entirely different conclusion. What was explicitly stated to be “unacceptable” by Collins at the final pre-app 4 meeting on 11th March (“There remain concerns over height scale & massing which require changes to the scheme to address this issue…overall height is unacceptable”), now “responds appropriately to the local context.”
Key issue C ends, under “Design Conclusion”:
“There are concerns regarding the scale of development, however the scheme before the local planning authority for determination would also provide significant benefits that, on balance outweigh those concerns.”
“Your officers have reached the conclusion that…The proposed development, whilst exceeding existing building heights, responds appropriately to the local context.”
Again, Collins had told the developer in the final pre-app letter something entirely different: that the proposed development was “excessively large and will have a significant and harmful impact on the Conservation Area and the setting of group listed church towers.”
Elsewhere, the report contradicts its own view that the scheme “responds appropriately to the local context”:
“From various viewpoints within Castle Park the unmodulated flat-topped buildings would be conspicuous, and at odds with the fine urban grain of the Old City beyond. This equally applies to longer-range views of the site from Redcliffe Bridge and Redcliffe Parade.”
And why would City Design comments not be included in Key Issue D? This section of the report is titled: “Is the proposal acceptable in heritage terms?” These are some of the most significant issues addressed by City Design in their pre-app responses to the applicant. And the report says in Key Issue D: “The application proposal has been assessed in detail by Historic England (HE) and the Council’s Heritage Officers.”
Historic England’s comments are covered at some length in the report. But in a sloppily copied-and-pasted manner, with a constant confusion over what is verbatim and what is being summarised by the officer. The first sentence here doesn’t even make grammatical sense, with “Historic England consider that the scheme” shoved carelessly into the original text by the officer:
Taken as a whole, the proposed development Historic England consider that the scheme would markedly jar with the scale of the Old City, detracting from the historic cityscape at Bristol’s heart. While we acknowledge that the redevelopment of the post-war buildings on this site is an important strategic objective for Bristol, which has proved difficult to secure, the harm consequent on these proposals is regarded as “unnecessary”.
The second sentence has also then been modified by quotation marks being placed around the final word “unnecessary”, an addition that doesn’t appear in Historic England’s original text.42
This confusion over whether it is Historic England speaking, or the officer themselves, pervades this whole section. And other than saying that council heritage officers had assessed the application in detail, there is no exposition of their views or comments. Again, as in Key Issue C, City Design officers have been excluded - as indeed they were from the whole report.
It’s important to recognise what an anomaly this is. When we look at other case officer committee reports, from before and after December 2021, we find direct and detailed reference to City Design Group’s comments on proposals. To take a couple of brief illustrative excerpts - this is from 25 September 2019, for a mixed-use office and residential scheme on Temple Back:
"CDG’s main concern as set out above is that the proposal does not achieve a good contextual fit and that it ignores the unifying qualities noted above with excessive and overbearing development. While the proposed office element provides a good contextual response this represents a fraction of the overall proposal being considered. The majority of the scheme is not compliant with urban design and heritage policy which seeks to reinforce neighbourhood character and celebrate heritage assets.”
And this is for student accommodation on Avon Street, put before the Development Control A committee on 20 July 2022:
“Consequently the Council's City Design Team considers that the proposed scale of the development to be unacceptable and recommend a height parameter in the range of 6 to 10 residential storeys. City Design add that the excessive scale poorly mediates the transition from building on the north side of the viaduct to the lower scaled urban/heritage led vision identified for the Silverthorne Lane character area.”
The only direct reference to “City Design”, “City Design Group, or “CDG”, in the entire St Mary le Port report - this major scheme in a Conservation Area at the historic heart of the city - is that erroneous piece of misdirection: “INTERNAL CONTRIBUTIONS. BCC CITY DESIGN GROUP. Design and Heritage comments are contained within Key Issue C.”
The Planning Committee Meeting
At the end of the long process of site acquisition, design work and pre-application negotiation, the ultimate decision lay with the planning committee of councillors. Bristol has two cross-party planning committees and they reflect the balance of seats held on the council across the parties. On Development Control Committee A that met on 15 December 2021, there were three Green councillors, three Labour, two Conservative and one Liberal Democrat. The meeting was chaired by Richard Eddy, Conservative councillor for the suburban south Bristol ward of Bishopsworth.
A week earlier, Prime Minister Boris Johnson had put the country in ‘Plan B’ Covid measures following the rapid spread of the Omicron variant. This may well have led to the sparse public attendance at the meeting, apparent from the online webcast. The format of the meeting is that any member of the public or person involved in the application can deliver a statement, speaking to the application, up to a minute in length. This is then followed by the case officer presenting the application to councillors and providing policy evidence for their recommendation decision. Councillors can then ask the officers questions, and this is then followed by councillors in turn expressing their own positions on the application, and then finally the Chair takes a vote with councillors voting to approve, refuse or abstain.
The first public statement was delivered by Historic England’s Simon Hickman, Principal Inspector of Historic Buildings and Areas for the South West. The previous day he’d been called to give evidence at Bristol Crown Court - not far from St Mary le Port in the Old City - at the trial of the Colston Four, the four people accused of criminal damage to the statue of Edward Colston.
Hickman began by saying that Historic England were “objecting with quite a heavy heart” and listed aspects of the the scheme that could be admired: the restoration of the ruined church tower, the beneficial use of the medieval vaults, the new connections through to the park. But then said with emphasis that “fundamentally it is just too big”. He cited the City Centre Framework and its expectation that the “lost grain” of the Old City would be restored: “this scheme just doesn’t do that.” If they took two floors off the corner buildings and got some articulation into the roofscapes, he said, Historic England could “enthusiastically endorse the scheme, but as it stands it’s not good enough. Bristol deserves better.”
Following an interruption from the chair asking Hickman to bring his statement to a close because his allotted time was up, he finished by saying that, as proposed, the scheme “would overwhelm the setting of the Old City.” He urged the committee to refuse the plans and encourage the developer to work with Historic England and the council “to come up with a revised scheme that respects the unique character and appearance of our city.”
Next up was Fraser Bridgford, who’d led the ‘Castle Park Users Group’ to oppose a previous development proposal, but was strongly in favour of this one. Then John Tarlton and Mark Ashdown from the Bristol Tree Forum spoke, who were objecting on the grounds of tree loss. And finally MEPC’s Roz Bird spoke.
How the proposal was presented to the councillors who voted on it is particularly crucial because it’s evident that some councillors do not read the report in full or absorb all the information. They are non-specialists, often with scant knowledge of planning policy or process, and understandably look to the planning officers for guidance and direction.
Case Officer Westbury began his presentation by saying:
“The first thing to say is that this site is allocated for development under the Bristol Central Area Plan (policy BCAP37). You will see in that list - and this is in the committee papers - the expectation for the policy. And it is your officers’ opinion that those requirements are met by the proposal. So that was the first thing that we considered when we were assessing this application.”
This was the full list referred to by Westbury, presented to councillors on a screen as he spoke those words:
But this list didn’t cover the entire expectation for the policy. Both these parts of the BCAP37 policy were not displayed to councillors:
"Development will be expected to safeguard and enhance Castle Park and its heritage assets as a large, publicly accessible city centre open space and to explore opportunities to restore the historic character of the Old City and reveal and enhance other heritage assets within individual sites.”
"Development exceeding existing building heights that responds appropriately to the local context and respects important existing views will be acceptable.”43
That second sentence does appear in the committee report but it’s a bastardised version that again doesn’t make grammatical sense:
“It also states that development exceeding existing building heights should respond appropriately to the local context and respects important existing views will be acceptable.”
Westbury also presented this image:
He said:
"I just highlight this plan because it is relevant I think for your consideration. And certainly it was part of my assessment. You’ll see the site is actually four quarters and there is an expectation that all four quarters would be developed but in the interests of the relationship with Castle Park the developers have come forward with a proposal that actually only does three quarters of the site. So we are actually dealing with three buildings today. We could have had a lot more encroachment into the Castle Park area.”
He briefly showed councillors this image before moving on.
Westbury’s assertion that one quarter of the site had been removed clearly doesn’t bear up to a comparison of the two images. What has gone from the original site allocation in the bottom right is a much smaller area than that taken up by the other three blocks, so considerably less than a quarter. And the proposed building at the bottom left now has a much larger plot size than the original site allocation plan, sitting tight up against the remains of the church. But this need to reallocate “a quarter” of the development quantum was used as the primary justification for the heights of the proposed buildings.
There was no direct mention of the history of the site at all in Westbury’s presentation or its historical significance to the city. In relation to the surrounding heritage assets and the fact that it sits in the City and Queen Square Conservation Area, he simply assured the councillors that: “It’s been dealt with very carefully and weighed against the economic benefits of the scheme.”
The Chair, councillor Eddy, began the debate section and expressed support for the proposal. He also said that he thought Castle Park was like Central Park in New York, and so would suit being surrounded by tall buildings. It was pointed out later in the meeting by councillor Plowden that Central Park is in fact 100 times larger than Castle Park.
Phillipa Hulme, Labour, was torn. Describing the decision as “one of the most difficult ones ever”, she went on to say: “We’ve really got a real responsibility to people now and in the future to get this right.” While liking aspects of the scheme she said: “The scale just doesn’t fit with what’s around.” When it came to the vote itself she paused for a long time before abstaining. Did she want to vote against but couldn’t because it was a priority site of the administration?
Green councillor, Fi Hance, said that she remembered “some absolute horror shows” that had been proposed for this site. And although she said she really didn’t like the look of the development - and thought councillors were in “a really difficult, unsatisfactory situation” - was going to vote to approve it. Apparently ignorant of a raft of national and local planning policies, but swayed by the assurances of Westbury and Collins, she said stridently: “Our job here is not to think about whether we like this or not, it’s whether it complies with current planning policy. And some of us may take issue with current planning policy and think it’s weak in certain areas. But that’s what we’re stuck with and that’s what we’ve got.”
Liberal Democrat, Andrew Varney, said he couldn’t vote in favour because of the harm to heritage assets caused by the height and scale of the buildings: “I’m just worried we’re going to replace one set of unpopular buildings with another set and I really don’t want to put my name to it.”
For Tom Hathaway, Green, a major issue was the loss of mature trees, He also cited the “size and massing of the buildings” and finished by saying: “For such a significant site in the city, I don’t think we should be settling for voting through with gritted teeth on this proposal.”
Green, Ed Plowden: “The Old City is overwhelmed and this is our most historic environment: the origins of Bristol in Saxon times at the bridge. So the mock-ups - they look out of scale and too massive compared with everything around them. I haven’t heard enough justification on business case, or whatever else it is, not to take it down by two storeys.”
Conservative, John Geater, didn’t feel he could vote against on grounds of height (which he framed as “Historic England’s only objection”) or the colours of the buildings. He talked positively about the “benefits of the regeneration of that area” and the danger of worse proposals for the site coming before the committee in the future.
Marley Bennett, Labour, said he had: "A number of issues [with the proposal]. The one that I raised earlier about park shadowing and the impact, the scale, the height, that this development has, is a concern for me but I'm willing to defer to the 'Friends of' group who do support this proposal."
Labour, Chris Jackson. Councillor Jackson had opened his remarks on this major scheme at the historic heart of Bristol with: “There’s lots of pluses and minuses to this site. I’m very, very pleased with the toilets…”. He also cited the support of ‘Friends of Castle Park’ as another positive which influenced his decision to approve. More of that group later.
During the meeting, Gary Collins mentioned that councillors had a briefing prior to the meeting from the applicant’s heritage advisors. This would either have been Savills - whose ‘Heritage and Townscape’ team provided a heritage, townscape and visual impact assessment for the application - or Feilden Clegg Bradley Studio’s in-house heritage lead for the project, James Sibson. This isn’t an opportunity afforded to statutory consultee Historic England.
