Restaurants, a hotel and housing: Chorley town centre transformation planned as part of 'levelling up' bid

Chorley Council has finalised the pitch that it intends to make in the hope of securing £20m from a nationwide pot set up to improve life in - and reduce inequalities between - different parts of the country.

However, it is estimated that the district’s bold blueprint would cost close to £45m to deliver - with the local authority potentially stumping up the remainder.

The Lancashire Post can reveal that the bid will be based on three schemes which would bring radical changes to several key locations in and around the town centre.

Under the plans, the former bingo hall site opposite the town hall - which has been operating as a temporary car park since late last year - would be transformed into a civic square.

The new sunken space would act as a general meeting place and a focal point for events - and would also feature restaurants, a hotel and possibly some private accommodation. Other retail units and a multi-storey car park would complete the redevelopment of the plot, which also encompasses the more longstanding Cleveland Street car park.

Meanwhile, the council’s Bengal Street depot on the A6 approach to the town centre would be flattened and replaced with a mixed development of apartments and what the Post understands is likely to be ‘colony housing’ - with separate upstairs and downstairs residences. A total of 62 properties have been proposed for the land once it is cleared.

A new commercial unit is also planned for the corner of the site close to the roundabout junction with Stump Lane.

The bid will also set out plans for major upgrade to the United Reformed Church’s Hollinshead Centre complex - located to the rear of the church itself - to facilitate the community work which is already carried out there. That element of the scheme would include improved links between Union Street and Astley Park, as well as green corridors to the Bengal Street development.

The shape of the bid received cross-party approval when it was discussed in both public and private parts of a Chorley Council meeting on Tuesday evening.

Ahead of the debate, the authority’s Labour leader, Alistair Bradley, told the Post that the civic square centrepiece of the plans had the potential to secure a stable future for the town centre over “the medium to long term” - by striking a balance between the traditional offering that makes Chorley unique and providing something new.

“Town centres are changing. We’ve seen with the Market Walk [shopping centre] extension that there’s an untapped market for some of that [leisure] provision.

“That doesn't mean that we want to get rid of our individual independent operators,because they do an excellent job, but we need to have the spaces that modern restaurants, leisure businesses or shops want to move into - and we haven’t got enough of that in our town.

“We predicted that there would be a shift to the north and east of the town centre, [given] the requirements for more modern space - and that there would be a shrinking of the wider town centre.

“But, interestingly, what we've seen is that [while] the bottom end of Market Street has become a bit more residential, it has also [provided space for] for start-ups and what I’d call ‘trendies’ - micro operators and some very novel businesses, such as a skateboard shops, and other places that are changing the dynamic.

“It gives us something different, which we have got the [market] for, because we've got quite a young, mobile and fairly affluent population,” Cllr Bradley added.

On the design of the civic square itself, he said that the idea was for it to be “multi-purpose”.

“At times it could be something that looks pretty - it would have fountains that come out from the ground that you can then turn off and walk across - but it could also be used for our Christmas lights switch on, Taste of Chorley and all the events we do. We don't really have that space at the moment.

“Our town centre is not the greenest, so we need it to be greened up a little bit for people to have some dwelling areas - and that’s [the rationale for] the idea of creating the food and beverage units [overlooking] some kind of public open space.”