Contractors appointed to transform flood-prone city site

Long-awaited plan to turn Hereford’s Merton Meadow into over 200 new homes along with business units are finally poised to begin after a major deal.

Herefordshire Council has commissioned Manchester-based Buttress Architects to oversee taking the project up to the construction stage, in a contract worth £767,253.

The firm will “manage a set of multi-disciplinary sub-contractors” on the project, the council said in its newly published decision.

The government awarded the county £2 million from its Brownfield Land Release Fund back in October 2021 to redevelop the area north of the city centre, currently largely occupied by council-run car parks.

The council has to spend grant by the end of this year, and to start work on-site by November, its decision notice said.

The scheme “will unlock significant growth at a key gateway location, creating opportunities for inter-generational inner city living on currently under-utilised land,” it added.

“This will enable people to live, work in the city centre, spend time and money in local businesses.”

When the council accepted the government funding, it said the project “will unlock 270 new homes” of which 190 would be “mixed affordable tenure homes including 30 supported housing units”, along with “an 80-bed all-age care facility”.

The funding award said that the new houses should provide key worker accommodation to support local health and education institutions, as well as addressing flooding issues affecting these and surrounding properties.

Part of the proposed solution to developing the low-lying, flood-prone site has been to create a new publicly accessible wetland to the east, on the former Essex Arms site.

The council said in September it would seek to “integrate housing, alleviate flooding and deliver a significantly enhanced local environment including the potential for open green space and a possible wetland” at the site.

The council now says that to not commit to the project would mean the £2 million grant would “need to be returned, and the area will continue to be blighted by flooding and thus no development/regeneration of these key strategic sites will be possible”.