The final vote was 5/3 in favour with 1 abstention:
(Chair) Richard Eddy, Conservative - APPROVE
Ed Plowden, Green - REFUSE
Fi Hance, Green - APPROVE
Tom Hathaway, Green - REFUSE
John Geater, Conservative - APPROVE
Chris Jackson, Labour - REFUSE
Andrew Varney, Liberal Democrat - APPROVE
Phillipa Hulme, Labour - ABSTAIN
Marley Bennett, Labour - APPROVE
Public Benefits v Harm to Heritage Assets
The National Planning Policy Framework divides harm to designated heritage assets and their setting into two categories: “substantial harm” and “less than substantial harm”. Gary Collins had said in his final pre-application letter that the scheme was “considered to be excessively large and will have a significant and harmful impact on the Conservation Area and the setting of group listed church towers. The scale of this harm is likely to range from less than substantial to substantial.” But the ultimate judgement of Westbury and Collins, as well as of Historic England, was that the harm caused by the scheme amounted to “less than substantial”. The NPPF states:
“Where a development proposal will lead to less than substantial harm to the significance of a designated heritage asset, this harm should be weighed against the public benefits of the proposal including, where appropriate, securing its optimum viable use.”
However, it also states:
“When considering the impact of a proposed development on the significance of a designated heritage asset, great weight should be given to the asset’s conservation (and the more important the asset, the greater the weight should be). This is irrespective of whether any potential harm amounts to substantial harm, total loss or less than substantial harm to its significance.
The fundamental argument of Westbury and Collins in their recommendation to councillors was that the public benefits of the development outweighed, in the balance of material considerations, the harm that would be caused to the Old City. Their report said:
“Overall the less than substantial harm to the heritage assets which have been identified here, have been given considerable importance and weight, in the balance of the final recommendation. This is of importance given that this harm gives rise to a presumption against planning permission being granted, however the public benefits of the proposals outweigh this harm and allow the application to be approved…”
But the NPPF also states:
“Any harm to, or loss of, the significance of a designated heritage asset (from its alteration or destruction, or from development within its setting), should require clear and convincing justification.”
So what was the clear and convincing justification provided?
The report claimed “2,750 full time equivalent employment opportunities” would be created, though caveated that by saying that was based on pre-Covid figures, and working patterns had since shifted.
There was a vague assertion that the council would work with the developer and end occupiers to ensure “people from the City’s most excluded groups are able to access the job opportunities.” Because the site was in the city centre, it was claimed to be “adjacent to some of the city’s most deprived communities, including Lawrence Hill”.
There was improved footfall for local businesses and construction employment opportunities. There were the heritage benefits of opening up the vaults “for potentially beneficial use.” And the improvements to the church tower and re-establishing its setting within a new area of “quality public realm”, as well as the general improvement to a shabby site in the city centre that had been in a poor condition for many years.
However, during Peter Westbury’s presentation of the scheme in the planning committee meeting he spent a mere 30 seconds on ‘Economic Benefits’, saying only that economic development officers in the council were supportive of the scheme and that it would deliver city-wide economic benefits.
What returns - and how much office floorspace - were necessary to make it ‘viable’ in their eyes? As a commercial, rather than a residential development, there was no obligation for MEPC to commission a viability report. But it was a key factor in shaping the balance between harm and benefits.
Questioned in the meeting by Labour councillor Phillipa Hulme about why the buildings had to be so large, Collins gave a wry laugh and said, “Yes, scale and height. The number of issues around this application - that’s been the most thorny one, it really has.”
But he went on in his reply to back up the idea that it was justified by the viability question:
“Yeah ideally we would have, you know, buildings not as tall as those because they’d have a reduced impact and for officers, you know, reporting to yourselves, it would make the balance of, you know, harm versus benefits easier. But, you know, the scheme is the scheme before us really. We had some very honest and robust conversations with the applicants about scale and height and I think their response has been sort of twofold really. One: genuinely they feel that the height and scale is the right height and scale for the site. So it hasn’t been, you know, an apologetic: “Oh yeah we think it should be lower but it has to be such.” So they’ve been very kind of honest in that regard. But also, you know, whilst we don’t go into viability assessments on commercial development in the way that we do when we’re negotiating affordable housing, you know, the response has been well, but two: to make the site deliverable we have to make it so. We need this type, this quantum of floorspace, really. That’s the applicants talking. But the council also has a role - that as planners we’re not too close to - but the council has a role as freeholder. Colleagues of ours do have some awareness of those viability issues, and some knowledge of that, and, you know, they have said, they’ve kind of agreed with that really and said that bringing this site forward - I mean there’s a reason why it’s been derelict or only partially occupied and in the condition it’s been in for so long for good reasons - to bring it forward with all the kind of abnormal costs on there, you know, working around the vaults and various other issues around there, you know, there will be real viability challenges. So the kind of informal view we’ve got from those colleagues is, well actually yes, you probably would need something of this order in order to deliver a scheme on the site.”
This was later picked up by Councillor Plowden who lamented the “informal” nature of these judgements. The assessment of viability seems to have been taken on trust, he said, determined purely by the developer.
This statement about the profits that Federated Hermes generates for its investors offers a suggestion of the high returns they require though. Chris Taylor, CEO of real estate and head of private markets at Federated Hermes, in a January 2023 interview with IPE Real Assets magazine:
“Taylor offers some numbers on investment performance. The total annualised return from all of its placemaking projects and two science parks (which combined have a completion value of around £7bn) since 2010 has been 18.5%. The equivalent all-property return for the UK, according to MSCI, is 8.4%.”
Driving Development
On 9 February 2021 the following Freedom of Information request was sent to Bristol City Council:
You recently sent me a response to a FOI request in which 'Development Driving Meeting' was mentioned. I can't find any details of Driving Development Meetings on the Council website. Under the Freedom of Information Act Can you give me details of what the Development Driving Meeting is and the following:
1. who attends Driving Development Meetings?
2. What is the remit and scope of Driving Development Meetings
3. agendas, minutes, notes and actions from the last four Driving Development Meetings held.44
I look forward to your reply
A full response was a long time coming. The statutory response time is 20 working days but Bristol City Council routinely fails to respond within that time frame. After four months, and repeated pressing from the requester, an answer finally arrived on 14 June 2021, written by the ‘Growth and Regeneration Programme Manager’:
1. Who attends Driving Development Meetings?
These meetings are attended by the Head of Mayor’s Office, Deputy Head of the Mayor’s Office, Mayor’s Policy Advisor, Executive Director – Growth and Regeneration and G&R Programme Manager.
2. What is the remit and scope of Driving Development Meetings?
This group was established in October 2020 to support the objectives of the Council’s leadership (whilst respecting our role as LPA) to ensure that we give our full attention to development projects on the radar, as they approach critical milestones.
3. Agendas, minutes, notes, actions from the last four Driving Development Meetings held
Information contained in these documents are substantively published or is due to be, and we are of the view that Section 21 and Section 22 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 are engaged and so the information has been withheld.
Another Freedom of Information request, by a different requestor, titled “Mayor’s influence on planning, revised request” was submitted to Bristol City Council on 15 December 2021 - the day the planning committee voted to approve St Mary le Port. It said:
“The executive and non-executive functions of the mayor and planning department are required by law to be kept separate. Planning officers are reporting complaints about the lack of management support for planning decisions and undue pressure being placed on them by politicians, through management, to make decisions that don’t meet the council’s published development policies. This should not be happening in an independent process.
The mayor has appointed himself the cabinet member responsible for planning and development, which seems to be a conflict of interests.
Please provide the following:
1. Details of the Bristol city council “planning review” including who instructed Steven (sic) Peacock and Zoe Wilcox that the review must take place.
2. Details of the scope and goals of the planning review.
3. All legal advice provided to the mayor's office over the separation of executive and non executive functions of planning within the council.”45
In the response that came on 21 February 2022, the council stated that Stephen Peacock had instigated the planning review himself and that “no specific legal advice has been provided in relation to this, as this is a matter that those involved in the review are fully aware of.”
Attached was a table laying out Peacock’s “Review Action Plan” which outlined how the Mayor’s Office and the senior leadership within the council were reforming planning in order to maximise their influence over planning matters in the city and speed up the process.
The table identifies “Issues”, followed by “Actions” and then “Outcomes”. The first issue is “All fully sited and no surprises”, which leads to the action “Create and manage list of key sites and Mayoral Priorities in the planning system”.
Under the issue “Ensure better alignment & culture that supports City outcomes”, the first action listed is “prioritise resources on key sites and Mayoral Priorities list”. This is meant to have the outcomes that “Majors Team Leader ensures resources are focussed on agreed priority sites and they’re kept to programme” and “Ensure the Planning Service reflects the ambition of the City”.
St Mary le Port was on the ‘Mayoral Priorities’ list, as can be seen in this Freedom of Information request. The council response to the FOI describes the criteria for being on the list as: “Planning sites which support mayoral priorities as discussed in regular meetings with the Mayor’s Office.”
The second action is “Key projects/ Delivering Developments meetings with Mayors Office chaired by Stephen Peacock”. The outcome here is: “Removing barriers to delivery and ensuring alignment with objectives of administration”. These are the regular ‘Driving Development’ meetings we learnt of previously.
With the issue “Remove emotive language and avoid unnecessary storms”, one of the actions is “Create Major applications comments template for City Design”. This is meant to have the outcomes: “Streamlined CDG commentary on Majors/ priority sites” and “Ensure technical response and no room for emotive language”.
The action “Review terminology of contributors to planning applications” has the outcomes “Term ‘contributors’ now being used as opposed to ‘consultees’” and “Confirm TDM as the only internal ‘statutory‘ consultee”. This can be seen in the St Mary le Port case officer report which refers to internal and external “contributors”, rather than consultees.
In another document, under “DM [Development Management] Operating Model: Proposed changes to the operating model", it says: “Incorporate the Urban Design team into DM - delivering to Mayoral priorities and contributing to an improved pre-app service.” These were the early stages of attempting to subsume the specialists in City Design and diminish their status.
In December 2022, the coup de grâce was delivered when a report came to Cabinet notifying it of the intention to transfer much of the council’s transport functions to the West of England Combined Authority and to also disband City Design and create a new Chief Planner role:
“…simplifying and reducing scope of work and focusing on core statutory functions…bringing together all city planning related functions in a single City Planning Service.”46
Light on detail, the report couched the policy in terms of the council’s efforts to “address a revenue budget gap of up to £87.6m”. Consequently, it was “seeking to simplify and reduce its scope of work and focus on delivery of its statutory functions and those functions not currently capable of being delivered by others.” Some existing functions of City Design would move into other council teams including Development Management and Highways, while others would be “procured externally where needed.”
The risk of this outsourcing to external consultants was briefly mentioned in the small print: “will cost the Council more as private providers will add a profit margin to their costs.” Redundancies were not directly mentioned but referenced obliquely in the assurance that trade unions would be consulted.
Although the report had been quietly slipped into a busy Cabinet meeting, it provoked a strong reaction and the public gallery of the council chamber contained a substantial number of council employees whose jobs were being thrown up in the air.
There were around a dozen public statements submitted for the meeting, including from the Unison trade union Branch Secretary, Tom Merchant. He said that the proposals had “been published in the public domain without staff being notified or involved.”
He also put forward a specific charge about planning: “the work of the department has been undermined, our professional judgement is not valued, and decisions are pushed through the committee system.” He went on to say:
“Carrying out the function of the LPA not only requires planning and enforcement officers in post, but also requires input from a wealth of other areas of expertise within the Council in order to do the job properly. These include City Design; Transport; Pollution Control and Land Contamination; Sustainability; Nature Conservation and Tree officers, as well as a range of other disciplines. A fully resourced planning and consultee service is not only key to delivering the aims of the Corporate Strategy but is essential for managing development quality, as well as ensuring sustainable transport, design quality.”
Another statement was submitted by Celia Davis, from the Town and Country Planning Association and a former senior planning officer at the West of England Combined Authority. She called the move “incredibly short sighted and very disappointing”:
“The scale of development happening in Bristol must be managed by a well resourced planning team with specialist knowledge in urban design, climate change, green infrastructure and how the citizens of Bristol use and access places and all their complex layered uses. The demands on land in Bristol have never been more complex and yet the role of this important team to influence how these can be met in the public interest (in line with corporate objectives of the Council) will be lost. I have no doubt that in the long run more money will be spent on consultancy advice to replace this valuable knowledge than the team cost to keep in house.
Proper scrutiny of development proposals and council resource to plan strategically for higher quality places is paramount. Last week Michael Gove wrote to Council leaders in England to emphasise the role of placemaking and design in creating successful places and asking Councils to ensure they have senior leaders with a design and placemaking remit and ‘make use of the tools you have available’ to secure sustainable development. What better tool does Bristol have than the City Design team?”
