The Story of St Mary le Port: short(ish) version
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
Two significant things are set to happen in Bristol in 2024: Mayor Marvin Rees departs City Hall in May and construction work will begin on a major new development at the historic heart of the city. If one of the enduring legacies of Rees’ time in office will be a wave of crass buildings across the city, the imminent scheme at St Mary le Port may well stand as the most totemic example.
The office block development was approved by a council planning committee in December 2021, got held up by an unsuccessful appeal to the Secretary of State from the Bristol Civic Society, and finally received planning permission in September 2022. Nothing has happened on site yet but I’ve been assured by the developer’s PR consultants that work will start this year. The story of its journey through the planning system exposes many of the features of the current planning and development regime that has incited recent public anger: political interference from the Mayor’s Office, disdain for transparency and due process, the sidelining of the council’s own placemaking specialists, and the green light given to developers to create bland, poorly designed places.
The remains of St Mary le Port church sit on the western edge of Castle Park, surrounded by three derelict office buildings from the 1960s and 70s. This is where the city began, by the crossing of the Avon where Bristol Bridge stands today. The area around the ancient crossroads of High Street, Wine Street, Broad Street and Corn Street was the heart of the city from its early beginnings in late Saxon times to the devastation of the Second World War. The Bristol Blitz of November 1940 saw the entire quarter of tightly-packed streets on the eastern side, then the city’s bustling shopping and entertainment district, sent up in flames. What little survived was later demolished and the area was turned into Castle Park in the late 1970s.
Directly to the west of St Mary le Port - left with only its church tower standing after the bombing - 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 and St Mary le Port forming a distinctive skyline, still visible from vantage points across the city.
Though the site has proved difficult to re-develop since the unloved post-war buildings have fallen into disuse, it’s one you would expect the city authorities to treat with diligence, care and respect. But a close look at how the planning process unfolded for St Mary le Port shows a troubling carelessness, as well as cynical efforts to manipulate the planning system in line with developer demands, with the judgements of specialist council officers trampled over in order to “get stuff done”. This is a breakdown in the firewall that is supposed to exist between the Executive and the Local Planning Authority around planning decisions, stipulated in planning guidance and law. And the story also illustrates a breakdown around the accountability of public officials and politicians, along with the legibility of their roles within a supposedly democratic system.
In his first State of the City Address in 2016, Rees spoke about a desire to re-shape the physical character of the city, saying “I want Bristol’s skyline to grow…Tall buildings built in the right way, in the right places and for the right reasons, communicate ambition and energy.” And one of the first things he did on coming into office was to begin a review of the local development plan, the policies that new development proposals are assessed against. The person he put in charge of overseeing it was new Labour councillor Nicola Beech, who had come straight from the PR and lobbying company JBP, working for developers in the planning process. Immediately before she became a member of Rees’ Cabinet in 2017, Beech had been trying to get a 24-storey high-rise tower built on Cardiff waterfront.
In response to the council’s call-out exercise in 2017, asking developers to make representations about sites in the city they were interested in, the US-based global investment manager Federated Hermes expressed an interest in St Mary le Port. Federated Hermes has around $700 billion worth of assets under its control and its biggest two shareholders are the largest investment firms on the planet, BlackRock and The Vanguard Group.
In the UK, it manages investments from the BT Pension Scheme - who are the investor for St Mary le Port - to build very large commercial developments. These include Silverstone Park, a 130-acre technology and research business park 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.
Though clearly a developer/investor partnership that creates commercial schemes entirely at odds - in their scale and use - with the character of Bristol’s Old City, by September 2018 they had bought the leaseholds of two of the three buildings at St Mary le Port. This was followed by the purchase of the last, the former Norwich Union Building, in February 2020. Pre-application discussions about development proposals began in earnest that summer with Bristol City Council’s planning department, with the council also remaining the freeholder of the site. In October 2020, a joint public statement was put out by Nicola Beech and Roz Bird, commercial director at MEPC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Federated Hermes, who would be the developer and ongoing manager of the St Mary le Port site. Bird had been seconded from her role running Silverstone Park (advanced engineering, electronics and software development), to oversee the planning application.
