Foodies to bring mill back to life again

STANDING in the shadow of Stockport’s red-brick viaduct on the far side of the bus station, the imposing Weir Mill inhabits what feels like a forgotten part of town.

But all that is about to change.

The former cotton mill will be at the heart of a new neighbourhood being planned by developer Capital & Centric, whose co-founder Tim Heatley starred in the recent BBC series Manctopia: Billion Pound Property Boom.

As well as housing 250 apartments, its transformation will create a cluster of independent restaurants, bars and businesses overlooking the Mersey, where the waterside is to be opened up to the public.

Residents were given a glimpse at how the courtyard could also come to life last weekend when street food market Foodie Friday popped up for a socially-distanced Sunday Social.

Tim told the Express he hoped to bring more local flavour to the development in future.

“The atmosphere was great,” he said of the event.

“It was great to have that feeling of being somewhere you shouldn’t be - in the middle of a mill, in a quasi-industrial setting.

“We’re hoping that, in terms of the ground floor space within the building but also some new buildings as well, we’ll create opportunity for independent local businesses on the food and beverage side - that’ll be the focus we think.”

Tim estimates the scheme will create around 15 to 25 commercial units, which could include a workspace and a gym - similar to the mix at their Ducie Street Warehouse development in Manchester city centre, which includes boutique gym Blok, a co-working space, coffee shop and restaurant.

“The vibe at Ducie

Street Warehouse is an idea of how it will feel,” he said, “taking elements of the best bits of other stuff we’ve done, but to have a local feel to the food and drink would be great.

“You’re not going to see a Starbucks in there, put it that way. You’re going to see the more interesting stuff, the indies, and we’ll make sure it works, that they can afford to open there.

“What we don’t want to do is compete with the town centre. You’re not going to see much retail there I wouldn’t have thought - but maybe hybrid spaces where people can make and sell.

“A brewery, for example, or fashion, or a graphic design and print shop.

“We want indies from Greater Manchester as well as Stockport.”

Tim is also keen to include pop-up opportunities for operators to try out new ideas in a low-risk environment, as they did with restaurant residency Higher Ground, which launched in an old security cabin at Capital and Centric’s city centre development Kampus shortly before lockdown and has since taken over the kitchen at Ducie Street Warehouse.

“We’ll have a lot of outside space, a lot of public realm, pedestrianised squares and terraced areas,” he said.

“That creates a lot of opportunity for us. If we design them right, we can make sure we have flexibility for future pop-ups.”

Speaking about the Higher Ground project, he added: “We fitted it all out, down to the pots and pans, equipment, everything. We bought all that and didn’t charge a rent and I think that’s important, to give new talent that chance to have a go.”

Foodie Friday organisers are excited about the plans. Sunday’s event was the first they had been able to hold since February, with coronavirus restrictions ruling out a return to their usual home on the Market Place, where capacity control would be difficult.

Joe Barratt, who runs the event with his family and is also a board member and delivery partner of the government’s High Street Task Force, said: “As we can’t currently run Foodie Friday at Stockport Market due to the restrictions around the coronavirus, it was great to work with the Capital and Centric team to run a safe, socially distanced street food event which brought Weir Mill to life.

“To see our street food traders, live music and DJs animate the space underneath our town’s iconic viaduct was truly incredible.

“We made sure that every precaution was taken to protect the health and safety of our event visitors upon arrival.

“This included only selling pre-booked tickets, limiting tables to six, having hand washing stations available and providing table service through the Dines App which allowed visitors to order their food and drink straight to their table without having the need to get up and form long queues.

“The feedback we’ve had from visitors who attended the event has been overwhelmingly positive. It’s clear that there’s a real demand to see this type of street food and live music activity delivered on a regular basis and we hope that this is the first of many events to come.

“Having Capital and Centric invest in developing a community at Weir Mill is a real game changer for our town.”

Not everyone is happy about the plans, however.

The mill is already home to around 13 businesses who now face having to relocate to make way for the redevelopment.

One tenant, who did not want to be named, said Sunday’s event had caused disruption to existing businesses who were not able to use the car park for the day - although he added that his criticism was not aimed at the Foodie Friday team who had been ‘nothing but supportive’.

He said tenants knew they would have to relocate eventually but claimed the building’s previous owners never notified them of the sale.