Questions were put by various people attending. Sitting next to Stephen Peacock, Marvin Rees read his replies directly from a pre-prepared script. A final supplementary question from Green councillor Ed Plowden drew a reply that was a typical piece of Rees non-speak but at the end referred to the internal frictions that were clearly now being dealt with:
"Our challenge is to make sure that, as I said at the beginning, in line with our corporate strategy we’re an organisation that is prioritising to make sure that decisions are being made where the powers are and where the resources are. But to make sure that we as a city remain in the driving seat. And the nature of relationships at the moment have not necessarily really served the city as well as we would have liked.”
Rees intoned the Executive authorisation for the policy. And this has now been enacted. Following the departure of Gary Collins, Simone Wilding came into the new role of Chief Planner in May 2023. She had most recently been in a senior position at the government’s Planning Inspectorate, but back in the 2000s she had been at the South West Regional Development Agency as an ‘Enterprise Manager’ for Dorset and Wiltshire, and therefore a colleague of Stephen Peacock’s. A fact, according to one councillor directly involved that I spoke to, that the appointment panel had not been made aware of.
The Mayor’s Office
How was the evolving relationship working between the Mayor’s Office, Stephen Peacock, and Development Management during the period the St Mary le Port proposal was moving through the planning system?
At this point we need to turn to Kevin Slocombe, the Head of the Mayor’s Office. This is a political position appointed by the Mayor to drive his agenda and manage the administration. Slocombe was Head of Communications at the Communications Workers Union for a decade before briefly becoming Jeremy Corbyn’s Head of Media Relations in 2015 when Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party. After a year in the role, Slocombe left to join the newly elected Marvin Rees as his backroom fixer in Bristol’s City Hall.
Internal email exchanges from July 2021 offer an insight into the relationship Slocombe had with senior planning officers at the time the St Mary le Port application was being assessed.47 Here he is being asked by Zoe Wilcox - at this time the most senior officer in the planning department - whether he would like to make any changes to a report about housing delivery that she and her officers were putting together for councillors on the Audit Committee.
This is the first objective of the Audit Committee, according to its Terms of Reference:
“To provide independent assurance of the adequacy of the risk management framework and the associated control environment, independent scrutiny of the authority’s financial and non-financial performance to the extent that it affects governance, the authority’s exposure to risk and weakness of the control environment, and to oversee the financial reporting process.”
This email, with the subject heading “Housing Delivery Risk Report: Audit Committee 26th July”, was also sent to Stephen Peacock and the Mayor was cc’d in too:
“Stephen & Kevin
Attached is the report and an appendix (BCC Assurance Map) to be finalised by the end of the day. Apols for such short notice but we’ve had less than a week to pull it
together following a request from the Audit Committee.
take this as the final report unless Stephen or Kevin require changes.”
Kevin Slocombe responds:
Thanks Zoe
We have been saying publicly that Brexit and Covid have played the leading roles infailure.
Is it possible to make this more front and centre in the report?
Thanks
Kevin
Why is Slocombe, a political appointee, shaping officer reports? These reports to scrutiny committees are meant to provide councillors with objective analysis and information, so that they can understand the workings of the council and make recommendations. Political interference of this kind is clearly a corruption of that process.
Elsewhere, less than a week later on 21 July 2021, we can see this apologetic message from Gary Collins to Kevin Slocombe, in which he claims to have “had to battle to get a deferral rather than a refusal” on a planning decision made by councillors in one of the Development Control committees.
“Subject: St Modwen, Access 18 Deferred by DC Cttee
Afternoon Kevin
Sorry to have to report this but unfortunately this application was deferred by Ctte this afternoon.It is a real shame because everything else came together, with HE [Historic England] withdrawing their holding objection.
Members were mainly concerned about the flooding issues (even though the EA [Environment Agency] had signed it off) and about developing on land liable to flooding in a climate emergency. We answered their questions about this as best as we could.The vote was 4 / 5 when the officer recommendation was moved. I then had to battle to get a deferral rather than a refusal on the day! We will take it back on 1st September with further advice but we will also have to offer up a flooding reasons for refusal for their consideration.
If you need any more info about this please let me know.
Regards
Gary
This pattern of behaviour had been raised publicly previously, notably by departing Green councillor Clive Stevens, quoted at length in a Bristol Post article from February 2021, headlined: “Bristol Mayor's Assistant has so much power they should stand for election too says leading councillor.”
It was also clearly becoming a serious issue in the minds of some councillors on the Development Control planning committees by the end of the summer of 2021.
On 30 September 2021, Zoe Wilcox wrote to Stephen Peacock:
“Stephen
So you are sighted on this – Gary & I (& someone from Dem Services) meet the DC leads 3/4 times a year and
invite them to raise issues around the running of the DC Cmmtts.
We sometimes bring items ourselves especially if we are recording higher than normal over turns or behaviours that are potentially bringing the
decision making process into disrepute.
But on this agenda its Item 6: Politicisation of the planning process – (raised by Cllr. A Stafford Townsend & Cllr. A Varney)
Obviously in days gone by I’d have had Clr Beech/ the Cabinet Member join me and give some cover.
Should I invite someone from the Mayors Office or will that just look odd?”
After being forwarded on, Kevin Slocombe replied:
“I don’t believe alleged politicisation of the process is a matter for officers or the DC chairs.
If they want to raise this issue – they should be referred to a political meeting – full council for example
Kevin”
If we go back again a little earlier in 2021, the St Mary le Port planning application had already been submitted to the council in late May, and Slocombe was at the centre of internal discussions about it. On 23 July, Collins sent an email jointly to Slocombe and Peacock providing them with the comments from statutory consultee Historic England on the St Mary le Port application, saying “I wanted you to have sight of the comments as soon as possible”:
Stephen / Kevin
Further to the recent discussion at a DD meeting, we have now received the HE comments which I attach for your information.
In summary although it supports the principle of redevelopment and acknowledges some positive aspects of the scheme, they ultimately object to the application in its current form. They have raised concern at the scale and massing of the scheme, and recommend a reduction in scale by further stepping back and reducing the height of each building. Importantly, HE consider the proposals would cause “less than substantial harm”, which is the lower of the 2 categories in the NPPF (the other one being “substantial harm”).
I understand that HE have shared their comments with the applicant’s team already.
We will be publishing the comments on our website w/c 9th August once I have returned from annual leave, and I wanted you to have sight of the comments as soon as possible.
Regards
Gary
"DD meeting” would seem to refer to the “Driving Development” meetings discussed above - raising the possibility that contrary to the information supplied in the FOI request, Gary Collins was also attending these meetings.
The attached letter from Historic England, written by Simon Hickman, echoed the view of the Historic England Advisory Committee that had deliberated on the proposal a few weeks earlier:
“The proposed buildings would be large, monolithic, entities, which would fail to respond to the fine grain of the Old City. Their scale and massing would challenge the visual primacy of the various Grade II* listed church spires in close proximity to the site. The character and appearance of the City and Queen Square Conservation Area would be irreversibly harmed, as would the setting of several highly-graded listed buildings…
Taken as a whole, the proposed development would markedly jar with the scale of the Old City, detracting from the historic cityscape at Bristol’s heart. While we acknowledge that the redevelopment of the post-war buildings on this site is an important strategic objective for Bristol, which has proved difficult to secure, the harm consequent on these proposals appears to be unnecessary.”48
Historic England’s objection to the scheme sat alongside formal objections from the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the Ancient Monuments Society, the Conservation Advisory Panel, the Georgian Group and Bristol Civic Society among others.
Off-The-Record Meetings
When councillor Nicola Beech became a Bristol Labour member for St George Central ward in May 2016, she was Head of Stakeholder Engagement at JBP, a PR consultancy that works for developers in the planning process and lobbies MPs for a range of corporate clients (in recent years they’ve been very active promoting the vaping industry).
Beech was actively involved in the Dolffin Quay development at Cardiff Docks in her first year as a member of the council, while still working for JBP. This regeneration scheme included plans for a 24-storey high-rise tower that drew strong public criticism from former Secretary of State for Wales, Nicholas Edwards (Lord Crickhowell).49 A public backlash, that included an 11,000 signature petition, ultimately resulted in the plans being withdrawn by the developer.
Beech left her role with JBP when she was appointed by Marvin Rees to his Cabinet in 2017 to take the portfolio for Spatial Planning and City Design. But not before she had helped organise a JBP-run event at City Hall in November 2016, hosted by Rees, called ‘The Big Conversation: Development by Bristol City Council’. This was an invitation-only opportunity for property developers to personally meet the Mayor and his Cabinet. Among the agenda items was ‘De-risking the development process and the role of planning’.50 While a councillor, Beech has gone on to work for the National Grid, a client from her time at JBP.
On 27 July 2021, five days after Historic England’s letter of objection arrived with the council, Marengo Communications - the communications consultancy working for MEPC - emailed Beech. I’m confident the second redacted person here is Roz Bird:
“Hi Nicola,
Thanks again for meeting with [REDACTED] last week – I hope it was a useful session.
[REDACTED] asked me to pass on that she is in Bristol on the 11th and 12th of August and that she’d love to meet up for a coffee if you have some spare time on either day.
I believe she is meeting with [redacted] on the 12th between 11am and 1pm. Perhaps before or after that meeting could work?”
It’s not clear who Bird was meeting on the 12 August, or what Nicola Beech was discussing at these meetings that were taking place in July and August. Beech didn’t even have the Cabinet portfolio for Strategic Planning and City Design at this point but had instead been responsible for Climate, Ecology, Waste and Energy since local elections in May. But half an hour after receiving the request to “meet up for a coffee”, Beech replies:
“Afternoon of the 11th August is good for me.”
Later that day Marengo write:
“Hi Nicola,
That’s great, I will confirm a time and location ASAP.
We were also wondering if we should see if Marvin would like to discuss the project – we are mindful that the Bristol Post are giving the project more attention so it might be helpful for him to meet [REDACTED].
You’re (sic) thoughts and guidance would be appreciated; and if it is a good idea, what would be the best way to arrange a meeting.”
The Bristol Post article referred to had been published on 23 July, and was headlined: “New offices planned for Bristol park likened to 'giant slabs' as opinion divided ahead of council decision.”
It’s worth pointing out here that Marengo Communications, a Bristol-based PR firm with offices on Whiteladies Road, has personal ties with Nicola Beech. One of the directors, Tom Selway, was a colleague of Beech’s at JBP for several years, as recorded by Powerbase. Having left JBP in 2014 after five years at the company, Selway joined Cadence PR - a specialist stakeholder engagement and planning communications consultancy - in 2016. In October 2020, he’d appeared for Cadence PR at a Bristol Housing Festival roundtable with the St Mary le Port development listed in his profile as one of Cadence’s “current schemes in Bristol”. But around this period the two companies merged, and it’s Marengo who can be seen in FOI releases liaising with the council for MEPC by email that same month.
Selway is now a director at Marengo (as well as remaining sole director of Cadence PR) and when I contacted them about St Mary le Port recently, it was Selway who called me back. It’s also worth noting that while he was working for JBP, he was the president of the Junior Bristol Chamber of Commerce - a business networking organisation for under 40's working in association with Business West.
Within an hour of Beech receiving the email from Marengo referring to the negative publicity in the Bristol Post, she forwarded their query to the Mayor’s Office:
“Hi mayors (sic) office team – would Marvin like to meet the St Mary Le Port team? See below
Nicola”
Fifteen minutes later, someone in the Mayor’s Office forwards the request to Kevin Slocombe:
“Hi Kevin
What do you think about this – a meeting between Marvin and the St Mary Le Port team?
Or is that better left to you?”
Two days later, the person in the Mayor’s Office emails Nicola Beech:
“Hi Nicola
Have spoken to Kevin about this. He thinks it should be a meeting with him and Stephen Peacock in the first instance
(doesn’t need to be Marvin right now).
Shall I just go them direct or do you want to respond to suggest that?”
On 1 August 2021, Beech replies:
“Yeah just go direct to them
In that case I also think they should meet with the guys at the galleries – Deeley Freed.”
