Designed by Make, 1 Arena Central features a curved façade with a contemporary chequerboard motif, designed to encourage pedestrian traffic onto the site and forming an extension to Broad Street. The building also features 2,500ft2 of open balconies on the top floor, providing views across Centenary Square and back towards the Mailbox and Cube.
Frances Gannon, Make partner said: “We are really pleased to have received planning consent and are now able to move forward with this exciting development. The bold building design paired with the generous park landscape will create a striking new place in the heart of the city.”
Martin Guest, CBRE, said: “The recent absorption of 100,000ft2 of stock at Two Snowhill is only exacerbating the current dearth of high quality stock in the city. The city needs deliverable opportunities such as this in order to meet the rising demand for high quality office stock from blue chip corporate occupiers such as Deutsche Bank.”
A joint venture between Miller Developments and Bridgehouse Capital, Arena Central is framed by Broad Street, Holliday Street, Bridge Street and Suffolk Street Queensway and lies at the heart of Birmingham’s City Centre Enterprise Zone, benefitting from simplified planning and reduced business rates as well as forming a significant part of the city’s vision for regeneration, as laid out in the Big City Plan.
Councillor Tahir Ali, cabinet member for development, transport and the economy, at Birmingham City Council, said: “Birmingham is attracting considerable interest from a range of high quality international occupiers, keen to relocate or expand their businesses. Office-led developments, such as Arena Central will go a long way to securing further investments of this kind and continue to raise the standard of office accommodation in the city, as well as creating job opportunities.”
Alongside 1 Arena Central, the planning committee also approved the development’s infrastructure works and a modification to the site’s much anticipated public realm, which will form the first element of Arena Central’s phased delivery programme.
Running from the north to the south side of the site, the public realm has been designed as an urban meadow in a style that mirrors other statement public spaces, such as the High Line in New York, and includes some 40 per cent soft landscaping.
Arena Central is currently home to a number of redundant buildings including the former Carlton Television studios, and a leisure club, with a multi storey car park having already been demolished.
Clearance work on the site is already underway with further demolition of the remaining buildings due to commence shortly and work on 1 Arena Central and the new public realm set to start in early 2015.
Joint commercial agents on the scheme are GVA and CBRE. For more information, please visit: arena-central.com
