CODE tower faces appeal after Sheffield rejects revised housing mix
A planning dispute over the proposed accommodation at the developer’s £125m scheme in the city centre is set to move to appeal, raising questions over the delivery of one of the city’s most prominent BTR and co-living schemes.
Construction is already under way on the building, which will provide a total of 1,054 apartments in three blocks of up to 26-storeys and sits within the council’s £470m Heart of the City district at the corner of Wellington Street, Trafalgar Street, and Rockingham Street, close to Pounds Park.
The building’s central core is now in place, however developer CODE’s latest attempt to revise the approved accommodation mix within the scheme, replacing the requirement for a proportion of cluster-style units with an entirely studio-based co-living offer, has been refused by Sheffield City Council.
The dispute centres on the type of accommodation to be delivered within the tower: The council has maintained that 14% of units should comprise en-suite accommodation arranged around shared kitchen and living spaces, while CODE is proposing fully purpose-designed co-living units alongside extensive shared amenity space, arguing that this is common across the sector and has been delivered in Sheffield and other UK cities.
CODE notes the accommodation is aimed towards graduates and young professionals, and that co-living apartments are an affordable stepping stone for these tenants after they leave university.
The developer has indicated that securing development finance to keep the project going is dependent on approval of the revised accommodation mix, with approximately £10m already invested in the scheme.
If no agreement can be reached, the application is expected to proceed to a formal planning appeal in September.
Alongside the proposed changes to the accommodation mix, the council has approved amendments to the wider scheme that increase the height of two associated buildings from 14 to 16 storeys and from 10 to 12 storeys respectively.
Permission for the scheme was granted in 2020, and originally it was intended the building would be Sheffield’s tallest, topping out at 38-storeys.
Meanwhile, a council report states: “The potential benefits of the development scheme are significant in terms of regeneration of a vacant site in the heart of the city centre, the jobs and investment the development would create during both the construction and operational phase and the much-needed new housing the development would deliver…
“What is proposed would be the largest single collection of homogenous substandard size units anywhere in the city, over 1,000 identical units stacked within a tall building on one of the key city centre development sites.
“Amending the floor plans to allow a 100 per cent studio scheme would not only be negative in the context of the overall diversity/quality of housing options within Sheffield City Centre but would also result in a monotonous monolithic development denuded of the vibrancy which a mix of accommodation types could bring in terms of attracting different types of resident and breaking up the otherwise repetitive internal layout and floorplan.”