The Galleries is a shopping centre on the northern edge of Castle Park that the Bristol developer Deeley Freed is seeking to redevelop as part of a £550 million mixed-use scheme that would be made up of offices, flats, student accommodation, retail outlets and a hotel - including a 28-storey residential tower. Deeley Freed is one of Bristol’s biggest property developers and its co-founder David Freed was Master of the Society of Merchant Venturers in 2021. Marengo are also working for Deeley Freed on that scheme as the “community engagement” consultants, with Tom Selway conducting the public consultation webinar that took place in July 2022.
On 2 August 2021 the person in the Mayor’s Office emails Marengo:
“Thanks for your email, which Nicola passed on to me.
In the first instance, can I suggest a meeting with Kevin Slocombe (Head of the Mayor’s Office) and Stephen Peacock (Executive Director – Growth and Regen)?
I have copied in Kevin’s diary manager Laura to set that up.”
The meeting took place just over a week later on 10 August 2021, with Marengo emailing Kevin Slocombe that day. Again, I assume the redacted person is Roz Bird:
Hi Kevin,
Sorry for emailing late but we are due to meet in 15 minutes with [REDACTED] to discuss the St Mary le Port plans.
Appreciate we only have 30 minutes and this meeting has come via Nicola, is there anything in particular you want to touch on or can avoid?
To summarise the situation from our side, we are waiting for Officers to come back, particularly on the design side.
The planning file is relatively quiet with 13 letters of support (including the Chair of Friends of Castle Park and the person who led the campaign against the previous application, and 25 objections (including the Civic Society and Bristol Tree Forum).
Those in support like the public realm, design, the investment and benefits to the area and area. Those against are raising height, loss of views and design.
See you shortly
Bristol City Council have told me that no records or notes exist for this meeting between Slocombe, Peacock and the developer that took place two and a half months after the planning application had been submitted and four months before the Development Control committee decision.51
Part of that discussion was clearly about the need to emphasise the economic benefits of the proposal, as can be seen in this message from Bird sent immediately after the meeting:
Hi Stephen,
It was good to see you today and get the chance to provide an update on the SMLP application.
As promised I am emailing now with the Economic Impact Report which we put together as a result of conversations with you and Abigail Stratford.
We submitted this as part of our planning application.
Please do let me know if you need anything else.52
The Local Government Association’s ‘Probity in Planning’ document states:
“Discussions before a decision is taken should ensure:
Consistent advice is given by officers based upon the development plan and material planning considerations.
That councillors avoid giving separate advice on the development plan or other material planning considerations, as they may not be aware of all the issues at an early stage. Councillors should not become drawn into any negotiations, which should be done by officers (keeping interested councillors up to date) to ensure that the authority’s position is co-ordinated.
A commitment is made that care will be taken to ensure that advice is impartial, otherwise the subsequent report or recommendation to committee could appear to be advocacy.
Officers should arrange any meetings, attend these with councillors and make a written record of the meeting placing this note on the case file. A note should also be taken of any phone conversations, and relevant emails recorded for the file. Notes should record issues raised and advice given. If there is a legitimate reason for confidentiality regarding a proposal, a note of the nonconfidential issues raised or advice given can still normally be placed on the file to reassure others not party to the discussion.”
A week after the meeting with Slocombe and Peacock, Federated Hermes sent a letter to the planning department about the Historic England objection:
“Historic England state that the scale and massing of the Buildings B & C would challenge the visual primacy of the various Grade II* listed church spires in proximity to the Site. The heritage experts advising the Applicant and authors of the detailed analysis conclude that the reduction in the height to Buildings B & C being sought by Historic England would not materially change the effects, as it will not open views of spires significantly over the submitted scheme, thus bringing into question the merits expected to derive from the reduction in height (i.e. it seems to be a comment which is not based on any assessment). The views of the church spires would be altered, even at much lower building heights, and so any reasonable regeneration scheme for the Site (as supported by Policy BCAP37 and the CCF) would not therefore be expected to deliver the desired outcome sought by Historic England.”
Within a few days of this letter the application went from “pending consideration” to “pending decision” on the council’s planning portal website, suggesting that this was when a final decision to recommend for approval was locked down.
Stephen Peacock asked to see the officer report before it was made public and was sent a draft by Gary Collins on 2 December 2021. Peacock replied:
“Thanks Gary – an interesting read. I note that TDM comments aren’t in and would be grateful to see the final version.
Stephen”
Transport Development Management is the council department that assesses the transport impacts of development and represents the Highway Authority’s role as a statutory consultee to the planning process. Gary Collins replies:
“Hi Stephen
As with other internal comments we have summarised TDM comments and included them as the Transport key issue.
To be honest with you, I’ve converted [REDACTED]’s approach of “Refusal because they haven’t agreed.......” into
“Approval as long as they agree to.....”, so I don’t want to say much more in the Transport section at this stage.
Regards
Gary”
Again, we can see here a strategy of deliberate withdrawal of information to councillors from internal consultees by the head of Development Management, as well as actually changing the meaning of their comments while claiming to be summarising them.
Peacock forwards that message to Kevin Slocombe within an hour of it being sent by Collins (earlier he had forwarded the draft to Slocombe too). Peacock simply writes a solitary exclamation mark in the body of his message: “!”.
A little under two weeks later, on December 15 2021, and just a few minutes after planning permission is granted by the DC committee, Collins sends his own exclamatory email to Peacock, Slocombe and Zoe Wilcox:
“Hi All
You may know already but DC Cttee resolved to grant PP!
Vote was 5 / 3 with one abstention.
Regards
Gary”
Peacock replies:
“Fantastic! Head down so missed it. Thanks to you and the team. Great work.”
Design West
As has been previously mentioned, the Design West panel reviews of the scheme were given great prominence in the officer report, while the council’s internal specialists, City Design Group, were excluded from it. The report states:
“Given the scale and complexity of the scheme an extensive pre application enquiry process was undertaken with the Local Planning Authority, including a review by Design West…the proposals were presented to Design West on three separate occasions (17th November 2020, 26th January 2021 and 5th July 2021).”
The National Planning Policy Framework, at paragraph 129, requires that LPAs should have local design review arrangements in place to provide assessment and support to ensure high standards of design. But who are Design West?
A Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO), its roots go all the way back to the closure of the Department of Architecture at the University of Bristol in 1982. In response, the Bristol Centre for the Advancement of Architecture was founded in 1984 by - according to the Design West website - “a group of architects, engineers, academics & passionate citizens who cared deeply about the impact of good design on society.” In 1996 they became ‘The Architecture Centre’, setting up in a newly-restored former sail-loft on the quayside. And then in 2007, they started a design review service called the Bristol Urban Design Forum. In 2021, The Architecture Centre merged with Creating Excellence - a similar organisation based in Bath, made up of architectural professionals who covered the South-West with its own design review panel - and they formed the newly-created Design West.
This is how they describe themselves today:
Design West is an independent service that provides consultancy, training and design review to promote excellence in urban design and increase place value across the South West of England. We convene the best expertise in the region to shape better, more sustainable places.
The full list of design review panel members runs to around 70 people. In the case of St Mary le Port, a group of 5 members assessed the plans. The two written responses were authored by the overall Design West review panel Chair - and previous head of the Bristol Urban Design Forum - Charles Wilson.
Wilson, an architect and town planner, was the long-time City Architect at Lancaster council in the 1980s and later their Director of Development. Before that he had co-designed the iconic brutalist Preston Bus Station in the late 1960s for BDP. This must place him now at least in his late 70s or early 80s.
He was also Chair of the Bristol Beacon Strategic Advisory Group, in a non-Design West role. This was an advisory committee of five people accountable to the Bristol Music Trust (BMT) for monitoring the delivery of the concert hall refurbishment project, which finally completed in late 2023 and ran vastly over budget. According to BMT’s trustees’ annual report for 2019/20:
“The group reviews project plans and status and advises the Trust on design development, construction, and fit-out of the transformation project in order to meet agreed client facility requirements…The Committee will normally meet monthly prior to the meeting of the Project Board.”
The overall cost of the Beacon project rose from £48 million to £132 million, with Bristol City Council - liable as the owner of the building’s freehold - seeing their costs soar from £10 million to £84 million. This extraordinary increase was blamed largely on unforeseeable complexities associated with the historic fabric of the building, which had had very little surveying work carried out on it before contracts were drawn up and work began.
JBP, the PR and lobbying firm that Nicola Beech and Marengo’s Tom Selway both worked for, had the Bristol Music Trust as a client from 2014 to 2018. The company ran the communications campaign around the fundraising drive for the refurbishment project, aiming to collect political and public support, as well as pledges of money. According to BMT Chief Executive, Louise Mitchell:
“JBP has worked with us to develop and roll out a creative campaign which positions [Bristol Beacon] as a national centre for entertainment, education and enterprise. They have a fantastic network of business and political stakeholders, as well as media contacts, which has significantly bolstered our transformation campaign and achieved tangible results.”
As the contractor Wilmott Dixon and the council were negotiating the cost increases in late 2020 and early 2021 - and documents were being written up to justify the huge jump in expense to the taxpayer that would be signed off by Cabinet in March - Wilson was assessing the St Mary le Port scheme for Design West. These two letters can be seen in full in an appendix at the end of the developer’s planning statement.
In the first, dated 24 November 2020, he regrets that the “layout at ground level…feels almost overly generous in public realm with a result that the sense of enclosure is diminished.” He expresses concern “that the rather uniform treatment of the large façades tends to emphasise the monolithic nature of the buildings.” But he also says that the panel “support the general disposition of buildings…the panel believe that the heights you propose can be accommodated, although we were pleased to see the reductions in bulk that have been made recently.”
The second written response, again authored by Wilson, dated 17 February 2021, and following a second meeting, is entirely positive. It states that “the panel were heartened by the progress made in design development since November last.” Other comments include:
“The draft verified views we saw give a good impression of the wider impact of the development and confirmed our view that the overall bulk and height is acceptable”
“We discussed your responses to our observations about a perceived monolithic nature of the building and particularly the ‘mansard’ shape of block C. Your revised approach of emphasizing the vertical rhythm of the buildings and rationalising the terraced set back and proposed jetties of the upper parts of the buildings is a great improvement.”
“The proposal to utilise a variety of colouration inspired by the various locally employed material is good, and the use of pre-formed terracotta panels should be suitable.”
According to the case officer report there was another meeting with the Design West review panel on 5 July 2021, but as this was after the planning application had been submitted, there is no public record of it or of any written response that it generated.
As well as the officer’s report leaning heavily on the Design West feedback, the applicant did the same in their planning statement. It mentions Design West 26 times and dedicates a whole sub-section to their comments. It also explicitly uses it to support the idea that the proposal complies with specific policies in the local development plan. In a table that lays out each requirement of the crucial policy BCAP37 in the Bristol Central Area Plan it has:
“Ensure development exceeding existing building heights responds appropriately to the local context and respects important existing views.”
And then opposite, as the corresponding evidence of compliance to that policy:
“The very principle of establishing additional height has therefore previously been considered in progressing this permissive tone and language through the preparation of these policy documents. A detailed design evolution has been informed by detailed discussions with a number of statutory consultees and stakeholders. Important to this is the review by Design West who consider the height, scale and massing of the Proposed Development to be entirely appropriate.”
And elsewhere the sub-section on Design West concludes:
“In summary, the engagement with Design West has confirmed the high quality design approach of the Proposed Development. The independent review supports the approach taken with regards to the layout, height, scale and massing of the three proposed buildings, while providing helpful comments on various other aspects of the Proposed Development. As will be discussed in Section 7, this independent review, encouraged through the NPPF and locally by BCC, is considered an important material consideration to be given great weight in the assessment of the high quality design presented by the Proposed Development.”
But how genuinely independent is the Design West review panel process? And how rigorous and objective is their feedback?
Naturally, fellow professionals are going to have professional and personal connections with each other. But questions need to be asked about whether the interdependent relationships of development professionals working in the city creates a reluctance or inability to critique certain schemes with the rigour necessary to serve the public good. There is clearly a vested interest among these people to promote ongoing positive relationships, both commercially and personally, and not to rock the boat. Drawn from a small circle at the top of their profession, they’re also likely to have perspectives that align with the dominant tendencies of contemporary architecture, urbanism and finance capital.
When the council’s politicians and senior management are taking such an active role in supporting certain development proposals, there is also a potential conflict of interest in the relationship between Design West and Bristol City Council. And in a time of severe council budget pressures and funding cuts, even more of a necessity to remain in good favour.
