Plans for massive 18-storey student block in Cardiff Bay
A HUGE 18-storey tower block could be built in Cardiff Bay as part of proposals to relocate the city’s sixth-form college.
Plans to convert two forgotten buildings in the heart of the Bay into the new home of Cardiff Sixth Form College were revealed in 2021, with another site on Pierhead Street acquired for the proposed multi-million-pound campus.
Merchant Place and the adjoining Cory’s Buildings have lain empty for 20 years but a planning application was submitted to Cardiff council in September for the college, which is currently based at Trinity Court on Newport Road, to take over the site.
Those plans, if approved, will see part of the listed buildings demolished and a new eight-storey building with classrooms, a library, sports hall and rooftop auditorium constructed.
Around 500 pupils will use the school with around 80% of them boarding. Further plans are now due to be submitted to the council for a student accommodation block to be built on Pierhead Street, with the proposed development set to become the tallest building in the Bay.
Under the plans, a part 10-storey, part 18-storey building will be built on the empty plot of land next to the Premier Inn, providing purpose-built accommodation for boarding pupils.
There will be capacity for 200 GCSE and 200 A-level pupils, as well as 17 house parents who act as parental figures for young students who are away from home. Three hundred students will be housed in single rooms but 100 pupils will share bedrooms, with 50 twin rooms also included in the proposals.
The new building has been designed to be “welcoming and comfortable” for students, who will spend the majority of the day at the proposed Merchant Place site before returning to their accommodation. Extracurricular activity areas also form part of the development, with spaces proposed for pupils to socialise, exercise and practise music in.
Bedrooms will be laid out in clusters across the top 16 floors, as well as lounges and accommodation for the house parents. The first floor will comprise more accommodation, communal rooms and lounges as well as a medical centre and a half sports court.
Further communal areas are planned on the ground floor in addition to an administration zone, a plant room and a large commercial unit. According to the planned application, this unit will be owned by the college and is envisaged to be “some sort of gallery space with a cafe that can be used by students, staff and members of the public”.
There will be 72 cycling spaces included in the development as well as 14 staff car-parking spaces. There will also be 30 cycle spaces provided at the
Merchant Place and Cory’s Buildings site but no parking, with staff and students expected to walk between the sites.
If approved, the building would be the tallest in the Cardiff Bay area, with nearby Vega House currently measuring the highest at 15 storeys. The Premier Inn next door is nine storeys high, although planning permission had previously been granted at the site for two taller office buildings.
A public consultation on the plans ended last week. The proposals are now set to be submitted to Cardiff council’s planning department for approval.
Cardiff Sixth Form College moved to its current site at Trinity Court in 2012 but is moving again due to the complex not being purpose-built for a school, with undersized teaching spaces and a lack of larger spaces for performing arts, sports and assemblies proving challenging.
A planning application submitted to the council last year by DWD Property + Planning added: “CSFC would like to increase its offering to students, both in capacity and the quality of teaching spaces and facilities. The most efficient way to ensure that the facilities are tailored to meet the needs of the students is to design a new state-of-the-art complex across the two sites identified.”
Around 365 pupils currently attend the college, with this set to increase by more than a third after the move to Cardiff Bay. The college also currently employs 116 members of staff, with 44 additional jobs set to be created by moving to the new site to compensate for the increased number of pupils.
The school is described in the application as “one of the top A-level schools in the world”, having achieved the best A-level results for independent schools in the UK this year with a 95% pass rate at the top A* or A grades. It has students from all over the world, with the majority boarding in college accommodation in Cardiff. The co-educational school is charging fees of between £20,600 and £53,600 for the 2022-23 academic year.