No details of the proposed scheme were released at this point, but the design was already at an advanced stage. The architects Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios (FCBS) had been working on them since March 2019. Originating in the late 1970s as early pioneers of green, energy-efficient buildings, with an affinity for the Arts and Craft movement, FCBS 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. They have been involved with some of the most significant developments in Bristol in recent years, all strongly supported by the current mayoral administration: Bristol University’s Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus, the masterplan for YTL’s vast Brabazon development at Filton and the ill-fated ‘Boatyard’ apartments on Bath Road.
They had produced a scheme that consisted of three very large office blocks, with retail or food and drink outlets at ground floor, while repairing the church tower, creating new ‘public realm’ and introducing permeability to the park through reinstated medieval street lines. But pre-application correspondence between the developers and Bristol City Council in its role as Local Planning Authority (LPA) - available to see through a Freedom of Information request - show that the proposed height, scale and massing of these office blocks was deemed unacceptable by council officers throughout the entire pre-application process. This included head of Development Management, Gary Collins, who would later make a formal recommendation to councillors to vote to approve the unchanged scheme.
The first written pre-application response was from Development Management Team Leader, Alison Straw, in December 2020. In her lengthy letter, she stated:
“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.”
This was supported by the council’s internal placemaking specialists, City Design Group, whose similarly extensive response included:
“It is advised that the development scale should be reduced…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.”
After a 3rd pre-app meeting, Alison Straw wrote again to the developers on 29 January 2021. While praising some changes to the design, other problems remained:
“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.”
These responses, along with other issues with the council’s transport officers, led Roz Bird to write testily to Growth and Regeneration manager Abigail Stratford on 11th February, saying, “It would be good to talk you through current, and ongoing, concerns.”
At this point, Stephen Peacock, then the council’s Executive Director of Growth and Regeneration (now Chief Executive), became directly involved in planning discussions for St Mary le Port. Peacock, who has a background working for oil and gas giant BP, the South West Regional Development Agency, and running Grant Thornton’s business growth services, joined the council in 2019. In his first year he conducted a review of planning. Out of this came regular ‘Driving Development’ meetings that were established from October 2020, taking place with the head of the Mayor’s Office, Kevin Slocombe; the Deputy Head of the Mayor’s Office; and the Mayor’s Policy Advisor. These focused on particular developments deemed “Mayoral Priorities”, one of which was the St Mary le Port scheme. The desired outcomes identified by Peacock in his review (which can be seen in this Freedom of Information request) included: “Removing barriers to delivery and ensuring alignment with objectives of administration”, and, “Ensure the Planning Service reflects the ambition of the City”.
Peacock attended a series of meetings in March and April between the developers and Gary Collins. It’s clear from the notes that Collins was sticking to the LPA’s position on height, scale and massing. At a ‘Design Workshop’ on 1st March we see: “fundamental issue remains of HSM [height, scale, massing]”. Again, at a meeting on 8th March: “HSM remain a key question - sensitive location”. On 11th March: “There remain concerns over height scale & massing which require changes to the scheme to address this issue…overall height is unacceptable”.
Collins wrote the final pre-application response himself, dated 30 April 2021:
“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…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.”
Towards the end of a lengthy letter he wrote:
“…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.”
Despite these clear and consistent messages, with detailed analysis provided by City Design Group of the impact of the development on the surrounding cityscape, the planning application was submitted to Bristol City Council on 28th May, with no changes to the scheme being made.
On 22nd July, statutory consultee Historic England submitted a formal objection. While approving of certain aspects of the scheme, it said it had to object on grounds of height, scale and massing:
“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.”