Design West’s Trustees’ Annual Report for the financial year 2020-21 shows that they received funding from the council to “deliver a programme of Placemaking Training to community leaders and officers.” There was also money from the council’s Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) for a placemaking project in St Paul’s. And funding for a community co-design project in Lockleaze that Design West ran.
The report also states that the charity had doubled its turnover in the three years since 2017/18:
“…growth that reflects the experienced leadership of the Director, and the advances made by the organisation in respect to delivering key services, generating demand from larger audiences, forging stronger partnerships with the professional sector and better demonstrating our value to funders.”
There was then another 39% jump in turnover the following year, according to the 2021/22 annual report. Much of that was driven by the expansion of the design review service following the merger with Creating Excellence, with the service now providing over a third of their income (£314K).53
We can get a deeper sense of how these mutual interests intertwine when we look specifically at Design West’s many connections to the St Mary le Port architects, Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios (FCBS). Peter Clegg - founding partner - was the chair of Creating Excellence’s South West Design Review Panel, and he remains on the Design West review panel. Geoff Rich, a partner at FCBS and their ‘Director of Heritage and Creative Reuse’, is also a current panel member.
One of the Design West board members is Sebastian Loyn, planning and development director for YTL, who is leading the Malaysian developer’s huge Brabazon regeneration project at Filton airfield. FCBS have designed the residential masterplan for the 380-acre site.
As an example of how Design West acts as a social bonding agent in this world, in January 2024, Andy Macintosh from FCBS (another one of the leads on the YTL development) gave a talk about contemporary brick architecture at a Design West event in Bristol described as “Talk, networking, live music and drinks”. FCBS also donated money to Design West in 2021 - along with various other architecture firms - to support the renovation work to their quayside building that turned the ground floor into a new bar called ‘The Architect’.
Perhaps most importantly, nearly all the design review panel members who actually assessed the St Mary le Port scheme were either employed by companies that had recently worked, or were working concurrently, with FCBS, or they had other other involvement with the firm in various personal and professional capacities.
The panel members that looked at the proposals alongside Charles Wilson were Innes Johnstone, Sophie Camburn, Jane Fowles and Lucy Barron.
Innes Johnstone
A senior partner at Max Fordham, the environmental buildings services engineers, and Director of their Bristol office. He sat on the Architecture Today awards committee in 2022 and 2023 alongside Andy Theobald, a senior partner at FCBS who has been working on the Brabazon development with YTL. And at the same time the St Mary le Port design reviews were taking place, Max Fordham were working with FCBS on a student accommodation scheme in Cambridge.
Sophie Camburn
Camburn works for Arup, the huge professional services firm that covers just about every aspect of the built environment. She’s a Director in their Bristol office and runs their ‘Advisory Services’ and ‘Cities, Planning and Design’ for the South-West and Wales.
She led on their ‘Strategic Partnership’ with Bristol City Council.54 Signing up along with other consultants Arcadis and Mott MacDonald, this is the private sector partnership overseen by Stephen Peacock to “aid the delivery of new infrastructure, homes and regeneration across the city… to meet the city-wide ambitions of the One City Plan.” The partnership was announced in late January 2021, in between the two design review meetings.
Also at the same time as the design reviews, Arup were working with FCBS on Leeds Temple, a large office-led regeneration scheme in the city centre. And a 10-year masterplan for National Museums Liverpool on the city’s historic waterfront.
Jane Fowles
Managing Director at the landscape architects Novell Tullett. As well as working on recent projects in Bristol of key significance to the mayoral administration such as the statement high-rise development Castle Park View and the Bristol Beacon refurbishment, Novell Tullett also worked directly with FCBS on ‘The Boatyard’, the controversial residential high-rise that still stands unfinished beside the river Avon after work began in 2020.
Lucy Barron
Until recently an Associate at Donald Insall Associates, the architects and historic buildings consultants, and now a director at placemaking consultancy Bibo. Barron was on the judging panel for the Bath Property Awards 2019 with FCBS partner Geoff Rich. She also sits on the ‘Advocacy & Campaigns Committee’ of the Bath Preservation Trust alongside Andrew Grant, founder of Grant Associates, the landscape architects working with FCBS on the St Mary le Port scheme. She was also pictured in ‘Bath Life’ magazine at the Bath Property Awards 2022 together with FCBS’s heritage consultant for St Mary le Port, James Sibson, who personally attended the design review meetings.
Another aspect worth considering about this process is that when a Design West review panel is less than positive about a building design, their feedback is left out from a developer’s planning application documents or given far less prominence. A major scheme to replace the former Debenhams at St James Barton - including a 28-storey high-rise tower - has recently been submitted to the council and was reviewed by Design West. However, the applicant’s planning statement offers vanishingly little detail about what they said. We’re told that two meetings happened, but only get two sentences worth of information in the entire 58-page document:
“Design West was strongly supportive of the layout, commenting that ‘this new opening in the façade of the Horsefair will enable a vital change in the city fabric and provide an important catalyst towards the council’s vision to reabsorb the St James Barton, or the Bear Pit into the Broadmead district.’”
“The proposed height [of the 7-storey western block] has been supported by Design West during pre-application discussions, which noted that the tall building’s ‘tripartite form is broadly agreed and is a sensible approach to the overall form.’”
In the even more extensive Design & Access document, the ‘Design Consultation' chapter gives the dates of the two review panel meetings but no details about what was said then or in the written feedback.
The only other reference to Design West is in an appendix titled: “Design West Feedback (March) on Sustainability”. And the only feedback quoted in the four pages is this: “Provide reasoning for demolishing the building. Both embodied and operation carbon reduction needs to be pushed as far as possible.”
Design West doesn’t publish their own feedback, so consequently their analysis doesn’t appear in the public domain in such instances.
Similarly, if there is a scheme that the council’s planning department are particularly keen to get approved, it seems that vaguely critical Design West comments will now not feature in their report to a planning committee at all. In the case officer report for the controversial Broadwalk development, there wasn’t a single mention of Design West, despite the fact that they had carried out a review, which had said such things as:
“A high percentage of dwellings are single aspect and a high number are north-facing and this should be considered in more detail…The current massing, density and height studies have not yet proven that the proposed quantum can be comfortably accommodated on this site.”55
Unhelpful in bolstering the officer’s recommendation for approval, it’s not hard to conclude why such comments weren’t included.
With A Little Help From My ‘Friends’
In the short, 1 minute long statement MEPC’s Roz Bird read out to councillors at the Development Control committee meeting on 15 December 2021, she mentioned the community group ‘Friends of Castle Park’ three times, more than any other group or individual:
“…the site cannot be redeveloped, in a policy compliant way, without the loss of some trees. We have revised the scheme to minimise the loss, and your Officers, and Friends of Castle Park, agree our approach on this, including significant replacement planting.”
“…for the local community, we have worked really hard with Friends of Castle Park on public realm and park investment.”
“I would like to take this opportunity to thank the City Council Officers, local councillors, Friends of Castle Park, the BID, Bristol Tree Forum, the Civic Society, the Bristol Walking Alliance, and the wider community, for their detailed and positive engagement throughout.”
When Bird had met for the first time with Stephen Peacock and his colleague Abigail Stratford at St Mary le Port in October 2020, she’d emailed them later that day thanking them “for a good initial discussion about the potential issues and opportunities on the site”:
“Our intention is to bring forward an exciting, policy compliant scheme, with clear references to key stakeholder feedback, in order to provide a place that works well with the surrounding activities and breathes life into the site.”
With the site’s recent history of successful protest and opposition from community groups, getting the support of “key stakeholders” – or at the very least minimising local opposition – must have been a key agenda item for discussion and seen as an important aspect of progressing the scheme successfully through the planning process.
Genuine community engagement is supposed to be an integral part of the planning process. Bristol City Council’s ‘Guidelines for planning pre-application community involvement’ stipulates:
“The developer will arrange to meet representatives of the resident/amenity group where there will be a brief discussion about the site, what existing planning policies are relevant and what issues are important either to the developer or to the community. The Community Involvement procedure will be agreed. The group representative(s) will inform the developer about how they will consult local opinion and to what extent they will need to make the proposals public.”
It’s also a feature of the Localism Act 2011. And discussed in paragraph 132 of the National Planning Policy Framework:
“Applicants should work closely with those affected by their proposals to evolve designs that take account of the views of the community. Applications that can demonstrate early, proactive and effective engagement with the community should be looked on more favourably than those that cannot.”
MEPC (using Marengo) carried out two public consultation meetings, which took place online on 21 and 22 April 2021. As shown earlier, as these were being carried out they were already fixed on a May submission for their planning application – just a few weeks after the consultation meetings. This was clearly always going to be far too short a timeframe for any feedback from the community to have any meaningful impact on the proposals.
Two people who had been given early sight of the plans were ‘Friends of Castle Park’. Or rather, they were Russ Leith and Fraser Bridgford, who had set up a Facebook group in September 2018 called ‘Friends of Castle Park’. Bridgford had been a leading figure behind the ‘Castle Park Users Group’, the community group that had formed to see off earlier development proposals on the site. He had set up a Facebook page called ‘Castle Park’ in 2013, around the time of the controversial proposed allocation in the Local Plan. Leith, a retiree and former boatbuilder, had moved to a flat on Wine Street overlooking the park with his wife at the start of 2018. They had moved from Shefford, a town in Mid Bedfordshire, where Leith had been a town councillor for around fourteen years and sat on the council’s planning committee for the duration of that period.
On 13 September 2018, Leith attended a meeting of Bristol City Council’s Area Committee 4, one of the committees of councillors that decides how to distribute Construction Infrastructure Levy (CIL) and Section 106 funds - money extracted from development - across their area of the city. He made a public forum statement about security in Castle Park. According to the Minutes, during the agenda item about Castle Park it was “noted that Castle Park does not have a support / friends group, so there is no one lobbying on its behalf. It would be helpful for members and officers to set one up.” It doesn’t state who had suggested this, but Nicola Beech was one of the members present.
On 21 September 2018 - nine days after the incorporation of ‘SMLP Bristol GP Limited’ by Federated Hermes and the BT Pension Scheme - a post appeared on this Facebook group saying: “A new group ‘Friends of Castle Park’ for those interested in Castle Park has been created today to discuss Castle Park.”
In many ways, both the arrival of Leith and the creation of the Facebook group seem to have brought benefits to the park. Leith has been an active force for organising litter-picking, weeding, gardening, removing tagging from ancient monuments, improving lighting, bin provision and much else besides. The Facebook page is clearly a good platform for sharing photos of the park and keeping people informed about what’s going on, promoting care for the place and exploring its rich history.
Since its beginnings in 2018 the Facebook group had grown to over a thousand members by 2021. But there was no formalising of ‘Friends of Castle Park’ with an AGM, a constitution, or the election of members to organisational roles such as Secretary or Chairperson. There were no group meetings. This would not be an issue – and the informal set-up of a Facebook group would certainly be a simpler and more attractive proposition to many – if the function of the group had remained as a platform for discussion, photos, news dissemination and recruitment of volunteers.
But that didn’t happen. What happened is that without any transparent or democratic process, the collective view of ‘Friends of Castle Park’ was misleadingly used as a powerful claim in support of the St Mary le Port development, both in the media, by the developer and in Leith’s submission to the council’s planning committee.
‘Friends of Castle Park’ are listed as one of the “Key consultees & local stakeholders who have informed the evolution of the scheme”, in MEPC’s ‘Design and Access Statement’ for the application. According to the ‘Statement of Community Involvement’, Bridgford and Leith met or spoke with MEPC (most probably online given Covid restrictions at the time) five separate times; in September, October, November, December 2020 and January 2021.
In his written submission to the councillors, on notepaper headed with a ‘Friends of Castle Park’ logo, and which opens with the words, “As spokesperson for Friends of Castle Park (FOCP) FaceBook group (with 1,300 members)”, Leith wrote:
“I have published several posts about the St Mary le Port development on FOCP FB group, which has given me an insight into a wide range of opinions from our members about this proposal. An analysis of responses shows that of members who reacted or commented on this proposal, there was a ratio of approximately 10:1 in support of Application: 21/03020/F.”56
Making a spoken statement in the council chamber at the planning committee meeting on December 15 2021, Fraser Bridgeford echoed Leith’s comments:
"As Russ has said in his application, in his submission to the committee today, 90% of those comments on the actual development were supportive. And that’s immense."
