City councillors have given planning permission to two major applications that will transform the south west corner of Bristol. The plans, both put forward by Bristol Sport’s billionaire owner Steve Lansdown, will see a 3,626-seat sport and convention centre next door to Ashton Gate, and 510 new homes on a green field site 500 yards away next to Ashton Vale.
It’s been almost 18 months since the plans were first submitted, but were finally passed by the city council’s development control committee on Wednesday night. But it could be a year before anything starts to change around Ashton Gate Stadium or on the field nearby.
The chairman of Ashton Gate Stadium, Martin Griffiths, welcomed the planning approval, but work is not yet done between the stadium and the city council planners. So what happens next?
Read more: Plans approved for new basketball arena at Ashton Gate and 510 homes on green belt
After Mr Lansdown - the Guernsey-based billionaire who made his money with the Hargreaves-Lansdown investment firm and now owns Ashton Gate Stadium, Bristol City FC, Bristol Bears rugby club and the Bristol Flyers basketball club - failed to overcome local residents in Ashton Vale and the imposition of ‘Town Green’ status to build a new stadium on land next to Ashton Vale in 2012, he did two things.
The most obvious was a massive redevelopment of three sides of the existing Ashton Gate Stadium, turning it from a historic and quirky but not-exactly modern football ground into a 27,000-seat stadium that’s one of the best medium-sized sporting venues in the country.
He also quietly went about buying up the freeholds of the businesses between the existing stadium and Winterstoke Road, paying millions for the land that DIY store Wickes, Nationwide Platforms and the Midas offices. After the Ashton Vale stadium plan failed, he also still owned the land between Ashton Vale and the Long Ashton park and ride. In the years since, it’s been cut in half by the Metrobus link road. The southerly half is basically marsh land, but the northern side, nearest the industrial estates on the very edge of urban Bristol were perfectly enclosed by the Metrobus road and the David Lloyd sports centre, and were the subject of the plan for 510 new homes, and a new name: Longmoor Village.
Ashton Gate’s director Martin Griffiths said: “After four years of consultation and engagement it was great to see the support for these proposals. To have the councillors approve both sets of planning applications for the Sporting Quarter and Longmoor will provide a once in a lifetime opportunity for sport in this city.
“To be able to ensure the future financial sustainability of the Flyers Basketball team by providing them with their own home at BS3, and be able to expand on the incredible work that our community foundations already deliver is fantastic.
“The Sporting Quarter will be a catalyst for expansion and regeneration in south west Bristol. 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,” he added.
The delays
When the plans were first unveiled back in 2018, a timeline produced by Ashton Gate Stadium tentatively showed that the project would be finished by now - at least the sports and conference centre.
But then Covid hit, and the first consultation prompted a rethink - the plans for the other parts of the Sporting Quarter project were slightly downscaled, and fresh plans were finally submitted in the spring of 2021. Another 18 months of dealing with planners, and both schemes have finally got planning permission.
But getting planning permission is only one step. Councillors at City Hall gave planning approval, subject to conditions - a long list of things that have to be ticked off and agreed between planning officers and the applicants. And in these two applications, the list is incredibly long, covering everything from plans to deal with leaking refrigeration units to agreeing the design of bridges over all the rivers that flow in the area.
However, perhaps the first thing that is could happen is Steve Lansdown’s company Esteban sells the land at Ashton Vale to a housebuilder. Buried in the planning documents and reports by officers to councillors ahead of last night’s meeting was a summary of why the two planning applications were being linked, and the reason was simply about money.
The finances
The Sporting Quarter includes 125 new flats, built in two different parts of the site, either side of the big conference centre. None of these will be classed as ‘affordable’ to be rented through the council house waiting list, because Esteban said it would not be viable to do that, given the rest of the development of the Sporting Quarter will see Steve Lansdown’s firm making an overall loss of around £45 million.
Steve Lansdown's net worth, according to the most recent Sunday Times Rich List, has been falling. The 2022 Rich List still had him as the 146th richest person in the UK, and he has £1.237 billion. He had fallen 22 places on the 2021 Rich List, and has seen his wealth go down by almost half a billion from pre-pandemic levels. In 2018 and 2019, the 69-year-old's wealth was put at £1.72 billion.
Some of that could well be down to his investment in Bristol Sport. The most comprehensive analysis of football finances, by researcher Kieran Maguire, estimates Steve Lansdown has spent around £214 million of his own money on Bristol City FC, including effectively bankrolling the club through the Covid pandemic, writing off the club's debt pretty much every year.
City is one of the teams trying to get promotion out of the Championship into the Premier League without the benefit of the lucrative 'parachute payments' given to teams after they've been relegated out of the Premier League, and City are consistently listed as one of the heaviest loss-making clubs in the EFL Championship. On top of that, it's also estimated that Mr Lansdown has around £50 million owed to him by Bristol Bears, the rugby side of Bristol Sport.
In terms of the Sporting Quarter, two different viability reports put the total cost of building everything that's planned there at almost £172 million. After Esteban put the overall losses of the project at £45 million, to show that it couldn't afford to include affordable homes in the 125 flats at Ashton Gate, the council undertook its own viability report, and actually concluded the scheme would cost Steve Lansdown more - around £49 million, something described as 'unusual' by council officers.
So Steve Lansdown intends to sell the Longmoor field to get some of that money back, as quickly as possible. The planning report said: “It is understood that the applicant intends to sell the Longmoor site and then use the capital receipt to reduce the deficit of the Sporting Quarter scheme. In effect, the Longmoor scheme will be used as a vehicle to reduce the landowner’s subsidy on the Sporting Quarter scheme."
Longmoor Village
Even though there is a website full of artist’s impressions and detailed layouts of the kinds of new homes planned for the Longmoor Village field, the planning permission for 510 new homes there is only an outline one. It is expected that Esteban will quickly sell the land with that outline planning permission, and expects to get more than £24 million for it.
It will then be up to the developer to go through the planning conditions for the Longmoor site, and submit their own, detailed planning application, which could be completely different to the Longmoor plans as they stand now.
Councillors last night only gave their permission to the principle of building new homes on the green field next to Ashton Vale - it will be a housing development company that has to get permission to build the kind of homes they want.
Sporting Quarter
At Ashton Gate, the first thing that has to happen is the demolition of the existing buildings that form Wickes, Midas and the National Platforms site. A spokesperson for Ashton Gate Stadium said detailed work will ‘start immediately’ on the next stage of this project.
“The first phase of the Sporting Quarter development will be the Sports and Convention Centre alongside the hotel, with hopes to be on site in late summer 2023,” they added.
The arena is to be the home venue for the Bristol Flyers basketball team, which currently sells out the SGS College venue in north Bristol.
It is likely that the convention centre will open first, with the offices, flats and multi-storey car park still being built around it. Andreas Kapoulas, the head coach of the Bristol Flyers, said after the meeting concluded: “This is a game-changer for the Flyers but also the sport of basketball in this city.
“It means that we will not only be financially sustainable but that we will be able to compete at the very highest level – including in Europe. It will be the third largest venue in the BBL and means we will be able to attract talent and extend our academy pathway and community provision of the sport.
“The Sporting Quarter will provide a minimum of an extra 40,000 hours of community sport which is huge as we know how much desperate need there is for community access to sporting facilities,” 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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