Six years after it was approved by planners work has finally started on a £400m Black Country business and office corridor scheme. Developers claim the Walsall town centre project could eventually create as many as 3,200 new jobs.
Based on the town’s Littleton Street and Blue Lane areas, the Gigaport project will see construction work start this June on a 20,000sq ft headquarters building for Jhoots Pharmacy. Work will then start on an office block for Walsall Housing Group and an £11m business and sports hub for Walsall College, planned for vacant land next to the college’s existing £64m Wisemore Campus.
Manjit Jhooty is managing director of Jhoots Pharmacy Group: “We were keen for our head office to remain in the Walsall area, and this site is ideal for our purposes,” he said. “Our new headquarters will be a high quality building which will support 35 community pharmacy outlets throughout the UK.”
Stalled by the recession, Walsall Council recently revived and renamed its Gigaport scheme by acquiring three private ownerships on the site which contained derelict industrial buildings. Those have now been demolished and it’s hoped the cleared land will provide an “oven ready and de-risked” office development opportunity for both local and national companies looking to expand.
The project acquired its new name with the advancement of modern technology and the potential to offer the business quarter occupants super-fast communications, something that just wasn’t around when the project was first mooted.
“The Gigaport initiative is starting to take shape now and we envisage that this latest development will go a long way to attract more businesses to the site, helping to diversify the town’s economy and creating new jobs and investment,” said the authority’s head of strategic regeneration, Mark Lavender.
Under the original Gigaport master plan, the town’s new business quarter was earmarked to provide 1.3m square feet of office, retail and leisure space.
Walsall, one of the four metropolitan boroughs that make up the Black Country, is currently being given a massive makeover with the aid of Government and European money as part of a drive to turn the region into a more attractive place for people to work and live.
Other projects already under way, include the unique £13.8m Walsall Waterfront regeneration scheme on three-acres of vacant and derelict land. Designed to transform and revive the town centre, it includes 103,000sq ft of offices and 34,000sq ft of retail and leisure space. Not surprisingly, the development makes use of the region’s historic canal network. The key feature of the first phase will be the Oysters, an oval-shaped, multi-storey building cut in half by the canal.