So where did these 10:1 and 90% figures relating to comments supportive of the development come from?
In January 2022, a member of the ‘Friends of Castle Park’ Facebook group posted a BBC article reporting that the Bristol Civic Society had requested the government to ‘call-in’ the planning approval and hold a public inquiry. In that article it states: “Historic England also objected to the planning application, saying it might be harmful, while others, including the Friends of Castle Park, were in favour.” In the comments below, another member posted: “I think I've missed something here, when did friends of castle park decide collectively that they were in favour?”
Leith replied:
“The weight of supporters for the MEPC proposal from FOCP members was about 10:1. Collectively about 30,000 words were written, with over 20K in favour of the development…The 10:1 ratio in favour is arrived at by counting ‘reactions’: 👍 & ❤ = support, whilst 😢 & 😡 = object; 😮s were not counted because they could be interpreted either way. As for the word count, this was arrived at by counting the number of posts in support as well as those against and not as you suggest simply counting the number of times the word ‘favour’ appears…oh how simple that would have been. It is the case that the total words written in posts which supported the application were approximately twice as many as those that didn’t.”
Even if we put to one side the accuracy and reliability of this method of ascertaining the group’s opinion on the matter – which seems to me deeply flawed, to say the least – what this clearly shows is that the 10:1 ratio figure put to the council planning committee was a falsehood in Leith’s own terms. It was not based on “members who reacted or commented on this proposal” (my emphasis), as Leith stated in his submission, and was echoed by Bridgeford on the floor of the council chamber, but was derived solely from those who reacted with emojis to a series of posts on the Facebook page – none of which asked directly for people to respond for or against the MEPC proposal, or stated that their reactions would be counted as a poll of their overall view of the development. The ratio of comments for or against the proposal (assessed by word count), were, in Leith’s calculation, 2:1 in favour. A figure that, even if we take to be correct, received no mention in the written submission or on the floor of the council chamber.
My own view, having looked through the history of discussion around the MEPC proposal on the Facebook group, is that even the 2:1 in favour ratio figure was not an accurate reflection of the distribution of members’ feelings as expressed on the Facebook page. In terms of where the balance lies on individual members expressing comments for or against the proposal, there is little doubt in my mind that a majority of members expressed comments against – many of them highly critical of the overbearing nature of the scheme.
Reading through the discussions, you also see a very clear pattern emerge: almost every critical comment is replied to by Leith personally with a comment aggressively in support of the MEPC proposal, often at considerable length and often repeating exactly the same phrases found in his other replies. Whether he included his own voluminous contribution to the word count in his calculations is not clear. What is clear is that establishing a ratio by counting number of words rather than number of commentators is creating another level of distortion.
There were two straightforward ways to speak for Friends of Castle Park on this point, fairly and legitimately: either by asking all the members of the Facebook group to vote on whether they are for or against the development, or by having a democratically accountable leadership structure that took a collective position. Neither of these happened.
Further to this, the false assertion of strong support from ‘Friends of Castle Park’ was used by the developer during the application stage to bolster their case. And the submissions from Leith and Bridgeford potentially had a material effect on the voting of at least two councillors present at the committee meeting - or at the very least was used as fig-leaf to justify their vote. This was a very finely balanced decision, with several councillors saying they were deeply conflicted about which way to vote, and resulted in a close outcome of 5-3 in favour.
During the debate that immediately preceded the vote, councillors declared their voting intention and gave their reasoning. Labour councillor Marley Bennett stated he had, "A number of issues [with the proposal]. The one that I raised earlier about park shadowing and the impact, the scale, the height, that this development has, is a concern for me but I'm willing to defer to the 'Friends of' group who do support this proposal."
You can see Councillor Bennett’s contribution here, starting at 1:38:27:
Similarly, fellow Labour councillor Chris Jackson had previously said in his summing up: “I’m also minded to take on that the ‘Friends of’ group are supporting this application. That’s very good.” That occurs at 1:28:10.
Both Bennett and Jackson were substitutions for other Labour councillors who were unable to attend on the day. It was Bennett’s first ever DC committee meeting, having only become a councillor seven months earlier at the May local elections. As mentioned previously, he is now employed by the planning and development consultancy Turley, sits on the council’s Growth and Regeneration scrutiny committee and has also become a member of Marvin Rees’ Cabinet. Jackson was the Labour group’s chief whip at the time.
The one specific piece of public consultation that MEPC did do with ‘Friends of Castle Park’ - beyond private discussions with Leith and Bridgeford - was an online meeting on 4 March 2021. However, Leith only told members of the Facebook group it was happening on the very same day it took place, writing on the group’s page: “Late notice I know, but if anyone is interested in attending a zoom meeting with MEPC for a St Mary le Port site, development update at 15:00 this afternoon, please comment below.”
8 people, including Russ Leith, his wife, Fraser Bridgeford and the local Green councillor (who is also chair of the council’s Development Control B committee) attended the online meeting and you can see their feedback here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3zzby5besl5wcme/FoCP%20Feedback%20MEPC.pdf?dl=0
There is further evidence of the misleading status of ‘Friends of Castle Park’ being used to positively influence the progress of the planning application. In an email to Stephen Peacock dated 25 April 2021, Roz Bird writes as part of “a brief summary of the remaining issues with our application”: “Feedback from groups such as Friends of Castle Park has been positive.”
And an email from an employee of Marengo Communications, representing MEPC, to Kevin Slocombe, sent 10 August 2021, contains this:
“To summarise from our side, we are waiting for Officers to come back, particularly on the design side. The planning file is relatively quiet with 13 letters of support (including the Chair of Friends of Castle Park and the person who led the campaign against the previous application, [redacted], and 25 objections”.
Leith now has the title of “Chair”. Was this another title Leith had given himself or was it just a useful fiction that MEPC’s representatives liked to use when talking to the Mayor’s Office?
Leith had evidently used the idea that ‘Friends of Castle Park’ was a representative community group as a vehicle to help drive his own preferred outcome in this planning process. He appointed himself as “spokesperson” for a group of over 1300 people and falsely represented their position to suit his own agenda. Extraordinarily, he’d moved to the city and almost immediately claimed its only city centre park as his own fiefdom. He and the developers also deliberately conflated a Facebook group and a formally constituted community organisation when it suited them: in the planning application, in correspondence with senior figures at the council and through the local media. It was disingenuous and fundamentally undemocratic.
Local Media Coverage
It’s striking to note how the local media perpetuated this false idea about this pseudo community group. On 8 April 2021, with the plans being revealed publicly for the first time, the Bristol Post wrote an article on the scheme. A quarter of the thousand-word article is dedicated to ‘Friends of Castle Park’:
“Friends of Castle Park, a volunteer group working to preserve and enhance the important green space, has welcomed the proposal.
Its members said in a statement: "The historic but neglected St Mary le Port has been a sad story for many decades, with several schemes being brought forward but failing to materialise.
"The excitement is at ground level where MEPCs proposals focus on rescuing St Mary le Port Tower and opening up the entire area to create a new bustling place with independent shops, cafes, restaurants and bars.
"The developer is also introducing new links to Castle Park with a nod to local history by bringing back the streets that we lost in the Bristol Blitz.
"As Friends of Castle Park, we especially like the attention to the park, with a whole new area of open space around St Mary le Port Tower and down to the Floating Harbour planned."
They said some of the trees will be lost around the site, but they have been reassured that these will be replaced with higher quality trees and there will be a net gain overall.
Their comment added: "Rather than looking onto the backside of some ugly buildings, the view from the park will be improved with attractive, active frontages and buildings with living walls so they become part of the park.
"We were reassured by the level of thought that had gone into the design of the buildings and their relationship to the park."
A BBC article appeared on 10 April 2021:
“Developers MEPC said it has carried out "a lot of community engagement" to ensure residents' views were taken into consideration. The Friends of Castle Park group say it is crucial developers "get it right"...The Friends of Castle Park group met the developer to take a first look at the latest plans. Member of the group Russ Leith said: "A whole range of really positive feedback came from that.”
Following the council vote in December 2021, there was further repetition in the media of misleading claims about the group’s position on the development. A BBC article from 31 January 2022 on the request from the Bristol Civic Society for the government to ‘call in’ the planning application, stated: “Historic England also objected to the planning application, saying it might be harmful, while others, including the Friends of Castle Park, were in favour.”
In a Bristol 24/7 article published 11 February 2022, written by Leith himself, he stated that the proposal was "supported by Friends of Castle Park members, ten to one in favour." Again, this was a completely false and misleading statement.
Leith had also written a piece for them when the first public announcement about development plans was made in October 2020, titled ‘Any development on Castle Park must be a fitting addition to Bristol’s historic heart’. In it he said:
“I am reassured by the experience and creativity of the team Roz Bird at MEPC has brought together, that Castle Park, the St Mary le Port site and the centre of the Old City will improve…The team has listened attentively to Friends of Castle Park about our concerns and they have been receptive to suggestions. Keith Bradley, lead architect from Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, as well as landscape architects Grant Associates, have listened to our ideas.”
Leith had been featured in a Bristol 24/7 article published March 2019 that looked at his ideas to create an “immersive, education experience” in the ruined St Peter’s church. In that piece he is referred to as “chair” of Friends of Castle Park. The same journalist, Ellie Pipe, again erroneously referred to him as “chair” in a March 2021 profile on Central ward.
Things took a peculiar turn in late October 2022 when Bristol 24/7 published an article titled: ‘How a man who wants a bright future for Castle Park has been targeted by trolls’. The interview with Leith, opening with the detail that his “beloved dog Millie” had just died, was written by the editor Martin Booth and provided no detail about who these “trolls” were, or any evidence about what they’d said exactly or where they’d said it. Nevertheless, Booth wrote that Leith “has been the victim of some particularly nasty attacks on his character and integrity.” He had been accused of “wanting to destroy the park that he loves” because of his support for the MEPC development and “of misrepresenting the views of members of the Friends and even of having an undue influence on the city council’s planning processes.”
I happened to see Booth cycling past in the street in the days after the piece came out and told him that there were legitimate concerns around the fact that Leith had misled the planning committee about the nature of the group and its position on the development. Booth told me that Leith had approached him in a pub with the story. The impetus must have been the article I was then writing for the Bristol Cable about the issues I’ve outlined above around ‘Friends of Castle Park’. This meeting in the pub was soon after I had contacted Leith telling him I was writing the Cable piece and had put some questions to him.
Earlier in the year I’d joined the Friends of Castle Park Facebook group having seen some of the local media coverage, curious at who this ‘community group’ was that were so enthusiastically supportive of the St Mary le Port development. I was immediately struck by the aggressive presence of Leith in all the discussions about it, his apocalyptic attitude towards the current St Mary le Port site (“condemning Old City to indefinite slumification, with its ever-present issues and escalating crime”, “How much longer should the good folk of Bristol have to suffer child exploitation, sexual assaults, arson, class A dealers and users, etc in the heart of their city?”), and his willingness to attack anyone in the group who disagreed with him (“the negative opinions from a minority of backward-looking armchair critics”).
It made me curious about the formal structure of the group and led me to look into his role in the planning application process. I posted on the Friends of Castle Park Facebook group linking to a piece of writing that methodically outlined the undemocratic nature of Leith’s approach and the falsehoods that he’d been promoting - and showed how this misleading impression had been used by the developers to justify their proposal as well as by the Labour councillors voting at the planning committee.
The post didn’t break any rules of the platform but was quickly removed by the group admins. This may have been Leith himself but I also later discovered that among the admins of the group was a Bristol City Council employee as well as the marketing manager of Bristol Waste, a company owned by the council. When I was asked later in the year by the Bristol Cable editor, Matty Edwards, if I had any newsworthy stories to pitch, I suggested a piece looking at the role of ‘Friends of Castle Park’ in the St Mary le Port planning process.
But nearing the point when I’d agreed to file the story, I heard from Edwards that somebody had suggested to them that I had been “harassing” Leith. We agreed to speak on the phone the following day, the only time Edwards ever communicated in any way other than email. I asked him who the person was that had made the allegation and he told me that it was councillor Nicola Beech. I was told that she had spoken to a director on the Cable board, who had passed it on to him. I later came to learn that this Cable director was most likely Yuliya Kosharevska, who is the partner of Beech’s Labour colleague, Councillor Tom Renhard. Renhard had been the member for Housing in Marvin Rees’ Cabinet alongside Beech since 2021.
