Take two steps out of Sheffield’s railway station and you are confronted by an impressive example of public realm development with one key message at its heart: this is a city built on steel.
But how does Sheffield reimagine itself now the days of heavy metal are long gone? How does it become greener and more attractive to visitors, and how does it get its name in corporate boardrooms?
These are questions that occupy the mind of Tim Bottrill, who five years ago founded Sheffield agency Colloco, which currently sits in second place on the EG Radius On-Demand Rankings for South Yorkshire. “Inward investment has never accounted for a huge proportion of the marketplace,” he says. “A lot of the activity in the market is indigenous businesses, whether they’re getting bigger, getting smaller, moving sideways, it doesn’t really matter – they account for 90% of the activity in the marketplace.”
Sheffield has a lot going for it. As well as its award-winning public realm, it is rich in green spaces (it has the highest ratio of trees to people of any city in Europe), it has a low-cost tram network, a wealth of quirky independent bars and restaurants, and the Peak District is right on its doorstep. Quality and affordability of life is a definite selling point.
“The city has a lot of things that will appeal to a lot of businesses if they are looking to relocate,” says Botrill. “But for those businesses that are footloose, a lot of the decisions are made conversationally. If you’re looking to relocate 100-200 staff, you can recruit them in just about any city in the country. Is Sheffield a part of those conversations? I don’t think it is.”
He believes South Yorkshire’s new mayor Oliver Coppard is “a breath of fresh air” and that he, alongside Sheffield City Council chief executive Kate Josephs, will help improve the political messaging.
But, he says, the city needs to put more collateral out there.
Sheffield city centre is currently being transformed through the Heart of the City 2 development, a mixed-use scheme bringing new retail, residential and high-spec office space to the market. It sits alongside older developments such as Park Hill and former industrial stock which has been revamped to offer space with the sense of character now in high demand post-pandemic.
Bottrill believes – especially so given the recent record-breaking temperatures – the CRE industry needs to offer much more than EPC badges when it comes to telling the environmental story of buildings. He also wants action on the environment to be a key pillar of the story that Sheffield should be telling the world.
“I think we can be one of the greenest cities in the UK,” says Botrill. “Using the word ‘green’ has a number of different connotations – we are already a very green city with the parks and the Peak District, but on the ESG side of things we can be a lot greener, and I think it’s investment in those areas that will make the city stand out and make it more interesting and appealing to people.”
This summer has already proved the practical importance of property going further on the environment. It could just be as important for Sheffield’s future as steel was to its past.
Sheffield at a glance
- Average achieved office rent: £12.88 per sq ft
- Average office yield: 8.21%
- Investment total: £244.6m
- Number of investment deals: 53
- A total of 29 applications for 248,991 sq ft of new office space were submitted in 2021, with permission granted for 24 schemes delivering 112,848 sq ft of space
- Just 145,614 sq ft of retail space went in for planning in 2021 in 90 applications, with 71,989 sq ft getting the green light
- Industrial space was high in demand with 48 applications for 3.6m sq ft of space. Some 5.6m sq ft of industrial space was given the go ahead in 2021
- Across all development types, some 2.3m sq ft of new space is set to be delivered in Sheffield in 2022, with refurbishments and new-build schemes making up the majority of that space
All figures have been sourced from EG Radius and are for the period 1 January 2021 to 31 December 2021, unless stated otherwise
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To send feedback, e-mail jim.larkin@eg.co.uk