Off the record meetings
Despite no longer having the Cabinet brief for strategic planning at this point (she had been made Cabinet member for Climate, Ecology, Waste and Energy following local elections in May), Nicola Beech was still a key point of contact and centrally involved in discussions with the developer after the planning application had been submitted. In July, five days after Historic England’s letter of objection was sent to the council, she was contacted by Marengo Communications, the PR consultancy working for the developers, to see if she would “meet for a coffee” with MEPC’s Roz Bird in August. After she arranged a date for this, Marengo wrote:
“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 23rd July, and was headlined: “New offices planned for Bristol park likened to 'giant slabs' as opinion divided ahead of council decision.”
One of Marengo’s directors, Tom Selway, is a former colleague of Beech’s from JBP. When I recently made an enquiry through MEPC’s St Mary le Port website, it was Selway that phoned me back. Whether it was him personally liaising with Beech in the summer of 2021 is unclear because the name is redacted in the FOI release. But she immediately passed on the request to the Mayor’s Office. The answer that came back was: “Kevin thinks it should be a meeting with him and Stephen Peacock in the first instance (doesn’t need to be Marvin right now).”
This meeting between the developers, Kevin Slocombe and Stephen Peacock took place on 10 August 2021. I’ve asked the council for any notes or minutes from this meeting and was told that none exist.
A few days after these meetings, the applicant wrote a letter to the council countering Historic England’s objection, and by 22nd August the application had gone from “pending consideration” to “pending decision” on the council’s planning portal website.
The Planning Committee Meeting
The planning application came to the council’s cross-party Development Control committee A on 15 December 2021. Two weeks earlier, Peacock had asked Collins if he could see a draft of the committee report:
“Thanks Gary – an interesting read. I note that TDM comments aren’t in and would be grateful to see the final version.”
Transport Development Management (TDM) is the council department that assesses the transport impacts of development and represents the Highway Authority’s role as a statutory consultee in the planning process. 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.
The case officer that wrote the report along with Gary Collins was Peter Westbury. Westbury has been an officer in the council’s planning department since 2008 but became Team Manager for Major Applications in October 2016, five months after Marvin Rees came into office. 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.
Their 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. It recommended councillors to approve the application, stating:
“Your officers have reached the conclusion that…The proposed development, whilst exceeding existing building heights, responds appropriately to the local context.”
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.”
Most troubling, perhaps, in this report on a major development at the historic core of the city, is the complete exclusion of City Design Group, which included the council’s internal heritage specialists.
On page 20 it states: “INTERNAL CONTRIBUTIONS. BCC CITY DESIGN GROUP. Design and Heritage comments are contained within Key Issue C.
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 throughout the pre-application process - we find that this is a deeply misleading statement.
Key Issue C doesn’t mention City Design Group and neither does it relate their fundamental objection that the height, scale and massing of the proposal didn’t comply with policy, which 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 anonymous “concerns”. This is highly anomalous when you compare committee reports for applications before and after this one, which either quote City Design directly or give a lengthy exposition of their view.
And on 18 May 2021, just ten days before the St Mary le Port planning application was submitted, a High Court judge had ruled that a conservation officer’s advice should not have been withheld from the London Borough of Lewisham’s planning committee when it approved the redevelopment of part of the Sydenham Hill estate. Mrs Justice Lang held that it should have been disclosed as a background paper under the Local Government Act 1972. This resulted in planning permission for the residential scheme being quashed.
Collins and Westbury claimed in the meeting and in their report that the public benefits of the scheme outweighed any harm to the Old City caused by the height, scale and massing of the buildings. Green councillor Ed Plowden questioned the lack of evidence provided for this and also the lack of evidence for the assertion that the viability of the scheme depended on buildings of this size, which had simply been taken on the developer’s word. But a shoulder-shrugging attitude from several councillors - that this was the best the city was going to get - meant the committee voted to approve by a narrow margin.
Minutes after the decision, Collins emailed Peacock, Slocombe and planning manager 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.”