I immediately offered to provide all the limited communications I’d had with Leith, which would show that I hadn’t done anything that could be remotely characterised as harassment. I’d asked some entirely justified and reasonable questions, and put some discomforting truths to him. It’s what journalists are meant to do. But I’d never been rude or aggressive and the small number of communications had been infrequent. Having looked at the messages, Edwards confirmed several days later that the Cable agreed that I couldn’t be accused of harassment.
However, after receiving an angry approach from Leith himself, Edwards decided that I was “too close” to the story and he said they would write it in-house instead. I could be quoted as a source. I never understood exactly what “too close” was supposed to mean, other than referring to my post in the Facebook group that had been immediately taken down and the fact that Leith had taken exception to what I was doing. But what I’d written then had differed little in content and tone of the piece I’d pitched. It was never explained to me. And neither was there any invitation to speak face-to-face about it or over the phone.
I was allowed to see a draft of the finished article and request changes, some of which were acted on, but it undoubtedly ended up a softened version of the one I’d written. I was deeply unhappy with the arrangement but accepted because it seemed the most important thing was just to get the story out.
The whole episode left me feeling that the Cable’s loud claims of independence and citizen journalism were fairly hollow. But equally disappointing was the way they’d handled the situation. The editor had showed no interest in supporting a writer who they agreed had had a false and unreasonable accusation made against them by a local politician - and one who’d been centrally involved in the planning process being written about.
I was also troubled that a councillor felt that contacting a director of the paper in this way was an acceptable way to operate. I wrote to Beech twice seeking an explanation for her actions, in particular what evidence she’d had to contact an employer with such a serious and potentially damaging accusation, but never received a reply.
“Ha! Whoops!”: The Wrong Church
The day after the committee decision in December 2021, Nicola Beech responded on Twitter to Dr Peter Taylor, an academic researcher and employee of the Bristol Port Company, who had tagged her under a tweet from Historic England that said:
“We are disappointed with @BristolCouncil's decision to approve proposals for the redevelopment of the site around the ruins of St Mary le Port church. This scheme will cause irreversible harm to the historic heart of Bristol.”
The Historic England tweet linked to a statement outlining their position. Embedded in the tweet was a photograph of St Mary le Port church tower.
Beech wrote in response:
“Thanks Pete I’ll read. But that is the wrong church 🧐”
It wasn’t the wrong church and this was spotted by the Bristol Tree Forum, who tweeted beneath:
“Definitely St Mary le Port @nicolabeech.
The two big planes in nave are also going even though the council planted them and there was no evidence presented that they are causing harm. Ditto the biggest Plane on Bridge Street...again, no evidence that causing harm to nearby vault.”
Beech replied:
“Ha! Whoops! To be fair there are loads of churches in the city centre! Not sure what was going on there. My apologies Pete!”
The Bristol Tree Forum have been the most tenacious amenity group in challenging the way that the planning department has been operating.
As with comments from Transport and City Design, the tree officer’s report was not made public during the planning process. It did not become available until 6 June 2022, nearly six months after the planning decision, and only then as the result of a March 2022 Freedom of Information Request by the Tree Forum (and only following a lengthy delay and an Internal Review).
One of their campaigns has been to stop the planning department falsely backdating documents on the council’s planning portal. A document titled ‘Final Tree Officer Comments’ was only eventually published on the portal some time on 14 December 2021, the day before the planning committee met - and most likely too late to have beeen read by councillors on the committee. Initially, the publication date was backdated, which gave the impression that it had been published on 2 December 2021. Following the Tree Forum’s complaint, the publication date was later amended to show its correct date, 14 December 2021. This was done sometime after the planning decision was made. Their complaint with the Ombudsman regarding the council’s practice of backdating the publication date of documents on the planning portal was successfully upheld in August 2022, with an instruction for Bristol City Council to stop doing it.
The tree officer’s grudging words in those final comments show how unhappy they had been with the St Mary le Port process, like Transport and City Design:
“I have reviewed the comments provided by Savills; we are at an impasse during the application process and therefore I have the following comments to be reviewed by committee. I have taken advice from my manager and unfortunately as case officer you have to balance whether the level of information provided is sufficient to present to committee and whether; on balance’ your advice is to consent or refuse the application.”
Conclusion
Something went badly wrong at St Mary le Port. The opportunity to leverage Bristol’s current attractiveness to developers and finally restore something of the lost heart of the city has been blown. The solution that has been arrived at - incoherent, bland, domineering and dismissive of the historic context - has come about through a mix of carelessness, dissembling, and the power of finance capital to get what it wants.
This has all been enabled by the current administration in City Hall. If built, the new development will stand for decades to come as a totemic example of their crass “getting stuff done” attitude.
One of the fundamental problems is that the wrong developer has taken on the site. Federated Hermes do large-scale commercial developments: vast business parks and huge office schemes. Why were they taking on this sensitive site at Bristol’s historic core?
This gives rise to further questions I haven’t yet been able to answer. Was their acquisition of the buildings encouraged by the council? What was the nature of the discussions that took place in 2017 and 2018 once Federated Hermes had declared an interest in the site through the call-out exercise for the Local Plan review? Were Historic England included in any discussions that took place prior to the acquisition of the buildings?
Once Federated Hermes had bought the three leaseholds there was an almost unstoppable momentum for a site with such a difficult history. And the developer understood that they could push the proposed scale of these buildings to a point where they clearly did not respect the existing context of the Old City because the council’s planning officers were never going to recommend the scheme for refusal. And they were never going to recommend it for refusal because Stephen Peacock and the Mayor’s Office didn’t want them to.
The undermining of the efforts of those specialist officers within the council trying to demand a scheme that Bristol deserved was shameful, even if you can have sympathy for Gary Collins, with the pressure from above that was undoubtedly being placed on him. But what is the point of a local development plan if it isn’t upheld? And how is the planning process supposed to have any legitimacy when it’s being manipulated by transitory officials and politicians, acting in such untransparent ways?
The story also exposes a remote caste of development professionals - architects, developers, lobbyists, consultants - working at the behest of their paymasters, often without genuine attachment to the places they seek to reshape or the people that live there. These are the foot soldiers for finance capital, a global force with ever-increasing influence over the fabric of those cities where money is to be made, and making so many places in Britain look like they could be anywhere.
Where are some of the principal actors in this story now?
In May 2022, Roz Bird left MEPC for a new job as CEO of Anglia Innovation Partnership, who own Norwich Research Park, a large science park specialising in food, genomics and health.
Nicola Beech has announced - like many of Marvin Rees’ Cabinet members - that she is stepping down as a councillor at the next local elections in May 2024. But her role in leading a cross-party working group to help shape Bristol’s new Local Plan has been celebrated by her old firm JBP, who are tipping her to be the next West of England Mayor.57 Though they forget to mention that she is a former employee:
“Mayor Beech – a political accumulator is building. Nicola Beech, Cabinet Member responsible for the local plan, was widely credited with bringing together a diverse range of political views through the local plan working group. Are these the skills needed for a future WECA Mayor? Although current Mayor Dan Norris has been reselected for May 2025, Mr Norris could stand concurrently in the new North East Somerset & Hanham parliamentary constituency. Currently, pollsters are predicting a Labour gain at the expense of Jacob Rees-Mogg. If Mr Norris believes this is a fight he can win, he may throw his hat into the ring, get elected, and leave a vacancy for someone to fill. Lots must happen, but it’s a long shot worth a flutter.”
Dan Norris has indeed now thrown his hat in the ring for North East Somerset, so perhaps the author is on to something.
Peter Westbury has taken a year long sabbatical which will include - according to comments made at the end of his last planning committee meeting by councillor Richard Eddy - a tour of California’s vineyards.
Gary Collins left Bristol City Council in the Spring of 2023 and headed to the quieter pastures of an interim role as head of Herefordshire County Council’s planning department. He said on LinkedIn that the experience had “put a spring back in [his] step”. At the end of the year he moved on to be Interim Head of Planning at Bath and North East Somerset council. He now has responsibility for an UNESCO world heritage site.
As mentioned previously, his replacement at Bristol, the new Chief Planner, Simone Wilding, is a former colleague of Stephen Peacock’s and has already shown herself willing to take a forthright role on planning committees to promote the administration’s goals. A crucial period of time is coming up as several major schemes are coming through the planning system which will shape the character of the city centre for the next century.
There’s a real prospect of the city centre of Bristol being turned into an exclusive realm, physically dominated by bland investment assets for distant financial investors. The preeminent and growing influence of Bristol University could see it become a place largely built around wealthy international students and a transitory professional class. As the wider citizenry become poorer and as public services and the civic realm continues to disintegrate, private capital will become ever more dominant, and will seek returns unconcerned with questions of Bristol’s heritage or identity or what the centre should mean to those pushed out to the margins of the city.
The last thing that Stephen Peacock ‘liked’ on LinkedIn was a piece of writing titled ‘Unlocking the potential of the UK’s cities’, written by Andrew Travers, a director at Inner Circle Consulting. It’s a distillation of the Peacock/Rees vision and a reminder that finance capital will be looking for new ways to influence the city’s institutions once the mayoral system goes:
“Some resources will come from existing assets and public-sector investment. But we know success will also depend on large-scale private sector investment from banks, insurance funds, pension funds, private equity, foreign direct investment and sovereign wealth funds.
We’re also working with developers, investors and funders to understand the delivery structures needed and the blockages which inhibit the flow of funds to investable propositions.
To make sure a strong and stable platform is in place for long-term investment, our work will also examine the kind of governance, leadership and capacity that each city and city region needs to create. We’re looking for key ideas, ingredients and processes that can bring together political and business leaders with other stakeholders to set a vision, strategy and narrative for the place.”58
A few weeks after Peacock was appointed to the council, in October 2019, the Portuguese writer and former politician Bruno Maçães appeared on the guest panel at Marvin Rees’ annual State of the City address. If Peacock was in attendance, one wonders whether he reflected on what he said. In the discussion following Rees’ speech, Maçães was asked about the new cities in China he had recently visited and what “traditional cities” in the West could do to compete with them. In his reply, he said:
“It’s a tough world out there. And Bristol has to compete. What I worry about - and I want to make this point also to the Mayor - this need to compete, this need to be as productive, as efficient, as modern, as future-oriented as you possibly can, has the danger that cities start to be thought of almost as smart gadgets that have to be up to the latest standard. They all start to resemble each other. I see that in China a lot. They lose their past and their identity because that’s the only way to survive and to be successful. And I wonder what we can do about that.
Sometimes I think public authorities, local authorities, think that it’s up to the people to preserve the identity of Bristol and up to the authorities to make it competitive. But I would say that people alone cannot do that. And we need cities as a whole, and we need local authorities to also be concerned - among all the other goals that the Mayor listed, and they’re all very important - about preserving the identity, the uniqueness, the special character of a city like Bristol and not leave it to chance, because if it’s left to chance, it might not survive.”59
Marvin Rees, ‘State of the City Address 2016’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5RlaH7ZYtw&t=1359s&ab_channel=BristolIdeas
Adam Postans, Bristol Post, ‘Bristol City Council cabinet member says mayoral system needs "more checks and balances"', https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/bristol-councillor-criticises-mayoral-system-4523855
Marvin Rees, ‘State of the City Address 2016’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5RlaH7ZYtw&t=1359s&ab_channel=BristolIdeas
Bristol City Council, ‘Key Facts 2023’, https://www.bristol.gov.uk/files/documents/1840-bristol-key-facts-2022/file
Bristol City Council, ‘The Population of Bristol - November 2023’, https://www.bristol.gov.uk/files/documents/7060-population-of-bristol-december-2023/file
Bristol City Council, ‘Key Facts 2023’, https://www.bristol.gov.uk/files/documents/1840-bristol-key-facts-2022/file
Bristol City Council, ‘Summary of Affordable Housing Practice Note 2018’, https://democracy.bristol.gov.uk/documents/s20019/Supplementary%20Item%20AHPN%20Appendix%20AB.pdf
Bristol City Council, ‘Urban Living: Making successful places at higher densities’, https://www.bristol.gov.uk/files/documents/2675-urban-living-spd-making-successful-places-at-higher-densities/file#:~:text=What%20is%20Urban%20Living%3F,-Urban%20living%20is&text=The%20Urban%20Living%20Supplementary%20Planning,the%20determination%20of%20planning%20applications.