“We always knew one day that place would get sold but it’s the way it’s been gone about,” he said.

“They didn’t tell any of the tenants.

“We found out from the M.E.N two days after it had been sold.

“We’ve had no help from anyone, none of the tenants have. They’ve done what they are contracted to and that’s it.

“There are businesses in there and livelihoods that are affected by this in a major way, that have been a big part of Stockport for many years.”

Tim said he sympathised with the hassle ten

ants faced in having to relocate but said the town’s growth could not be held back because of it.

“We’re working closely with those existing occupiers to make sure they are fully aware of what’s happening so they have plenty of notice to find suitable alternatives,” he said.

“I have sympathy for the aggro and hassle it puts those businesses through but it creates opportunity for a different part of the town, and often these businesses are better suited to being in alternative premises.

“It wouldn’t be fair to hold back growth because it’s inconvenient.

“The vast majority of the tenants as far as I’m aware, apart from one or two, have been understanding and supportive of the proposals and aware they have been a long time coming.”

Tim believes the project will benefit the wider town - not least by opening up the river, which has been largely hidden elsewhere by the building of the Merseyway shopping centre in the 1960s.

“We’re looking at things like a viewing platform you can walk out onto, almost like a gangplank, so you feel that connection to it,” he said, adding that they wanted to ‘clean it up, plant it up and light it up’.

“We want to reconnect the town, make it permeable, create links back to the river and make it a bustling part of the town centre so that when you get off the train or bus, or swing off the motorway, you think: ‘That looks interesting’.

“We want to give people lots of reasons to visit. There’s already a lot of great stuff emerging in Stockport and we think we can definitely add a lot to that.

“We’re hopeful other businesses and developers will follow us in once we show what can be achieved and how cool it can look.”

While prices haven’t yet been calculated for the Stockport apartments, Tim estimates they’ll cost around 30 per cent less than an equivalent flat in Manchester city centre.

“It’s only seven minutes on a train line into Manchester but you can pay a third less to buy here. That’s a really compelling offer,” he says.

“And what’s great about Stockport is you have access to the green spaces, health care and early years education that’s here, all the bars and restaurants we’re bringing in and those already existing.”

Whether any of the prices will fall into the official ‘affordable homes’ bracket - that is, those sold or rented below the market value - is also yet to be determined.

“We’ll be guided by the planning process as to what the requirement is around affordability,” said Tim.

“We’re open to the provision of affordable homes as far as possible, but we are restoring a conservation mill building which is semi-derelict and has needed it for a long time.

“An indication of the challenges about being able to provide lots of affordable homes is that the government has provided a £7m grant towards that project because it wasn’t viable to do it.”

Under national planning policy, developers are expected to contribute towards affordable housing provision - either by building them as part of their projects or paying local authorities to do so elsewhere.

Following its appearance on Manctopia, Capital and Centric has faced criticism that its Crusader Mill scheme provided no affordable homes and no payments.

But Tim says it’s a complicated issue that needs a national solution to level the playing field, with obligations varying wildly from council to council and development to development.

“There’s a misconception that developers don’t want to build affordable homes but if we wanted to buy something and assume 50 per cent of it is affordable, and the next developer assumes only 10 per cent will be discounted, we’d never buy anything,” he said.

“Unless the government sticks to what the affordable percentage has to be, it’ll never happen.”

The developer has won praise, however, for selling the Crusader Mill flats purely to owner-occupiers rather than buy-to-let investors.

But Manctopia featured several buyers who were angry at delays to the development caused by complicated construction problems.

So has the experience taught Tim anything he’ll take to Weir Mill?

“The reason these buildings fall into disrepair and are semi-derelict and abandoned is because of the fact they are so complicated,” said Tim.

“There isn’t a project we do where you don’t come across something you’ve never experienced before. That always happens.

“The point we wanted to make with Crusader Mill and Manctopia is we didn’t want to cut corners.

“Where we find problems we wanted to make opportunities to make it better.

“We wanted to explain that to people - there’s nothing to hide.

“We’ve done lots of [mill conversions] and there’ll always be a curveball but I love the challenge.

“It’s what gets me out of bed in the morning.”

More information about the Weir Mill plans and public consultation can be found at weirmill. com.