With a Little Help from Our ‘Friends’
In the short statement MEPC’s Roz Bird read out to councillors at the Development Control committee meeting, she mentioned ‘Friends of Castle Park’ three times, more than any other group or individual. And two Labour councillors explained why they were voting to approve the application with reference to the same group.
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."
Similarly, fellow Labour councillor Chris Jackson 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.”
So who are ‘Friends of Castle Park’?
The same month that Federated Hermes bought the leaseholds for the first two buildings at St Mary le Port, in September 2018, Bristol City Council’s Area Committee 4 met at City Hall. Area Committees, made up of councillors, decide on how CIL and Section 106 funds – money that developers have to pay – is distributed. Giving a public forum statement at that meeting, on the subject of security in Castle Park, was Russ Leith. Leith and his wife had moved to Bristol from Shefford in Bedfordshire at the start of that year, and had taken up residence in a flat on Wine Street, overlooking the park. In Shefford, Leith had been a town councillor for over a decade, sitting on the council’s planning committee for the whole of that time.
The minutes from that meeting state that the committee “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.” The minutes don’t say who had put forward that idea, but one of the members present at the meeting was councillor Nicola Beech.
A week later, the ‘Friends of Castle Park’ Facebook group appeared online. It had been created by Leith along with Fraser Bridgeford, who had organised a previous group called the ‘Castle Park Users Group’, which had opposed previous proposals for the site that they felt had encroached on the 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 and bin provision. The Facebook page is clearly a good platform for sharing photos of the park, keeping people informed about what’s going on, promoting care for the place and exploring its rich history. And over its first two years the Facebook group grew to around a thousand members.
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 wasn’t a single meeting of the group. Nevertheless, as Roz Bird began the ‘stakeholder engagement’ process of her work to take the St Mary le Port scheme through planning in the early autumn of 2020, Leith and Bridgeford were in discussions with MEPC as the park’s anointed community representatives. In October 2020, Leith wrote an article for Bristol 24/7, saying:
“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.”
Without consulting members of the Facebook group, Leith (and possibly Bridgeford) met with MEPC every month between September 2020 and January 2021, according to their planning application. And the enthusiastically positive position of ‘Friends of Castle Park’ on the development was referred to repeatedly in further press coverage about the scheme. The “group” was repeatedly mentioned during MEPC’s two ‘public consultation’ presentations by the developers and architects that took place online in April 2021, including featuring at the top of a list of organisations on a slide titled “Understanding what is important”. While this sham consultation period ran for a total of 18 days in April. With a May submission for the planning application already planned by MEPC, this was always gong to be far too short a timeframe for public feedback to influence any changes to the scheme.
Elsewhere, Marengo told Kevin Slocombe before the meeting with him in August that the planning application had “13 letters of support (including the Chair of Friends of Castle Park and the person who led the campaign against the previous application”.
Leith also made a written submission to the councillors voting on the scheme, describing himself as “spokesperson” for the Facebook group:
“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.”
Making a spoken statement in the council chamber at the planning committee meeting, 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."
The reality, however, as Leith later admitted, was that these 90% and 10:1 figures were derived simply from counting reactions and emojis on the Facebook page, not from comments. Just as there was no democratic basis for him to call himself the “spokesperson” for the group, there was never any poll of members’ feelings about the development. A look through the discussions that were happening on the Facebook group at the time shows many members – a clear majority in my view – were critical of the proposal. While Leith, a gurning pirate avatar as his profile picture, often responded with highly charged statements about the current state of the St Mary le Port site (“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 dismissed those who took a different view about the proposals (“the negative opinions from a minority of backward-looking armchair critics”).
When I was writing an article for the Bristol Cable in the autumn of 2022 about the role of ‘Friends of Castle Park’ in the St Mary le Port planning process, I had approached Leith for comment. I was puzzled to be told by the editor a few days later that someone had contacted a director of the paper to suggest that I was “harassing” him. When I asked who this was, he told me it was councillor Nicola Beech.