Tristan Cork, Bristol Post, ‘Delays to two big Bristol housing projects blamed for drop in affordable homes’, https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/delays-two-big-bristol-housing-8808602
Matthew Montagu-Pollock, ‘Bristol tall buildings recently built, permitted, or in planning’, 15 July 2023, https://bristolcommentary.uk/author/yahomar_1
Esme Ashcroft, Bristol Post, ‘Private talks of a Bristol Arena at Filton started six months before the council claims’, https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/private-talks-bristol-arena-filton-1890201
Esme Ashcroft, Bristol Post, ‘The three men involved in Bristol Arena's past, present and potentially its future’, https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/three-men-involved-bristol-arenas-1199941
Bristol City Council Freedom of Information request, ‘Legal and General (L&G) meetings and emails (01/09/2017 and 31/12/2017)’, https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/672974/response/1689258/attach/html/2/A9R71D0%20Redacted.pdf.html
Part of this trade was in human beings. Until Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester, campaigned for its abolition in the second half of the 11th century, a well-established trade in Anglo-Saxon slaves transported to the Viking settlement of Dublin had taken place through the port of Bristol. See William of Malmsbury’s Vita Wulfstani.
Jean Manco, ‘The Saxon Origins of Bristol’, https://www.buildinghistory.org/bristol/origins.shtml
Lorna Watts and Philip Rahtz (1985), Mary-le-Port, Bristol: Excavations 1962-1963, Bristol: City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.
J.B. Priestley, English Journey, : “…it looks ten times the place that Leeds looks. It is a genuine city, an ancient metropolis. And as you walk about in it, you can wonder and admire. The place has an air… I had expected to see the usual vast dingy dormitory. What I did see, of course, was something that would not have astonished me at all in Germany, France or Italy, and ought not to have astonished me in England: I saw a real old city, an ancient capital in miniature…What is especially admirable about Bristol is that it is both old and alive, and not one of your museum pieces, living on tourists and the sale of bogus antiques. It can show you all the crypts and gables and half-timbering you want to see; offers you fantastic little old thoroughfares like Mary-Le-Port Street and Narrow Wine Street; has a fine display of the antique, the historical, the picturesque; but yet has not gone 'quaint' but is a real lively bustling city, earning its living and spending its own money.”
Pete Insole, ‘Re-planning Bristol - The Post-war City Part 1 - A new shopping area’, https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/2b25f56c80d84420b4eff65c121848d1
Roger Mortimer, ‘St Mary le Port redevelopment: an alternative approach explored’, https://www.sustainableredland.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/st-m-le-port.pdf
Savills cover letter for St Mary le Port planning application, https://pa.bristol.gov.uk/online-applications/files/C434A1A7D94D987ED277A7F5E39B84BE/pdf/21_03020_F-COVER_LETTER-2959329.pdf
Federated Hermes Inc., CNN Business, https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?symb=FHI&subView=institutional
‘Cautious BT may boost cash support for its £47bn pension scheme’, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/dec/08/cautious-bt-may-boost-cash-support-for-its-47bn-pension-scheme
‘BT Pension Scheme – a major investor in the UK’
https://www.btps.co.uk/NewsDetail?a=72#:~:text=%E2%80%9CCurrently%2C%20the%20average%20Scheme%20member's,paying%20pensions%20to%20the%20members.
‘How we turned the STC from a hunch into a reality – Roz Bird, Chair, Silverstone Technology Cluster’, https://www.ukspa.org.uk/how-we-turned-the-stc-from-a-hunch-into-a-reality-roz-bird-chair-silverstone-technology-cluster/
Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, ‘About Us’, https://fcbstudios.com/practice/approach/
It was to this ‘landmark’ 17-storey development beside the River Avon that Marvin Rees took Keir Starmer during its construction - to admire the ‘cranes on the skyline’ - when the Labour leader visited Bristol in the lead-up to the May 2021 Mayoral election. However, in July 2022 the off-site specialist contractor Mid Group collapsed, leaving the building half-finished. The housing association Clarion has taken over the project but no work has been carried out since. Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) has been encouraged by the Bristol administration through a project set up in 2018 called the Bristol Housing Festival. But flagship MMC projects such as Bonnington Walk in Lockleaze and Boklok on the edge of Knowle West have seen completion delays of over a year after major construction faults have been discovered, leaving many of those who had already put down money for the homes distressed and out of pocket as mortgage rates have spiralled. For an in-depth account of the curious relationship between evangelical Christianity, Marvin Rees and the Bristol Housing Festival I recommend this piece by Joanna Booth: https://joannab.substack.com/p/housing-or-monastery-20.
Bristol City Council, Freedom of Information request, ‘St Mary le port interference’, https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/st_mary_le_port_interference
Bristol City Council, Freedom of Information request, 'Communications between Stephen Peacock and Federated Hermes/MEPC', https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/993747/response/2370625/attach/html/2/Binder1%20redacted.pdf.html
Applicant’s Design and Access Statement (Part 5 of 13), https://pa.bristol.gov.uk/online-applications/files/5F866665BCB13497D82DA2B7F086578C/pdf/21_03020_F-DESIGN_AND_ACCESS_STATEMENT_PART_5_OF_13-2959339.pdf
Bristol Civic Society, ‘Response to Local Plan review and Urban Living SPD March 2018’, https://bristolcivicsociety.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Response-Local-Plan-review-and-Urban-Living-SPD.pdf
Esme Ashcroft, Bristol Post, ‘Plans for a sky-high city – this is where Bristol’s high-rise towers will be built’, 28 February 2018, https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/plans-sky-high-city--1271224
Bristol City Council, ‘Urban Living SPD - Consultation statement’, https://www.bristol.gov.uk/files/documents/2678-urban-living-spd-consultation-statement/file
Bristol City Council, ‘Draft City Centre Framework 2018’, https://files.smartsurvey.io/2/0/QQ7D0ICS/City_Centre_Framework_draft_March_2018.pdf
Bristol City Council, ‘The City Centre Framework 2020’, https://democracy.bristol.gov.uk/documents/s50582/Appendix%20A2%20-%20City%20Centre%20Framework.pdf
Bristol City Council, ‘Local Plan: Site Allocations and Development Management Policies’, https://www.bristol.gov.uk/files/documents/5718-cd5-2-brislington-meadows-site-allocations-and-development-management-policies/file
Adam Postans, Bristol Post, ‘Bristol City Council director paid nearly £90K for five months' work - despite his successor having been appointed’, https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/bristol-city-council-director-paid-4456883
Declassified UK, ‘How BP’s interests drive UK support for wars, coups, and dictators’, https://www.declassifieduk.org/how-bps-interests-drive-uk-support-for-wars-coups-and-dictators/
John Savage was appointed Chair of the Western Harbour Advisory Group by the Mayor’s Office. This board overseeing the development of plans for a major regeneration scheme at Cumberland Basin (see: https://thebristolcable.org/2022/08/western-harbour-development-cumberland-basin-advisory-group-more-diverse/ ) was established the month Peacock joined the council in October 2019. I was told by someone who had spoken to Peacock about the project that he had described Savage in the role as “our sword and shield against the public”.
The most famous member of the Society of Merchant Venturers is Edward Colston, the slave trader and philanthropist whose statue was pulled down in Bristol city centre and thrown in the harbour during a Black Lives Matter demonstration in 2020, sparking a global reaction. Colston chose the Society to act as his trustees with the aim of perpetuating his memory, something they pursued with great energy and dedication over the centuries in Bristol.
Freedom of Information request to Bristol City Council, ‘St Mary le port interference’, https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/st_mary_le_port_interference
Local Government Association, ‘Probity in Planning’, December 2019, https://www.local.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/34.2_Probity_in_Planning_04.pdf
St Mary le Port committee report, Development Control Committee A – 15 December 2021, https://democracy.bristol.gov.uk/documents/s67838/21.03020.F%20-%20St%20Mary-le-Port%20Wine%20Street%20-%20Committee%20Report.pdf
Historic England advice on Application No. 21/03020/F, 22 July 2021, https://historicengland.org.uk/content/docs/planning/he-response-bristol-application-21-03020-f/
Bristol City Council, ‘Bristol Central Area Plan’, https://www.bristol.gov.uk/files/documents/2238-bcap-adopted-march-2015-main-document-annex/file
Freedom of Information request to Bristol City Council, ‘Driving Development Meetings’, https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/driving_development_meetings
Freedom of information request to Bristol City Council, ‘Mayor’s influence on planning, revised request’, https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/mayors_influence_on_planning_rev
Bristol City Council, ‘Cabinet Agenda Reports Pack, 6 December 2022’, ’https://democracy.bristol.gov.uk/documents/g10184/Public%20reports%20pack%2006th-Dec-2022%2016.00%20Cabinet.pdf?T=10
Freedom of Information request to Bristol City Council, ‘I want to know what Kevin Slocombe is saying to the planning department’,
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/829335/response/1987336/attach/html/2/23349745%20All%20emails%20Redacted%20s.43%202.pdf.html
‘HE advice on Application No. 21/03020/F’, https://historicengland.org.uk/content/docs/planning/he-response-bristol-application-21-03020-f/
‘Huge apartment tower scheme for Cardiff Bay 'fundamentally flawed' says former Welsh Secretary Lord Crickhowell’, https://www.walesonline.co.uk/business/commercial-property/dolffin-quay-scheme-cardiff-bay-12977147
“Lord Crickhowell who has written to director of ABP South Wales, Matthew Kennerley, outlining his concerns, said he feared the wedge-shaped tower block element of Dolffin Quay, would “dominate and over power the Norwegian Church and Locky’s cottage” which is planned to be relocated. He added: “The principal building is about twice the height of other buildings around the Bay. And because of its height and bulk it will dominate its neighbours which include the Senedd [National Assembly for Wales] and Wales Millennium Centre, and present an implacable front north and west towards the Pierhead building at the very heart of the Bay - which is where most visitors will see it for the first time. There is no evidence to substantiate the claim that the proposals will deliver ‘a flagship tall building to enhance the skyline along the Bay and contribute to Cardiff’s world-class capital city status’.”
‘Selling Out, Cashing In’, The Bristolian, February 8 2017, https://thebristolian.net/2017/02/08/selling-out-cashing-in/
Freedom of Information request to Bristol City Council, ‘Meeting between Stephen Peacock, Kevin Slocombe and the St Mary le Port developer’, https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/meeting_between_stephen_peacock#incoming-2226483
Freedom of Information request to Bristol City Council, ‘Communications between Stephen Peacock and Federated Hermes/MEPC', https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/982925/response/2342917/attach/html/2/Binder1%20redacted.pdf.html
Design West, ‘Report and Unaudited Financial Statements 31 March 2022’, https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-search?p_p_id=uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet&p_p_lifecycle=2&p_p_state=maximized&p_p_mode=view&p_p_resource_id=%2Faccounts-resource&p_p_cacheability=cacheLevelPage&_uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet_objectiveId=A12649151&_uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet_priv_r_p_mvcRenderCommandName=%2Faccounts-and-annual-returns&_uk_gov_ccew_onereg_charitydetails_web_portlet_CharityDetailsPortlet_priv_r_p_organisationNumber=290575
Arup.com, ‘Sophie Camburn’, https://www.arup.com/our-firm/sophie-camburn
Bristol City Council planning portal, Broadwalk applicant’s Design & Access Statement part 2, https://pa.bristol.gov.uk/online-applications/files/71F8B71A91F9D9988E501D3AB1AD6C07/pdf/22_03924_P-DESIGN___ACCESS_STATEMENT_-_PART_2-3279925.pdf
Simon Bacon, ‘Bristol local plan political analysis: Six takeaways incl. Cllr Beech for Mayor?’, https://www.jbp.co.uk/bcc-meeting-summary-2023/
Andrew Travers, Director at Inner Circle Consulting, ‘Unlocking the potential of the UK’s cities’, https://www.futureoflondon.org.uk/2023/04/24/spotlight-the-potential-of-cities/
Bruno Maçães, ‘The Mayor's Annual State of the City Address and Debate 2019’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvmwTo8TDkE&ab_channel=BristolIdeas