For capital’s £100m bus station project

This is the latest and final design for a new bus station in the centre of Cardiff, with office space above and hundreds of apartments that will be available to rent.

The £100m Interchange project, with a 14-stand bus station at ground-floor level, is being delivered by the Metro Delivery Partnership (MDP), which is made up of Cardiff council, the Welsh Government, property development firm Rightacres and Network Rail.

And work on the project, which is scheduled for completion in 2020, will start up to ground-floor level next week.

It comes as the MDP is continuing to press the case for the UK Government’s Transport Secretary Chris Grayling to match the £120m raised in Wales for the much needed upgrade of Cardiff Central train station, which is just yards from the new bus station site.

It recently submitted detailed proposals to his department seeking financial backing for the modernisation of the Victorian built station.

Alongside the new bus station the transport hub is being called the Metro Central Interchange.

A public consultation exercise on the Interchange project will be launched early next month ahead of a planing application at the end of the month. Planning approval is expected in July. However, the scheme at Central Square already has consent for enabling works, which means that work up to ground-floor level can now start.

Architects of the original Interchange scheme were Foster + Partners, which designed the new £100m HQ for BBC Cymru Wales also at Central Square.

The latest version has been designed by Cardiff-based Holder Mathias Architects (HMA), which came close to winning the original design competition won by Foster + Partners.

The Welsh Government, which recently acquired the Interchange site from Cardiff council for £12m, has also, at a cost of around £3m, acquired the rights to the original design information, including transport planning and architectural principles, for the scheme.

That detailed work was carried about by around 20 firms, including Foster + Partners.

The ground-floor element of the revised scheme is effectively the same design as that from Foster + Partners.

An issue for the original scheme was the cost of reconfiguring some of the underground utility infrastructure, including drainage, running through the site.

It is understood that the Foster’s design would have cost around £10m more than the latest, but not significantly different, one from HMA.

The original scheme had slightly more office space at around 110,000 sq ft and 400 apartments. The bus station in the scheme will be operated by the Welsh Government’s at-arm’s-length transport body, Transport for Wales.

The latest project will see:

■ a bus station with 14 stands and ancillary services;

■ 80,000 sq ft of new grade A office space;

■ 300 new apartments for rent; and

■ space at ground-floor level for tenants such as food operators.

The funding element consists of:

■ £20m for the bus station;

■ £60m for the residential apartment; and

■ £20m for the office space. While not confirmed, Rightacres, building on its partnership with financial services giant L&G, is expected to engineer, on behalf of the MDP, a forward funding financing deal for the scheme.

L&G has already provided £400m in funding to help deliver Rightacres’ wider Central Square scheme, so is an obvious candidate to provide finance to deliver the Interchange scheme.

It it has also recently launched a new build division for rented properties, in Legal & General Homes.

This could potentially see this division acquiring the 300 apartments that will be rented at the Interchange.

And with eventually up to around 10,000 people working at the wider Central Square scheme, there is potentially a strong market for companies seeking to rent apartments so close to their offices.

And while the office element is