New plans have emerged for the Broad Street Mall from latest owner AEW and their development partner McLaren Living. Proposals were exhibited earlier today in the mall, and you have a second chance to speak to the team on Wednesday 19th July between 3.30pm and 7.30pm, in the unit opposite Poundland (former New Look). I called in earlier and I can run you through the scheme, which is also presented on the consultation website.

“We’ve been here before”, might be your first thought on this one. And yes, we have. Back in February 2019 plans were submitted by previous owner Moorgarth for a similar residential scheme based predominantly around three new towers above the southern perimeter of the mall. Despite being approved, nothing has been built. A pandemic and a change in ownership is part of the explanation. But the new owners today conceded that it was, to mimic a Red Dwarf catchphrase, a brilliant plan with just two minor drawbacks: one, the towers would now be illegal to build (they had one staircase each and fire safety now requires a second), and two, the towers perched on top of the car park would have been practically impossible to build anyway. Many of you asserted the latter point to me back in 2019. Perhaps Moorgarth employed an overly optimistic engineering consultant? Or maybe their intention was only ever to establish permission for the concept to drive up the value of the mall for resale?

The main changes are as follows. The mooted Premier Inn hotel is removed, and the building heights increase by up to 15 metres. This is to make the scheme viable given the lost footprint to those extra stair cores. The cumulative impact is an increase in apartments up to 601. The balance is also slightly tilted in favour of larger flats. The ground floor commercial space is allegedly exactly the same size, but that’s a netting out of several increases and decreases. More specifically, a huge ground floor cycle store eats up a chunk of space – in my time writing these articles bike storage has seen a massive increase in focus and priority. There is also a reorientation of space in favour of the Dusseldorf Way frontage (the pedestrianised extension to Hosier Street), and a reduction on Queens Walk. This is due to a remodelling of the car park ramps that link the underground warren of service roads to the above-mall parking.

The idea of building above the existing car park is discarded, in favour of simply demolishing a chunk of the mall fronting Dusseldorf Way. The new development can then be built from the ground up. A spiral ramp to the remaining car parking will be installed, but with the cost of one year without any mall car parking, and ultimately a reduction in spaces from circa 750 to 550. Basement deliveries to the mall can continue during construction and, parking aside, the mall would operate normally throughout. The orientation of the new spiral means some significant benefits over the old scheme, which had been constrained to persist the existing blank frontage along an extent of Dusseldorf Way owing to the parking ramp immediately behind the outer wall. The cost of that reorientation is the corresponding loss of active frontage along a swathe of Queens Walk, basically right after the Sushi Mania corner.

The developer explained to me, reasonably convincingly, why this was better. Firstly, the outer retail units all now enjoy a southerly aspect. They will also face into a new re-landscaped area, along with whatever emerges on the council-owned civic area regeneration site to the south. Additionally, Queens Walk will have the HexBox frontage on the western side, and that should enliven that approach.

First floor podium residential gardens add some further greening. Talking of colour, grey and red brickwork for the apartment buildings is preferred to the gold-coloured cladding-dominated Moorgarth plans. However, the grey concrete Tetris-like car park frontage is now lost. This was one of the main talking points at the exhibition with attendees roughly equally divided into those strongly in favour of eradicating all trace of the 1970 car park’s artistically ventilated periphery, and those who thought it should be preserved for posterity. Perhaps I’m finally undergoing some kind of transformation away from complete philistine as I feel a momentary sympathy for the argument to retain. However, a sensible compromise is proposed, and that is to relocate a slab onto the new and aforementioned blank frontage on Queens Walk. I questioned whether it would just disintegrate and they said an alternative was to reinterpret the patterns in a new work in that location. I think that would satisfy me as a way to provide a courteous nod to what had gone before.

We got some slight clues on the Minster Quarter across the way. The council is currently choosing its development partner and McLaren said they were in the running. You can certainly see a benefit of having both schemes aligned. The old central Police Station is apparently now owned by the developer of the Drews building. A concept layout is included in the visual above, but it sounds likely to change, albeit still predominantly residential with ground floor retail and leisure, with a focus on improving the setting of the theatre. Did that Hexagon totem used to revolve, or am I getting confused with New Scotland Yard? Anyway, save the totem!

All in all, it’s probably a slight improvement to the approved impossible plans. The height increase may pose questions. But unlike other sites, it’s so far from existing low-rise residential: more than 120m by my reckoning over the Hexagon and IDR to reach Howard Street. And with tall building designation and permissions already, I think this time around they may spend more time arguing about the Tetris car park exterior than the air space-invading nature of Reading’s latest apartment tower proposals.

Follow @readingonthames