Stoke-on-Trent,which last year saw 14 international companies move into the area, is hoping new links with China will attract inward investment and create hundreds of jobs.
Already one of the fastest growing areas of the UK, the city is now courting businesses and potential investors from Chongqing — one of the world’s fastest growing economic regions.
The links are being built by Dr Yu Xiong, a UK-based academic working with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and whose brief includes forging creative partnerships with British businesses. “Stoke-on-Trent has some really exciting plans which seem to fit in well with the way Chongqing is thinking,” he said.
He praised the “vision of a modern technology driven city” with good universities and interesting research businesses and he hopes fact finding visits from China arranged for this summer will “generate real bilateral opportunities for both cities.”
Ruth Rosenau, the city council’s cabinet member for regeneration, is convinced the world is beginning to see Stoke-on-Trent with fresh eyes. “Our ambition and focus on the knowledge economy, new technology and innovation, and our vision for a sustainable energy future, are repositioning the city,” she said. “Last year more than a dozen global companies set up in the city region and that’s why international business is starting to take us seriously.”
Stoke-on-Trent is currently undergoing significant regeneration focused on the city centre. This has already delivered a new bus station from Grimshaw Architects and ongoing improvements to the public realm.
The first phase of the city’s £170 million Smithfield business district, which will provide 210,000 sq ft of office space already pre-let to the city council, is currently under construction and due for completion next spring. In the longer term, the scheme will provide 1.2m sq ft of office, retail and hotel space adjacent to the city’s cultural quarter.
But while this development is progressing well, another ambitious project is facing being downscaled following a report from consultancy WYG into Stoke-on-Trent’s retail and leisure needs for the next 15 years.
The council had hoped to revive the stalled City Sentral retail development, but the £44,000 viability study claims the 650,000 sq ft mall — on the city’s former East-West precinct — would only draw existing trade away from other centres such as Longton, Tunstall and Newcastle-under-Lyme.
The original City Sentral plans, which also included 40,000sq ft of food and drink outlets and a multi-screen cinema, is significantly in excess of what is required to meet the needs of the city, says the report, particularly since the hoped for anchor Marks and Spencer is building a new store at Wolstanton Retail Park and the nearby Intu Potteries shopping centre has a new nine-screen cinema in the pipeline. Consequently the report concludes; “WYG would therefore recommend that it may be an appropriate time to reconsider the scale of City Sentral to reflect market conditions.”
When shoppers were questioned the research showed that the city centre accounted for 22.3 per cent of non-food shopping trips, with Festival Retail Park the second most popular destination at 14.9 per cent. Third and fourth were Longton, generating 8.5 per cent of trips, and Tunstall at 4.1 per cent. The Potteries’ other town centres combined received only 4.1 per cent of all shopping visits.
Ruth Rosenau said the council was still committed to completing the City Sentral project and that the recommendation to reduce its scale came as no surprise. Referring back to the planned Chinese visits, she added: “We’re trying to bring developers to the city centre, and if that works, all our town and district centres will benefit with more jobs and more money to spend.”
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