It’s a Sunday afternoon in the autumn of 2026, and excited guests are checking in to the four-star hotel that’s just opened in Ashton Gate. They are getting ready for a week of indulging in all there is to know about home improvement, as the Grand Designs Live exhibition comes to Bristol for the first time.
After parking in the multi-storey car park attached to the hotel, they’ve got their first glimpse of the view from the window of the tenth floor hotel room, looking down on the vast roof of the shiny new Sport and Convention Centre. To their right, the big Lansdown Stand of the Ashton Gate football stadium is filling up with thousands of fans gathering for the afternoon match, as Bristol City continue their bright start to the Premier League season.
Down in the Sport and Convention Centre, a small army of people are busy turning it from one to the other: on Saturday night, more than 3,600 fans packed in to watch the Bristol Flyers professional basketball team win, and as soon as the final fan left after the game, work began to clear the seats and turn a basketball venue into a convention centre venue, ready for Monday’s exhibition.
Read more: What next for Ashton Gate Sporting Quarter and Longmoor greenbelt housing plans
While the above description might seem far-fetched, it moved a huge step closer to becoming reality this week, as plans for the ‘Sporting Quarter’ were finally given approval by city councillors. In fact, given the Sporting Quarter approval was won the night after Bristol City spluttered to a 0-0 draw at home to bottom of the Championship side Coventry City, the likelihood is that the most fanciful part of that Sunday afternoon scene from the year 2026 is the idea that by then the Robins could be in the Premier League.
But the Sporting Quarter is coming, and will bring something that Bristol has never really had before. It’s the kind of thing most of us are familiar with if we’ve ever been to the likes of Birmingham, Cardiff, London, Liverpool or even places like Bournemouth or Brighton: a large, flexible venue that stages concerts, conferences and conventions, where car parks and hotels are right next door - almost like it’s all been planned.
It’s likely that it won’t all be finished by 2026, but after four years in the planning process, delayed by changes to the design, Covid and the council planners, Steve Lansdown and Martin Griffiths, the director of Ashton Gate, are men in a hurry. They now have months of thrashing out the details of the plans with council officers, and hope to start work by the end of next summer.
The first thing that will happen will be the area will quickly be cleared - and that westerly end of Winterstoke Road will begin to look very different. The size of the space being developed will become clearer as the buildings and walls come down, and by the first half of 2024, the first buildings should begin to rise.
The convention centre, hotel and car park will come first, followed by the two blocks of flats and the office block. It’s likely to be a building site for a good few years, but Ashton Gate will be a destination known regionally, if not nationally.
“It’s a good change, and it will be a big change,” said George Ferguson, the first directly-elected Mayor of Bristol, who owns the Tobacco Factory just round the corner from Ashton Gate down North Street. His transformation of that building, along with the nation’s first Lounge, is credited with kickstarting the upturn in fortunes of the Ashton Gate end of North Street 20 years ago, which has led to the gentrification of Southville and Bedminster.
“I support what they are trying to do there, and while I might not be a huge fan of the architecture, how it will look, it will bring some good activity to Ashton Gate. It will bring people, and it will be great for the culture of the area. It will be great for it to be known as not just a football stadium, but a major venue for lots of things,” he added.
“But it will be bloody good for South Bristol as a whole - this is the biggest area of deprivation in the whole of the South West, and this will provide jobs locally,” he added.
The hope is that there will always be something going on at Ashton Gate. Already, the stadium itself has diversified with Comicon conventions, gigs, weddings, business conferences, student graduations. The big Lansdown Stand has a number of different lounges, rooms, conference facilities and restaurants.
But the scale will be magnified with the Sport and Convention Centre, across the concourse. There could be as many as 5,000 people attending a standing-room-only gig one night, and thousands more attending an industry convention later the same week. All of those will need a small army of people to turn around the flexible space, but Martin Griffiths is hopeful it will have a much bigger impact across the area, describing it as a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’.
“The Sporting Quarter will be a catalyst for expansion and regeneration in south west Bristol,” he said. “It will drive local jobs, the local supply chain and by having a hotel attached to the Sports and Conference Centre means we will be able to attract events to the city which would traditionally lose out to cities like Birmingham and Cardiff. The positive impact on the city will be enormous.”
Those arriving on that Sunday night in late 2026 are likely to go further afield too. North Street’s restaurants and bars already have a city-wide reputation, with new places opening regularly since the pandemic.
One North Street restaurant owner, who declined to be named, said: “On balance, it’s a good thing. A lot of people who live round here are worried about things like parking and traffic and the area becoming over-developed. Everywhere there’s a space at the moment it seems someone is building blocks of flats. The traffic is already a nightmare around the stadium any time there's anything on, so they need to make sure that's improved first.
“But overall, this is good news. We’re all feeling the cost-of-living crisis, and the numbers of people coming in is down, because people can’t afford to go out any more. This has given us hope, obviously not for right now, but that in the long term, the hope is that having events and stuff going on down the road on a wet Wednesday in February will keep us ticking over when the locals are staying in,” he added.
Read more on the Ashton Gate Sporting Quarter saga:
- Dec 2020 - New plans for 'Longmoor Village' development revealed
- June 2021 - Final plans for Sporting Quarter and Longmoor Village submitted
- June 2021 - In pictures - what Ashton Gate's Sporting Quarter and Longmoor Village would look like
- October 2021 - Councillors pass motion against building homes on green field sites in South Bristol
- March 2022 - Number of people objecting to Longmoor Village plan reaches 150
- August 2022 - Environment Agency drops flood objection that would have stopped Longmoor Village plan
- September 2022 - Business West say scheme will 'supercharge Ashton Gate as major regional venue'
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