Design West
While there was just a single, erroneous reference in the case officer’s report to the council’s internal specialists, City Design Group, there were seven given to Design West, the placemaking consultancy based on Bristol’s harbourside. The report repeatedly emphasised their support for the scheme’s design. All major developments in Bristol now get assessed by a Design West review panel during the pre-application process. They describe themselves as “an independent service that provides consultancy, training and design review to promote excellence in urban design”. But how independent were they when it came to St Mary le Port? A closer look reveals a tangled web of professional connections and conflicts of interest.
The panel had two meetings with the architects and developers before the application was submitted. While the written feedback for the first in November 2020 was very warm, it suggested a few areas that could be improved. The second in February 2021 was entirely positive. Most importantly, in relation to the height, scale and massing within the context of the Old City:
“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”
The developer’s planning application lent as heavily on this feedback as the officer report did, citing it as clear evidence of the scheme’s “high quality design” and policy compliance:
“…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…this independent review, encouraged through the NPPF [National Planning Policy Framework] and locally by BCC [Bristol City Council], is considered an important material consideration to be given great weight in the assessment of the high quality design presented by the Proposed Development.”
The feedback letters (available to see in full in an appendix at the end of the developer’s planning statement) were written by the Chair of the panel, Charles Wilson. A former architect and town planner, Wilson also held a non Design West position at that time as Chair of the Strategic Advisory Group for the Bristol Beacon refurbishment project, which was starting to run vastly over budget. According to council documents, the role of the Strategic Advisory Group was to provide “close project monitoring and challenge, as well as compliance with funding requirements.” By 2021, the overall cost had risen from £48 million to £107 million, and that would then spiral further to £132 million. The final cost to the council, liable through a contract that placed all the risk of the project on it as freeholder of the building, rose from an initial £10 million to £84 million. Incidentally, the lobbying company working for the venue’s managers, the Bristol Music Trust, to get financial and political support for the project, had been Nicola Beech and Tom Selway’s former employer, JBP.
Another member of the five-person design review panel for St Mary le Port was Sophie Camburn, a director at Arup, who had very recently been arranging the firm’s new ‘Strategic Partnership’ with Bristol City Council, instigated by Stephen Peacock. There was Jane Fowles, managing director at the landscape architects Novell Tullett, who were at that time working with St Mary le Port architects FCBS on the ‘Boatyard’ development on Bath Road. Innes Johnston was a director from Max Fordham, a firm working with FCBS at the same time on a student accommodation scheme in Cambridge and who had also been in discussions with the council and Russ Leith about providing lighting for St Peter’s church in Castle Park.
The specific connections between Design West and FCBS are even more numerous. One of the architect’s founding partners, Peter Clegg, was Chair of the Creating Excellence design review panel that had recently merged with the Architecture Centre to form Design West’s service. And he is a current review panel member. Geoff Rich, a partner at FCBS and their ‘Director of Heritage and Creative Reuse’, is too. One of Design West’s board members, Sebastian Loyn, is planning and development director for YTL’s huge Brabazon regeneration project at Filton airfield, for which FCBS have designed the residential masterplan.
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’.
How critical of this scheme were this design review panel ever likely to be? As well as a corrupted Local Planning Authority, a cosy and self-serving clique of development professionals is also a powerful factor in how Bristol is being shaped.
Coda
The mayoral administration’s efforts to control planning took another step with the breaking up of the council’s City Design and Transport departments in late 2022. In a statement to the Cabinet meeting where the decision was formally ratified, Unison trade union Branch Secretary, Tom Merchant, said of City Design: “the work of the department has been undermined, our professional judgement is not valued, and decisions are pushed through the committee system.” Those officers that remained from this shake-up were brought under the auspices of a newly created Chief Planner role, with a former colleague of Stephen Peacock’s from the South West Regional Development Agency, Simone Wilding, being appointed to the position. A connection, one of the councillors involved told me, was not divulged to the appointment panel.
For an even more detailed, fully referenced exploration of St Mary le Port and planning in Bristol, please read my longer version here.