Planning Corruption at the Heart of Bristol: The Story of St Mary Le Port Castle Park with Joe Banks

The Story of St Mary le Port: short(ish) version

https://joebanks.substack.com/p/the-story-of-st-mary-le-port

Political interference, specialists sidelined and developer power: office block scheme at the historic heart of the city reveals important insights into Bristol's planning and development regime

Joe Banks 30 Jan 2024

Two significant things are set to happen in Bristol in 2024: Mayor Marvin Rees departs City Hall in May and construction work will begin on a major new development at the historic heart of the city. If one of the enduring legacies of Rees’ time in office will be a wave of crass buildings across the city, the imminent scheme at St Mary le Port may well stand as the most totemic example.

The office block development was approved by a council planning committee in December 2021, got held up by an unsuccessful appeal to the Secretary of State from the Bristol Civic Society, and finally received planning permission in September 2022. Nothing has happened on site yet but I’ve been assured by the developer’s PR consultants that work will start this year. The story of its journey through the planning system exposes many of the features of the current planning and development regime that has incited recent public anger: political interference from the Mayor’s Office, disdain for transparency and due process, the sidelining of the council’s own placemaking specialists, and the green light given to developers to create bland, poorly designed places.  

The remains of St Mary le Port church sit on the western edge of Castle Park, surrounded by three derelict office buildings from the 1960s and 70s. This is where the city began, by the crossing of the Avon where Bristol Bridge stands today. The area around the ancient crossroads of High Street, Wine Street, Broad Street and Corn Street was the heart of the city from its early beginnings in late Saxon times to the devastation of the Second World War. The Bristol Blitz of November 1940 saw the entire quarter of tightly-packed streets on the eastern side, then the city’s bustling shopping and entertainment district, sent up in flames. What little survived was later demolished and the area was turned into Castle Park in the late 1970s.

Directly to the west of St Mary le Port - left with only its church tower standing after the bombing - is what remains of the Old City and its dense concentration of Georgian and Victorian listed buildings. As you currently look across the site from Castle Park you see the grouping of historic churches, with the spires and towers of St Nicholas, All Saints, Christ Church and St Mary le Port forming a distinctive skyline, still visible from vantage points across the city.

Though the site has proved difficult to re-develop since the unloved post-war buildings have fallen into disuse, it’s one you would expect the city authorities to treat with diligence, care and respect. But a close look at how the planning process unfolded for St Mary le Port shows a troubling carelessness, as well as cynical efforts to manipulate the planning system in line with developer demands, with the judgements of specialist council officers trampled over in order to “get stuff done”. This is a breakdown in the firewall that is supposed to exist between the Executive and the Local Planning Authority around planning decisions, stipulated in planning guidance and law. And the story also illustrates a breakdown around the accountability of public officials and politicians, along with the legibility of their roles within a supposedly democratic system.

In his first State of the City Address in 2016, Rees spoke about a desire to re-shape the physical character of the city, saying “I want Bristol’s skyline to grow…Tall buildings built in the right way, in the right places and for the right reasons, communicate ambition and energy.” And one of the first things he did on coming into office was to begin a review of the local development plan, the policies that new development proposals are assessed against. The person he put in charge of overseeing it was new Labour councillor Nicola Beech, who had come straight from the PR and lobbying company JBP, working for developers in the planning process. Immediately before she became a member of Rees’ Cabinet in 2017, Beech had been trying to get a 24-storey high-rise tower built on Cardiff waterfront.

In response to the council’s call-out exercise in 2017, asking developers to make representations about sites in the city they were interested in, the US-based global investment manager Federated Hermes expressed an interest in St Mary le Port. Federated Hermes has around $700 billion worth of assets under its control and its biggest two shareholders are the largest investment firms on the planet, BlackRock and The Vanguard Group.

In the UK, it manages investments from the BT Pension Scheme - who are the investor for St Mary le Port - to build very large commercial developments......